'I'VE GOT BREAST cancer,' says Christina Noble with no prompting. 'I'm on the treatment now for five years. I'm a bit tired, but I really want to go to Hong Kong. I want to thank the people there. They've been very good.'
Noble is speaking from Dublin, ahead of a trip this week to the city that's the second biggest sponsor after her native Ireland of the foundation she set up in 1991 to help Vietnamese, and now Mongolian, street children. It's been known that Noble, who turns 60 this year, has been ill for a while, but this is the first time she's broached the subject with the media, and her approach is the matter-of-fact, no-nonsense style that has, no doubt, contributed to the remarkable growth of the Christina Noble Children's Foundation over more than a decade.
'When they told me about the cancer, they said, 'It's malignant, Christina.' I just went out and called my friends, and said we're going to celebrate. We're going to have a party, because we're going to win. When I was waiting for my radiotherapy, I had the other people singing. We set up a little club in the clinic. You have to keep away the negative vibes,' she says, laughing and exuding a confidence that, once again, she's going to bat away life's challenges and carry on her work that literally began with a dream.
As described in her autobiography, Bridge Across My Sorrows, Noble's foundation started with a dream she had in 1971 of Vietnamese children running along a dirt road fleeing napalm bombing during the Vietnam war. 'I don't know why I dreamt about Vietnam,' she says. 'Perhaps it was because the country was so much in the news at the time. In the dream, the ground under the children was cracked and coming apart and they were reaching up to me. One of the girls had a look in her eyes that implored me to pick her up and protect her and take her to safety. Above the escaping children was a brilliant white light that contained the word 'Vietnam'.'
It wasn't until 1989 that she arrived in Ho Chi Minh City, 'with no credentials, no contacts and no money'. With no particular plan or place to start, she began by bringing two ragged little girls from the street into her hotel room to feed, wash and clothe.
Less than two years later, she'd built the Children's Medical and Social Centre in the city, the core of her many programmes, that include the Sunshine Schools in Vietnam and Mongolia (which provide free education and catch-up assistance to children who've fallen out of the state system), day care centres that keep kids off the streets, and away from drugs and prostitution and allow their parents to look for work, medical care, residential care, and extensive art, music and sports programmes. Today, the foundation is responsible for dozens of projects all over Vietnam.