You Magazine
Christina Noble Children’s Foundation In Mongolia
By Sue Carpenter
Around the corner from the Ulaanbaatar Hotel, one of the best in Mongolia’s capital city and a monument to the old Russian-backed Communist regime, there is a stinking sewer. In it lives a gang of street urchins. As I walk past the manhole, two heads pop up, one furnished with a battered baseball cap, worn back-to-front, the other close-shaven. The boys climb out, followed by six or seven others, all filthy and ragged.
I motion as if to go down the sewer, and they rub their fingers and thumbs together, as if to say, ‘you look in our sewer, you pay.’ As it is, the stench wafting up is so foul that I decline, but a fellow hotel guest gamely climbs down the iron rungs. He is back in minutes, grimacing. ‘The smell is awful,’ he reports, ‘and there are rats the size of a cat.’
All over Ulaanbaatar, where temperatures are currently dipping towards the winter lows of minus 30 degrees, as many as 1,000 homeless children are finding shelter in the warmest place possible, and that usually means a sewer. Rather than sewage channels, these ‘sewers’ are in fact tunnels carrying hot water pipes. Nevertheless, conditions, as we saw, are far from cosy.
Over on the outskirts of the city, beneath a green hill, is another refuge for street children, a cluster of traditional ‘gers’ – the round, felt-lined, wooden-framed tents in which the nomadic Mongolians traditionally live. Wrapped in anonymous white canvas and tied down against fierce storms with horsehair ropes, each ger is surprisingly warm and inviting inside, with gaily painted wooden beds and chests and a central wood-burning stove.
The village was created a year ago by the Christina Noble Children’s Foundation (CNCF) and, although it has only sheltered some 50 children so far, it has made a profound difference to those young lives. And although Christina Noble is not the only person trying to help Mongolia’s street children (Save the Children arrived in 1994, when the problem first emerged following the demise of Communism), she operates in a highly individual way and has made a strong and positive impression on the government.
To understand Christina Noble’s work, you have to know her personal background. Born in 1944 in Dublin’s Liberties (a ‘God-struck, beer-soaked slum,’ according to her), she was just ten years old when her frail mother died. With a violent, alcoholic father, she assumed responsibility for her younger brother and two sisters. They lived in appalling poverty, ridden with fleas and lice, breaking up their own furniture for firewood, until they were forced to move in with despicably cruel relations, where Christina was sexually abused.
The authorities eventually stepped in, split up the family and consigned them to orphanages. Christina jumped from a first-floor window, breaking an arm and a leg, and ran (or, rather, dragged herself) away. With nowhere else to go, she lived rough for two years, sleeping in public lavatories and parks. Finally rounded up and sent to a strict Catholic industrial school, she grew up in the false belief that her siblings were dead. When, at 16, she was released with just a £5 note to her name, her father met her and told her he had given up drinking. ‘We will all be together again,’ he said. He took her fiver into a pub – ostensibly to get change – and walked straight out of the back door, leaving Christina shivering on the pavement.
There was yet more to endure. Living back on the streets, she was set upon late one night and raped by a gang of men. She became pregnant and gave birth to an illegitimate son, whom she named Thomas after her father. Placed in another institution, a home for unmarried mothers, she was just finding new hope in life when she learnt that the nuns had given her son away for adoption. Determined to put her past behind her, she fled for England. There, she met a Greek Cypriot, Mario, and soon moved in with him. Together for 14 years, they had three children, Helen, now 32, Androula, 30, and Nicolas. But there was more pain to come. Mario had affairs and beat her, and she wound up in a psychiatric hospital. Finally, at the age of 32, she left him. She later married Simon Noble, who saw her through years of therapy, but the relationship did not last. During the 80s, alone again and stronger, she built up a catering business and began to make a little money for the first time in her life.
Her story, which begins like the grimmest of Dickens novels, is recorded in an emotive two-part autobiography, Bridge Across My Sorrows (1994) and the new Mama Tina (both John Murray). The first book takes us up to the turning point in her life when, in 1989, following a dream in which she saw children running and the word ‘Vietnam’ lit up in the sky, she took her savings and flew to Ho Chi Minh City, installed herself at the Rex Hotel, late HQ of the world’s war correspondents, and took in children off the streets. Unabashed, she would bathe and feed them, to the staff’s displeasure.
She went on to charm and harangue officials and corporate heads into backing her plans for a medical and social centre, from which has grown the most wide-reaching children’s organisation in Vietnam, with shelter, medical and educational facilities that have helped more than 80,000 youngsters, whom she calls her Sunshine Children (so named ‘because I believe that through their ordeals, their pain and their struggles, the one thing they have is sunshine’. Her daughter Helen, a professional singer, now teaches the children music, while Nicolas manages the Vietnam office.
Christina’s mission – unknown even to herself until it happened – is to give children the love that they, like she, have been denied, and to rebuild their belief in themselves. ‘I understand inside that it takes a long time for a child to trust again,’ she says. ‘When you’ve felt inferior to the point where you feel you are nothing and everybody else is important, it’s hard to come up to a level of feeling equal.
‘I’ve always held on to my dignity. Even when they stripped it from me, I held on. I see children as individuals, I want to help them realise their dreams, give them back their dignity. Sometimes I wish my arms were this long [she stretches them out wide], so I could bring them all in.’
Archetypally Irish, with a distinct accent, Christina rollercoasters from bitter determination to emotional melodrama to conspiratorial whispering to choked-back tears. It is hard to keep a rein on her conversation, which, like everything she does, outpours straight from the heart, often bypassing the normal bounds of decorum. The Mongolian who helped her start up in Ulaanbaatar is Dr Borshigt; she promptly called him ‘Dr Bullshit’ (not just to me, but to his face). She doesn’t care what people think, and, more importantly, she gets things done.
‘You have to have that maverick spirit…’ I venture. ‘The nutter spirit,’ she interrupts, spitting the word out. ‘I’m happy to be a nutter.’
Her new book details ‘the doubts, the uncertainties, the determination to fight back, individual children’s stories and where they are now, and where I am personally now.’ Where she is physically right now is Britain, recovering from stress and exhaustion. In common with other victims of an abusive childhood, she shows addictive tendencies. Some turn to drugs, alcohol or self-abuse. She, like the Princess of Wales in latter years, is addicted to helping other victims. When nothing or nobody else can stop her working all hours that God gives, her ailing health steps in.
Where she is personally now, is more confident than ever before. In rebuilding others’ self-esteem, she has rebuilt her own. ‘Has the fact I’ve been introduced to all these high-faluting people and won all these awards changed me? No. But now I can finally accept that I’m an intelligent being and I have the ability to use my pain in a constructive, positive way to help others. The pain is my strength.
‘I have my weaknesses, my ups and downs, my scarring, which will never go. But I am stronger now than I have ever been. I’m only stronger because I know for the first time in my life that it hasn’t been for nothing.’
Although she has always operated on instinct, nowadays she actually believes in her instincts. So, when, last year, she had the notion to spread ‘the magic’ to the children of Mongolia, she acted on it. ‘I knew nothing about the situation there,’ she says, ‘I just knew in my soul that there were children suffering. I had to ask my office to find me a map so I could see where Mongolia was!’
The situation there is relatively new, and one that has hit other former Communist countries this decade. Before, the standard of living may have been low, but everybody was provided for. The new market economy has brought with it massive inflation, job losses and cuts in subsidies for healthcare, fuel and other basics. Impoverished parents – particularly lone mothers – face the ugly decision of turning one or more children out on the streets, in the knowledge that they have more chance of scraping a living by begging, stealing and scavenging. Other children run away. Because the elements are so harsh in Mongolia, the people are naturally hardy. There is nothing pathetic about these kids, who team up in streetwise gangs, just like modern Artful Dodgers led by teenage Fagins (nary a lip-quivering Oliver among them). While their spirit may remain strong, however, their health deteriorates and their prospects are nil.
When Christina arrived in Ulaanbaatar, she headed straight for the Rotary Club and gave an impromptu talk. ‘By the end, Dr Bullshit was crying,’ she says. ‘I said, “Take me to the children.” He took me to a concrete building where a lot of children have suffered. Then I said, “Take me to a mountain.” He took me to a mountain, and I said, “Build the gers there, at the foot of the mountain, one a clinic, one a school, make a vegetable plot and grow flowers.” Children don’t have time to wait. I want them to eat, I want them to fly, to laugh, to sing.’
Within a few months, what seemed like a whim became a reality: a village of nine gers, comprising a classroom, a guard/office ger, a visitors’ ger, a clinic, and five that house five children each plus a ‘ger mother’ – generally a homeless woman – who looks after the household. Rather than place children in an orphanage, Christina wanted to give them a traditional, caring environment in which to grow up. As well as the requisite vegetable and flower garden, there is the Sunshine Chicken House (home to six hens and their chicks) and, on the day I visit, several new additions to pets’ corner: a sheep, a cow and calf, and a goat and kid, which the children have named Wendy, after CNCF Mongolia’s general manager Wendy Evans, who has matching grey, curly hair.
My visit coincides with the annual holiday for Naadam, Mongolia’s celebrated sports festival, and the children have new outfits and balloons. As we drive into the fenced compound, they rush up, chattering and laughing, keen to show off their dazzling white T-shirts and bright baseball caps (I am told that the sartorial contrast between sewer kids and CNCF kids is not quite so marked on a normal day).
Several hands grab hold of mine and pull me into the classroom ger, where I am treated to a gleeful rendition of ‘You are my Sunshine’ – one of Christina’s favourite songs, and a signature tune for the Sunshine Children – followed by a Mongolian song. Beaming, young Purevragchaa breaks into a solo (‘about the mother and father and how they are wonderful,’ whispers the teacher).
It is a particularly poignant choice. He and his elder brother, Ragchaa, ran away from home after their mother died and their father remarried. For nearly a year, they lived in a sewer and survived by portering at the bus station and carrying bottles for drinks vendors. A CNCF volunteer nurse found Purevragchaa on the street a month earlier, with a polyp the size of a golf ball in his nose. ‘We took him to hospital,’ says Wendy Evans, ‘and asked him if he’d like to come here afterwards. He said he would if his brother agreed. We found Ragchaa and invited him here too. He’s a lovely chap, well-behaved, helpful and he really looks after his brother.
‘Usually street children who have been deserted or run away from home are really tough nuts. They are professional thieves. We try to help them, but we don’t force anyone to stay. Often they go back to the streets. These boys were obviously not as desperate as some children, and they had not been on the streets long enough to totally adopt that way of life.’
For 10-year-old Chinetsetseg, another form of streetlife is ingrained. ‘This little girl makes us cry,’ sighs Wendy. ‘Her mother is a prostitute and she doesn’t want her. But this little lass has been taught by her mother what to do. Recently she ran away with four of our boys, and she showed them what to do. She doesn’t see that there is anything wrong – she talks about it as we would talk about the weather – because she was introduced to it at a young age and had a stepfather that abused her. Our doctor and education coordinator are giving her counselling to suggest that this isn’t acceptable practice. She’s absolutely lovely, but she ties my stomach in knots, this little one.’
Following a recent government directive, CNCF is obliged to reunite children with their parents wherever possible. In the case of one two-year-old boy, found on the streets wrapped up in a fur-lined coat, they were successful in tracking down his mother, who had abandoned him because she was penniless and terrified the child would starve. They looked after the toddler, while helping his mother set up home and find work. The pair are now together and flourishing. But, although Chinetsetseg desperately wants to be with her mother, her mother won’t have her. For her, the Ger Village is home.
So impressed were the government by CNCF’s work that, of some 15 organisations working with street children, they were the only one invited to attend a conference on children’s rights earlier this year. ‘Apparently,’ says Wendy Evans, ‘the national children’s centre told the other charities that they like ours best and the others should follow our model. It’s a wonderful compliment, but it’s embarrassing since we are newcomers. They liked the fact that we had full-time medical care and education, as well as family units within a community.’
Perhaps because Christina Noble was deprived of such things in childhood, she knows instinctively what is needed. ‘I’m not an expert,’ she says, ‘but I have a worldly experience. I do what feels right, but I have to make sure it will work, too. To be really successful, you have to involve the local people. We’re human beings, brothers and sisters, but they have their own way of life and we don’t interfere with that. We’re a tool, nothing more, nothing less.’
That tool that would not operate, however, without her total commitment. It is a symbiotic relationship: in giving 100 per cent, Christina gains 100 per cent. ‘Sometimes I feel so tired and frustrated,’ she says, ‘but mostly I know that I’m lucky. I know that I am so lucky.’ Her voice lowers as she relishes those four words. ‘You couldn’t even begin to understand that. I am so lucky.’
Christina Noble Children’s Foundation In Mongolia
By Sue Carpenter
Around the corner from the Ulaanbaatar Hotel, one of the best in Mongolia’s capital city and a monument to the old Russian-backed Communist regime, there is a stinking sewer. In it lives a gang of street urchins. As I walk past the manhole, two heads pop up, one furnished with a battered baseball cap, worn back-to-front, the other close-shaven. The boys climb out, followed by six or seven others, all filthy and ragged.
I motion as if to go down the sewer, and they rub their fingers and thumbs together, as if to say, ‘you look in our sewer, you pay.’ As it is, the stench wafting up is so foul that I decline, but a fellow hotel guest gamely climbs down the iron rungs. He is back in minutes, grimacing. ‘The smell is awful,’ he reports, ‘and there are rats the size of a cat.’
All over Ulaanbaatar, where temperatures are currently dipping towards the winter lows of minus 30 degrees, as many as 1,000 homeless children are finding shelter in the warmest place possible, and that usually means a sewer. Rather than sewage channels, these ‘sewers’ are in fact tunnels carrying hot water pipes. Nevertheless, conditions, as we saw, are far from cosy.
Over on the outskirts of the city, beneath a green hill, is another refuge for street children, a cluster of traditional ‘gers’ – the round, felt-lined, wooden-framed tents in which the nomadic Mongolians traditionally live. Wrapped in anonymous white canvas and tied down against fierce storms with horsehair ropes, each ger is surprisingly warm and inviting inside, with gaily painted wooden beds and chests and a central wood-burning stove.
The village was created a year ago by the Christina Noble Children’s Foundation (CNCF) and, although it has only sheltered some 50 children so far, it has made a profound difference to those young lives. And although Christina Noble is not the only person trying to help Mongolia’s street children (Save the Children arrived in 1994, when the problem first emerged following the demise of Communism), she operates in a highly individual way and has made a strong and positive impression on the government.
To understand Christina Noble’s work, you have to know her personal background. Born in 1944 in Dublin’s Liberties (a ‘God-struck, beer-soaked slum,’ according to her), she was just ten years old when her frail mother died. With a violent, alcoholic father, she assumed responsibility for her younger brother and two sisters. They lived in appalling poverty, ridden with fleas and lice, breaking up their own furniture for firewood, until they were forced to move in with despicably cruel relations, where Christina was sexually abused.
The authorities eventually stepped in, split up the family and consigned them to orphanages. Christina jumped from a first-floor window, breaking an arm and a leg, and ran (or, rather, dragged herself) away. With nowhere else to go, she lived rough for two years, sleeping in public lavatories and parks. Finally rounded up and sent to a strict Catholic industrial school, she grew up in the false belief that her siblings were dead. When, at 16, she was released with just a £5 note to her name, her father met her and told her he had given up drinking. ‘We will all be together again,’ he said. He took her fiver into a pub – ostensibly to get change – and walked straight out of the back door, leaving Christina shivering on the pavement.
There was yet more to endure. Living back on the streets, she was set upon late one night and raped by a gang of men. She became pregnant and gave birth to an illegitimate son, whom she named Thomas after her father. Placed in another institution, a home for unmarried mothers, she was just finding new hope in life when she learnt that the nuns had given her son away for adoption. Determined to put her past behind her, she fled for England. There, she met a Greek Cypriot, Mario, and soon moved in with him. Together for 14 years, they had three children, Helen, now 32, Androula, 30, and Nicolas. But there was more pain to come. Mario had affairs and beat her, and she wound up in a psychiatric hospital. Finally, at the age of 32, she left him. She later married Simon Noble, who saw her through years of therapy, but the relationship did not last. During the 80s, alone again and stronger, she built up a catering business and began to make a little money for the first time in her life.
Her story, which begins like the grimmest of Dickens novels, is recorded in an emotive two-part autobiography, Bridge Across My Sorrows (1994) and the new Mama Tina (both John Murray). The first book takes us up to the turning point in her life when, in 1989, following a dream in which she saw children running and the word ‘Vietnam’ lit up in the sky, she took her savings and flew to Ho Chi Minh City, installed herself at the Rex Hotel, late HQ of the world’s war correspondents, and took in children off the streets. Unabashed, she would bathe and feed them, to the staff’s displeasure.
She went on to charm and harangue officials and corporate heads into backing her plans for a medical and social centre, from which has grown the most wide-reaching children’s organisation in Vietnam, with shelter, medical and educational facilities that have helped more than 80,000 youngsters, whom she calls her Sunshine Children (so named ‘because I believe that through their ordeals, their pain and their struggles, the one thing they have is sunshine’. Her daughter Helen, a professional singer, now teaches the children music, while Nicolas manages the Vietnam office.
Christina’s mission – unknown even to herself until it happened – is to give children the love that they, like she, have been denied, and to rebuild their belief in themselves. ‘I understand inside that it takes a long time for a child to trust again,’ she says. ‘When you’ve felt inferior to the point where you feel you are nothing and everybody else is important, it’s hard to come up to a level of feeling equal.
‘I’ve always held on to my dignity. Even when they stripped it from me, I held on. I see children as individuals, I want to help them realise their dreams, give them back their dignity. Sometimes I wish my arms were this long [she stretches them out wide], so I could bring them all in.’
Archetypally Irish, with a distinct accent, Christina rollercoasters from bitter determination to emotional melodrama to conspiratorial whispering to choked-back tears. It is hard to keep a rein on her conversation, which, like everything she does, outpours straight from the heart, often bypassing the normal bounds of decorum. The Mongolian who helped her start up in Ulaanbaatar is Dr Borshigt; she promptly called him ‘Dr Bullshit’ (not just to me, but to his face). She doesn’t care what people think, and, more importantly, she gets things done.
‘You have to have that maverick spirit…’ I venture. ‘The nutter spirit,’ she interrupts, spitting the word out. ‘I’m happy to be a nutter.’
Her new book details ‘the doubts, the uncertainties, the determination to fight back, individual children’s stories and where they are now, and where I am personally now.’ Where she is physically right now is Britain, recovering from stress and exhaustion. In common with other victims of an abusive childhood, she shows addictive tendencies. Some turn to drugs, alcohol or self-abuse. She, like the Princess of Wales in latter years, is addicted to helping other victims. When nothing or nobody else can stop her working all hours that God gives, her ailing health steps in.
Where she is personally now, is more confident than ever before. In rebuilding others’ self-esteem, she has rebuilt her own. ‘Has the fact I’ve been introduced to all these high-faluting people and won all these awards changed me? No. But now I can finally accept that I’m an intelligent being and I have the ability to use my pain in a constructive, positive way to help others. The pain is my strength.
‘I have my weaknesses, my ups and downs, my scarring, which will never go. But I am stronger now than I have ever been. I’m only stronger because I know for the first time in my life that it hasn’t been for nothing.’
Although she has always operated on instinct, nowadays she actually believes in her instincts. So, when, last year, she had the notion to spread ‘the magic’ to the children of Mongolia, she acted on it. ‘I knew nothing about the situation there,’ she says, ‘I just knew in my soul that there were children suffering. I had to ask my office to find me a map so I could see where Mongolia was!’
The situation there is relatively new, and one that has hit other former Communist countries this decade. Before, the standard of living may have been low, but everybody was provided for. The new market economy has brought with it massive inflation, job losses and cuts in subsidies for healthcare, fuel and other basics. Impoverished parents – particularly lone mothers – face the ugly decision of turning one or more children out on the streets, in the knowledge that they have more chance of scraping a living by begging, stealing and scavenging. Other children run away. Because the elements are so harsh in Mongolia, the people are naturally hardy. There is nothing pathetic about these kids, who team up in streetwise gangs, just like modern Artful Dodgers led by teenage Fagins (nary a lip-quivering Oliver among them). While their spirit may remain strong, however, their health deteriorates and their prospects are nil.
When Christina arrived in Ulaanbaatar, she headed straight for the Rotary Club and gave an impromptu talk. ‘By the end, Dr Bullshit was crying,’ she says. ‘I said, “Take me to the children.” He took me to a concrete building where a lot of children have suffered. Then I said, “Take me to a mountain.” He took me to a mountain, and I said, “Build the gers there, at the foot of the mountain, one a clinic, one a school, make a vegetable plot and grow flowers.” Children don’t have time to wait. I want them to eat, I want them to fly, to laugh, to sing.’
Within a few months, what seemed like a whim became a reality: a village of nine gers, comprising a classroom, a guard/office ger, a visitors’ ger, a clinic, and five that house five children each plus a ‘ger mother’ – generally a homeless woman – who looks after the household. Rather than place children in an orphanage, Christina wanted to give them a traditional, caring environment in which to grow up. As well as the requisite vegetable and flower garden, there is the Sunshine Chicken House (home to six hens and their chicks) and, on the day I visit, several new additions to pets’ corner: a sheep, a cow and calf, and a goat and kid, which the children have named Wendy, after CNCF Mongolia’s general manager Wendy Evans, who has matching grey, curly hair.
My visit coincides with the annual holiday for Naadam, Mongolia’s celebrated sports festival, and the children have new outfits and balloons. As we drive into the fenced compound, they rush up, chattering and laughing, keen to show off their dazzling white T-shirts and bright baseball caps (I am told that the sartorial contrast between sewer kids and CNCF kids is not quite so marked on a normal day).
Several hands grab hold of mine and pull me into the classroom ger, where I am treated to a gleeful rendition of ‘You are my Sunshine’ – one of Christina’s favourite songs, and a signature tune for the Sunshine Children – followed by a Mongolian song. Beaming, young Purevragchaa breaks into a solo (‘about the mother and father and how they are wonderful,’ whispers the teacher).
It is a particularly poignant choice. He and his elder brother, Ragchaa, ran away from home after their mother died and their father remarried. For nearly a year, they lived in a sewer and survived by portering at the bus station and carrying bottles for drinks vendors. A CNCF volunteer nurse found Purevragchaa on the street a month earlier, with a polyp the size of a golf ball in his nose. ‘We took him to hospital,’ says Wendy Evans, ‘and asked him if he’d like to come here afterwards. He said he would if his brother agreed. We found Ragchaa and invited him here too. He’s a lovely chap, well-behaved, helpful and he really looks after his brother.
‘Usually street children who have been deserted or run away from home are really tough nuts. They are professional thieves. We try to help them, but we don’t force anyone to stay. Often they go back to the streets. These boys were obviously not as desperate as some children, and they had not been on the streets long enough to totally adopt that way of life.’
For 10-year-old Chinetsetseg, another form of streetlife is ingrained. ‘This little girl makes us cry,’ sighs Wendy. ‘Her mother is a prostitute and she doesn’t want her. But this little lass has been taught by her mother what to do. Recently she ran away with four of our boys, and she showed them what to do. She doesn’t see that there is anything wrong – she talks about it as we would talk about the weather – because she was introduced to it at a young age and had a stepfather that abused her. Our doctor and education coordinator are giving her counselling to suggest that this isn’t acceptable practice. She’s absolutely lovely, but she ties my stomach in knots, this little one.’
Following a recent government directive, CNCF is obliged to reunite children with their parents wherever possible. In the case of one two-year-old boy, found on the streets wrapped up in a fur-lined coat, they were successful in tracking down his mother, who had abandoned him because she was penniless and terrified the child would starve. They looked after the toddler, while helping his mother set up home and find work. The pair are now together and flourishing. But, although Chinetsetseg desperately wants to be with her mother, her mother won’t have her. For her, the Ger Village is home.
So impressed were the government by CNCF’s work that, of some 15 organisations working with street children, they were the only one invited to attend a conference on children’s rights earlier this year. ‘Apparently,’ says Wendy Evans, ‘the national children’s centre told the other charities that they like ours best and the others should follow our model. It’s a wonderful compliment, but it’s embarrassing since we are newcomers. They liked the fact that we had full-time medical care and education, as well as family units within a community.’
Perhaps because Christina Noble was deprived of such things in childhood, she knows instinctively what is needed. ‘I’m not an expert,’ she says, ‘but I have a worldly experience. I do what feels right, but I have to make sure it will work, too. To be really successful, you have to involve the local people. We’re human beings, brothers and sisters, but they have their own way of life and we don’t interfere with that. We’re a tool, nothing more, nothing less.’
That tool that would not operate, however, without her total commitment. It is a symbiotic relationship: in giving 100 per cent, Christina gains 100 per cent. ‘Sometimes I feel so tired and frustrated,’ she says, ‘but mostly I know that I’m lucky. I know that I am so lucky.’ Her voice lowers as she relishes those four words. ‘You couldn’t even begin to understand that. I am so lucky.’
