Carlo Torriani

SWARGA DWAR

The conversion of a catholic missionary

presented by

Card. Simon Pimenta

PIME Publications, PIME Regional House, Eluru - 534 0-07, A.P., India

CHILDREN

 Letter No. 13, Bombay, May 1979

 Dear Friends

    The time is passing but the memory of all our friends in different parts of the world is not passing.

Our work is going on and we are rather satisfied. The good news is that Salafia has finished his medical studies, he passed all the exams and has become a doctor ready to work in our project in Bombay. He has to complete an other year of internship, meanwhile he started a society for leprosy control also in Bangalore with the name Sumana Halli.

The Municipality had entrusted to us an other ward of the city, Chembur, and we are going to expand our work also there. We give treatment, but after they are cured, if they lost their job or their place who will rehabilitate them? Unfortunately the work of rehabilitation is still to be developed. Something has been done but not enough.

Beside the work of survey-education-treatment that you know we have a particular care for the children of leprosy patients and also of the other children of slums who are in danger of contagion. We collect them in balwadi (kindergarten) in order to prepare them for the public school and we give them a preventive dose of dapsone. We collect all the children of all ages, many had never been to school. The parents sometime need them at home to look after the smaller ones. The schools are overcrowded and don’t care about difficult cases, etc…

Our purpose is  first: to keep them under observation to prevent leprosy, second: to prepare them to get admission into the public school. Out of eighty children that, last year, we sent to school, only thirty are still there; the others drop out for different reasons. It is not a great success! Very soon an Italian teacher, Agnese Paleari, will be coming as volunteer to take care of our preprimary schools and to train our local teachers.

The Indian Government has a very well organized vertical program for leprosy control, but up till now we can speak only of control because we do not have a vaccine to prevent leprosy and eradicate it. All over the world, sponsored by WHO, there are different research projects to find out a vaccine, but it will take a long time.

Our problem now is what to do for those to whom we say: “You are cured”, but they do not have a work, they are thrown out of their family, they don’t have a pension, they have no future. Many times also the children are taken by the parents to help in begging, they do not come to our balwadi, they don’t go to school. To change habits and mentality it takes generations.  We can only work with patience and love.

To continue this work we need friends like you who “hope against hope”, who work and give without seen the results. I learned that also in the Bhagavad Gita,  Krishna exhort Arjuna to do his duty without bothering about the fruits that will come. Ours is a drop in the ocean, but we would like to see that is a drop of color.

Thank you for your help. It is important that you continue to hope and love with us.