a letter from
SR. LUIGINA MARCHESI
Dear friends,
I would like to write to all my friends, volunteers, visitors and relations who since 1975 have participated in or followed our work in LSS and SD. This is the last step of our work for the Hansenians that we have treated, helped in rehabilitation and finally, we hope, they will disappear in the crowd, back to normality.
While I write I see your faces, worried and hear your voices questioning: "Why, Luigina, did you leave the protection of your family and your institute?" In 1971 I started feeling that what I was doing to fight leprosy, was not enough. I could do more, particularly to prevent leprosy in the children, and so on. We were beating the air. So I hit upon the idea of asking my superiors to allow me to live in a slum for some time. In February 1975, from Chunabhatti slum, I wrote the following: "My idea is to spend my remaining years to prevent leprosy in children, to defend them from infection, to cure them, to send them to school and prepare them for a better life. For this I requested and obtained due permission to stay in Sion-Chunabatti, where there are about 750 leprosy patients in a slum and where I would like to try out my plan of prevention and control of leprosy in children. With the possibility of little financial help I collected the children for a kindergarten and the youth for classes in English.
Thanks to the support received from the parish priest of Sion, where we live, we started cooking a meal daily for the children of the Kindergarten. After the children, in the afternoon we have a stitching class, a dispensary, and an adult education class in the evening.
My idea is to form an open community with those who would like to do something good for these children. We are already a small group. There is John, a resident of the slum, who teaches the Tamil language, cooks the meal for the children and comes with me for the leprosy survey. There in Ann, a girl from Everard Nagar, the housing society where we have rented a flat. She teaches English and helps at home. There is Daisy who lives with me and is in charge of the Kindergarten. For the evening school we have a university student, a volunteer, a very good protestant; and we hope to have some others.
There is also an Italian volunteer, Giuditta, who spent a few weeks with us. We hope that other volunteers from Italy will avail of a chance to come and help.
Every Monday there are Leprosy patients coming also from outside the slum to the dispensary. We do it all with the help of Dr. Baxi, Fr. Torriani and Joakin, paramedic."
As I write now, after many years of experience and introspection, I can add a few more thoughts.
I never regretted and I do not have any doubt about my missionary vocation. Also the long journey with the PIME sisters (1951 - 75) was necessary for my human and spiritual growth. I still remember my religious sisters with nostalgia and regret. I now acknowledge that at that time I missed the chance to realize my lay missionary vocation. I still remember the joy I was feeling when I was dreaming about the missions, but the idea of convent life left me in doubt. I looked around for a lay missionary institute. There was only one: Auxilieres Missionaries in Bruxellers, but they were not ready to assure me work in the missions. There was no choice but to join a religious congregation. The PIME sisters assured me of work in the mission.
To rocognize all this, after many years, has not been easy. Fr. Carlo Torriani helped me in this introspection. He represented for me the real missionary spirit, free from all kinds of restrictions and conditioning inherent in institutions. The missionary is a frontier man and Fr. Torriani was living in a slum, Janata Colony, in the midst of the poor and non- Christians.
Together we have embarked on a long journey, the same journey that is narrated in these circular letters it is the most significant period of our missionary life and activity. Many of our friends understood our struggle, they followed us, they helped us, and they loved us. To them I say thanks. Many others could not understand, they left, and we lost them. For them I am sorry. I hope they found other ways and other guides for their own varied aspirations.
Without my religious sisters my life would be not been full, but without the help and support of Fr. Carlo my life would have not been complete!
A big thanks to all of you my dear friends!
By Luigina Marchesi
More about Sr. Luigina Marchesi
By Rev. Fr. Carlo Torriani.
The reader must have noticed that many had been my Italian collaborators whose name recurs in these pages. At the beginning there was Dr. Antonio Salafia, then came Franco Aresi, Agnese Paleari, Dr. Antonio Grugni. All there have come and gone. But since 1973 Sr. Luigina has been still is working with me.
Sr. Luigina is the "nom de guerre". Her original name is Orsola Marchesi. She was born in Costa Mezzate (Bergamo) and came to India as a missionary with the Sisters of Immaculate, or a PIME sister, in 1960. Four years later she was asked by her institute to start a leprosy control project in Eluru District of Andhra Pradesh.
Starting to live with her sisters in a thatched hut, in ten hears of work she organized the Damian Leprosy Centre and built a hospital of 100 beds in Vegavaram. In 1971 she was transferred to Mumbai with the purpose of starting a leprosy control project there with another hospital that took the name of Vimala Dermatological Centre in Versova.
At that time her mother in Italy died. These two events were the cause of a crisis in her life and set her rethinking. In Mumbai there were already two leprosy hospitals (Wadala and Trombay), the real necessity was the prevention of the contagion of leprosy in the slums, health education to the people and keeping the health of the children of leprosy patients under control. Sr. Luigina asked for permission to work living out of the convent. After three years of trial she decided to remain out and keep her religious name since everybody knows her by that name and it is the symbol of continuation of her missionary vocation.
It is more than 25 years that we have been working together. I am very grateful to my conferrers and my superiors who had given us enough freedom and space to live our experience that has produced a better understanding of the conditions of life of leprosy patients.
Some time ago, Sr. Luigina wrote to me this quotation of Nasim Hikmar:
If I burn
and you don't blaze
If we both don't catch fire
Who will dispel darkness?
My life would have incomprehensible without Luigina. I would have not done even the little that I did, without her. For this reason it is inevitable that I report here at least one letter of hers.