Using Her Own Experience of Abuse and Pain to Help the Street Children of Vietnam-Christina Noble
Hello Magazine!
20 January 1996

Christina Noble is one of life's dreamers. She dreamed of kindness when she was sexually abused by relatives and abandoned by her alcoholic father. She dreamed of a warm house when she was a child living on the streets of Dublin. She dreamed of her dead mother after being gang raped at the age of 16. And just when she thought her dreams had come true, they were shattered by the first man to show her any real kindness - Mario, her first husband, who she says deceived, beat and raped her.

In one of Christina's most vivid dreams she saw a little girl running towards her, holding out her hand and asking for help, and the word "Vietnam" written in the sky. The dream didn't make much sense to her then, but in 1989, 16 years later-after she had brought up three children, married and divorced again and spent years in therapy- Christina finally traveled to Vietnam. Once there, she she knew she would remain, to help the street children who beg, steal and sell their bodies to stay alive.

With no money and no contacts, just her dreams to drive her on, she set up the Christina Noble Children's Foundation in Ho Chi Minh City. Six years on, hundreds of children have passed through her care. She has built a home, an intensive-care clinic and a school, known as Mama Tina's Sunshine School, and is now building a treatment centre for children with cerebral palsy and tuberculosis.

These days, Christina spends much of her time fund-raising. In the past few months, she has traveled to Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand to tell people about the plight of her street children, known locally as the "bui doi", the dust of life.

She has been presented to Mother Teresa, to whom many have likened her, and to the Princess Royal, and shared a podium with Princess Alexandra and Simone Veil, former President of the European Parliament, at last year's Women of the Year lunch. Christina is now the subject of a documentary and film going into production this year.

Quite an achievement for a woman who can only ever remember being shunned. She says it was her rejection by other children that hurt the most. "I used to wear my shirt inside out and then back again because I didn't have the means to wash it," she says. "The grime and the blood from the flea bites and ringworm would rub off on to my collar. You can understand why other children didn't want to play with me.

"When they went home to their families at the end of the day, I pretended I was going home to mine. But I was really going back to the hole in the park where I had been living.

"You want to believe there is a purpose to suffering - that it hasn't all been in vain. But when somebody takes your body away from you in the way that my body was, and when you have suffered terrible abuse and powerlessness, that has no purpose.

"It was a long time before I even began to feel that I was a worthwhile person. It was very difficult to tell my children about everything....sometimes they discovered for the first time in my book." Christina published her first autobiography in 1994.

"You can't pretend it didn't happen. You have to fight and be strong. I am angry and will be until the day I die. But I use that anger. I can understand what those children on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City are feeling because I have been down that alley."

It is impossible to remain indifferent to the street children. Dark eyes implore you to buy a three-day-old newspaper. A tattered, adorable girl clings to you if you so much as give her a smile. But sometimes these children's interaction with foreigners is more sinister. "There are an awful lot of foreigners who come to Vietnam to buy their flesh," says Christina.

She has saved many children from such a life by teaching them to read and write and giving them a chance to earn a living. They learn to cook and clean, and wash their clothes, but most of all they learn to have respect for themselves. One child has found work with one of the foundation's biggest supporters, British Gas, while another was given money to buy a rickshaw.

Many of Christina's charges are still babies - such as the girl I saw writhing in pain in her cot who had been found in a dustbin on the brink of death. Many infants born with abnormalities are abandoned because their parents are too poor to deal with their disabilities.

But to Christina, they are all Sunshine Children. "They are dirty but there is a light inside. I have never been discouraged to give up. It is so easy to make their dreams come true....."