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

WOMEN AND CHILDREN

Letter No. 52, March 1998                                          

Dear Friends

    Since three years now, our financing agency, Amici di R. Follereau, call me to Italy, every January, to lecture and witness during their anti-leprosy campaign. This year they sent me to Savona, Sassari and Castelfranco Veneto.

In this tour of Italy I had the chance to present my book “La Porta del Cielo” that you already know. I hope you have received a copy. The 2000 copies of the first edition had already gone. Many wrote to me their appreciation. Somone asked when I will write a second volume.

    Back to India in the first week of February, I find myself musing about old and new friends. How much sympathy. much affection, sharing of ideals, how much eagerness for news.

    You may ask me: what is new in Swarga Dwar? There is an innovation: now in SD we hava also women and children. In the past, many noticed and asked surprised why in SD we were having only men. At the beginning it has been a choice out of necessity. Three years ago we started keeping a couple in charge of the Kitchen: Krishna and Rajeshwari. Hailing from Tamil Nadu, but settled in Mumbai, they have already settled their children and they accepted to take charge of the kitchen. Then Gopal, very old resident of SD, expressed the desire to keep with him the old mother, so we gave them a small house till the mother died a few months ago. Then we admitted  Haribao, an old leprosy patient, who after a few weeks asked whether he can keep with him wife Pushpa. We put them in the same house where Gopal was with his mother. So the couple became two.

While we work in the slums and the dispensaries of Lok Seva Sangam, very often people point out to us orphan children and request us to take care of them. Many times we placed them in orphanages. Other times we encourage the single parent to keep the child and give him financial assistance under the sponsorship scheme. But when we found recently, two children orphan of both parents, then we got the idea of keeping them with us and we searched for a couple ready to take care of them along with their own children.

Since June ’97 a young couple, with their own two children, live in SD and look after our two orphans, Rohit and Gafur, both seven years old. So now we have three couples and four children. The atmosphere in SD is completely changed. Where there are children there is joy, there is noise, there is life. And the sari of the ladies have added a not of colour to the green of our garden.