Noble Endeavours,
The Sunday Business Post, Ireland,
7 April 2002

Christina Noble's Childhood was spent in institutions and on the streets of Dublin, where she was raped and abused. But she refuses to submit to the past, and has set up a foundation offering shelter to more than 80,000 children in South East Asia.

Christina Noble is a survivor. From childhood, she endured over tow decades of sexual and physical abuse in religious institutions, on the streets of Dublin, and even during her first marriage. But she refuses to give in and has turned her life around by working with Asia's street children.

Noble has a palpable energy; this is what has helped her to transcend her humble origins among "the poorest of the poor" in Dublin, to her current position as head of her own international foundation, which has offered help and hope to thousands of street children in South East Asia.

"It is not enough to mend children's broken bodies. It is not enough. You have to give them a future and that is what I want to do. We have given some a future. Now I'd lie to give it to many more," she says.

This no-nonsense woman with the Dublin accent is greeted by shouts of `Mama Tina' every time she walks around the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, her home since she set up the Christina Noble Children's Foundation in 1989. She has a Monty Pythonesque ability always to look on the bright side of life, countered by a strong does of street-wise common sense.

Noble turned up in Vietnam 14 years after the war, "with only £2,000 and a big heart". She would, she says, do anything to help these children. She sings to them, feeds them, comforts them and kicks in the doors of hotel rooms to rescue them from paedophiles.

When she arrived in Vietnam, there were 50,000 street children in the growing city. It had become a dumping ground for babies abandoned by their families or orphaned in the 20 years of intermittent war in Vietnam.

This self-proclaimed "mad Irish-woman" reached out to the street children and, with a shared background of a loveless and often violent childhood, somehow made contact. "What we gave them is childhood.

They are very individualistic. I would have been like them. A lot of them got into trouble and were the black sheep of their families. But we help them with a constant determination and commitment to bring love.'

Noble's own background reads like a catalogue of horrors, beginning with the death of her mother – a central, stabilising figure in her life – in 1954. Noble was then only ten years old; one of a healthy brood of ten children.

Her father was an alcoholic and unable to cope with such a large family. He sent some of his daughters to live with relatives in what she calls a "terrible abusive" situation.

The sisters were removed after a year and put into the Catholic Church-run industrial school system. Here, they got food and shelter, but no respite from physical and sexual abuse.

"I had a shocking life," says Noble with her customary matter-of-factness. "Make no mistake about that. I don't make light of it, because some of my family members still suffer due to the past. Some of them were younger and spent longer in the institutions. I was a free spirit, and I never let anyone destroy that. You take the beatings but I always found a way to keep going."

She broke a leg and arm in a dramatic escape from her first home, the Magdalen Laundry in Drumcondra, and managed to crawl into a city centre Garda station. After her injuries healed, she ran away again and slept rough in Dublin's city centre for tow years, staying close to the family home in Marrowbone Lane in the Liberties.

"I would sleep in coal sheds down the back of Rialto and along the canal. All the fellows and their mots would go down behind the Guinness plant for a kiss and a cuddle, and we would hide further down the back. But the Phoenix Park was my real home."

After nearly two years living rough in Dublin she was found again, and put into the chillingly infamous St. Joseph's Industrial School at Letterfrack near Clifden, Co. Galway.

On release from St. Joseph's, her by them homeless father met her at the train station. "He was drunk on the platform. I gave him the fiver (given to her by the school) and he went into the pub and slipped out the back door with my money."

She returned to living rough in the Phoenix Park. This finally came to an end, not thanks to a helpful sould in the land of a thousand welcomes, but because she was gang-raped in the park by a group of men. She recounts this without flinching; her voice occasionally emotional, but always controlled.

Her son, Thomas, the result of the rape, was taken away at birth. She believes she has seen him (he would not be about 40 years old) at fundraising events, and is certain he lives in Dublin. "He knows where I am. Make no mistake about it. Does he know he is Thomas? I don't know, but at an event in Christ Church (three years ago), someone approached me and I felt it was him," she says. The following day, a man similar to the one who had spoken to her in the doorway of Christ Church left a £5,000 donation into the office. Money continues to be sent anonymously every month from the same source.

She is aware that a meeting with her son would be a tense one. "He has to find me. I don't have the right to invade his life, but he has the right to invade mine. I leave it that way." She pauses for a moment, and then resumes.

"All the pain and suffering is not something you can get rid of overnight. It took the best part of my life to receive all that, and it is taking a great part of my life to send it all away. I am healthy in the emotional and mental state now. I am me – I don't worry about anything. I would rather be open than bottle it up and appear calm and controlled on the front."

To date, the Christina Noble Children's Foundation has established 20 projects in Vietnam, with services ranging from emergency health clinics, schools, shelters for homeless boys, childcare centres. It also organises sporting events and vocational training.

"I just love kids. I have a great relationship with kids. Working with them can be exhausting at times and exasperating at times, but there is an incredible sense that these little lives are going somewhere. These are the world's children. Thee are the next generation and we are trying to give them back a little childhood.."

Noble has been called a saint for her work in Vietnam, though she shudders at the notion of such accolades. "There are real saints," she says. "Like Mi Lynn, a young girl in Ho Chi Minh City with cerebral palsy. Her whole body is totally trapped – if she moves at all, her bones break. She is on the drip full time and regularly gets pneumonia. Sometimes I ask God to take this little angel out of this pain."

"But she lives for music. Just rub her arm, and sing. Mi Lynn is my hero – she inspires me the most in this world. There is no other person in this world with her level of courage. You can't put it into words no matter what a dictionary says. She loves when I sign Danny Boy or Sweet Sixteen. I am no more a saint than the man on the moon, but she is a little saint".

The sheer agony of looking back has caused much of Nobel's recollection of past events to become muddled. But the one thing that protected here, and acted as a safety blanket, was her music.

As a child, she sang in the pubs of Dublin to raise money for food. Later, while in the care of the nuns, she used her talent to entertain the other girls. "It is like entertaining the troops. But the nuns refused to put me in the band because they though I was soiled goods – a Dublin tramp because I had lived on the streets."

A tireless campaigner, she plans now to "start a band among the street children" with a collection of discarded musical instruments donated by various Irish musicians.

Noble's whirlwind tour of Europe, aimed at raising further funds for her new project with street in Mongolia, was broken by two high-profile celebrations of her life's achievements.

She received a Humanitarian award at the recent Meteor Music Awards. But far more important to her was the cheque she got for €100,000.

There was, however, another reason for the trip. While she reluctantly agreed to give a speech at what she believe would be an Armani fundraising event in London, her colleagues and friends were scheming behind her back with This is Your Life host, Michael Aspel, to arrange the perfect opportunity to present her with Red Book.

"I was very annoyed at all this effort for one fund-raising event, and, when Aspel arrived in the middle of my speech, I was furious. When I say him I thought, `he is here for one of the models or actresses in the crowd and he's going to ruin my speech to raise money for the children," she laughs.

When it became clear she was Aspel's intended victim, she had to be dragged off the stage. "But once we got there, it was a beautiful evening. Filled with friends and family including a message from the Taoiseach."

Her next stop is Mongolia, where she is involved in setting up a project for street children. In 1997, she travelled there for the first time. The sprawling poverty of this former Soviet republic made for a steep learning curve.

Temperatures in Mongolia during the winter can fall to minus 40 degrees Celsius.

In a bid not to freeze to death, most of the street children live in self-sufficient gangs under the streets in the antiquated warren of heating pipes. According to the World Bank, one third of the population lives below the poverty line, and one in four children is chronically malnourished. Children as young as eight years are routinely jailed by the authorities.

The children of Mongolia, 650 of whom are now cared for by her foundation, call her Genghis Khan's Queen.

Noble's next plan is to build a transition centre for children released from jail to stop them getting back into the cycle of poverty.

"To help teach children a few basic skills. We would like to do more – vocational training and sports facilities for the kids," says Noble.

She is searching for searching for tradesmen – plumbers, bricklayers and carpenters and electricians – to come out to Mongolia to help build facilities, and to teach the children or their parents tangible skills.

"You don't want to push too many foreigners on the children, but we also need to teach them skills which will secure their futures," she says.

Her rich Dublin singing voice has already brought a little slice of heaven into the troubled lives of thousands of street children in Asia.

Unfortunately, however, life will change for these young children only when she can offer them tangible opportunities and a future.