Robaird O’Cearbhaill
Hong Kong Correspondent
Founder of a foundation for vulnerable children Christina Noble’s early Catholic Dublin life was terribly cruel, coming from what she described as the worst slum in Europe.
Her mother died when she was ten, leaving her to look after her siblings. There were eight children originally, but two died in their infancy. Her alcoholic father did nothing for the family, not even buying food.
When Noble’s mother died, she prayed to God that if he spared her, she would become a nun. Instead, while not being even a teenager, she had to become a mother herself to her younger siblings, the youngest of whom was only three. “I tried to feed them, I tried to get them to school. I’d go to the market at 4 am to get the oranges and cabbages they were turning out (throwing away) and then I’d come home and try to cook them.”
It was a hopeless and desperate task, made impossible by the fact that her father was an alcoholic. “I’d go from pub to pub looking for him and when I found him I’d say, ‘Come home, Daddy’ – even though there was no food in the house.” On the other hand he would take her to build sandcastles on the beach saying frequently, “God has great plans for your life.” Seems he was right.
Noble’s life took another tragic turn when the authorities intervened, taking the children to orphanages. She was separated from her five brothers and sisters, who she was told, untruthfully, were no longer alive, and was treated badly at school as her biographical blog (https://christinanoble.weebly.com/about-christina-noble.html).
“Christina was sent to a school on the west coast of Ireland which was miles away from her (east coast) home for four years. At the school, the nuns would say rude things about her mother, call her names, beat her and the other students and they made her believe that her brothers and sisters were dead.”
Returning to Dublin at 16, living rough, she was gang raped, and becoming pregnant. Returning to an orphanage again, her healthy baby was born Noble was breast feeding him, but soon he was removed from her care, against her wishes to keep him.
Good fortune finally came her way. She found out about the state’s lies about her siblings being dead, and tracked down her brother in London. But even there, her life took another sad turn. Married, she bore three kids, but her husband was abusive.
However in 1971 she found inspiration that would change her life, and that of many children, wonderfully.
She had a dream about suffering children in Vietnam as she wrote in her autobiography Nobody’s Children. She then decided to go there to help them, which she did. Despite her poor education and having no connections with sponsors, through hard work and inventiveness, she built up an impressive international charity, the Christina Noble Children’s Foundation. The Guardian article’s fitting title was “Christina Noble: the woman who transformed the lives of 700,000 children,” and, of course, many more since.
Noble’s terrible childhood and poverty turned into a bonus, inspiring her to help neglected, greatly impoverished street children, as she explained in her autobiography.
As the Guardian article said tellingly: “She had endured a childhood of appalling suffering and from that had sprung a passion to help other children.”
“It doesn’t matter whether you’re in a gutter in Dublin or Ho Chi Minh City, it’s still a gutter,” she says when we meet to talk about a film that has been made about her life. “What I want to do is get children out of the gutter because it’s no childhood at all – every child deserves love and cuddles and kindness and warm food and a bed, and every child has the right not to be afraid.”
In Nobody’s Children Noble revealed how strong her Catholic faith, love and dedication has long been, towards the homeless kids, and in detail her prayers asking for help to support the abandoned kids. And the source of her motivation beginning with the dream.
“The dream told me to work with the street children of this poor jangled, disease-ridden country. You might laugh at that. You might say that it was only a dream and that only someone who is Irish would act on a dream as if it were a message from God. And you could be right. Not anything I can explain today. I had a dream – a vision if you will – that ordered me to Vietnam. That is all.” Noble added that the first homeless kids she took care of, two girls, “Huong and Hang are proof that God wants me to stay here. He used them to make me see that I must stay. I don’t know if you believe in God. But God wants me to do this.”
The Christina Noble blog summarizes her aptly. “Noble is an inspiration to everyone, the way she was so empathetic and selfless is a perfect example of a modern day prophet.” (Photo: Christina Noble Children’s Foundation website)
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