Winter 2008 - Sacred Heart Schools

Joan Terry (SHP ’61), (center) is pictured here with Sr.
Carmen Parrilla (left) and Sr. Ida Rinne.
Ann Carey (SJSH ’71, SHP ’75) and Sheila
Giannini Ruprecht (SHP ’63) with Alex Lucas
Ertola (SJSH ’72, SHP ’76).
Lyn Jason Cobb (SHE ’65, SHP ’69),
and Lisa Geserick (SHP ’69)
“When I was a student here at
Sacred Heart, a close friend, Mariko
Takahashi, now a nun in Belgium,
gave me a holy card which I still
have today. Though our paths are
different, it says, our goal is still
the same. To surrender one’s self, to
hope for the courage to say yes, is to
glimpse the truth illumined in Saint
Teresa of Avila’s magnificent prayer:
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours.
Yours are the eyes through which He
looks with compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but
yours.”
later, to pay public tribute and to give open thanks
to a school, a faculty and a religious order whose
own brave mission was to educate and protect the
minds and spirits of young girls.
In the spring of 2005, I was sitting in a creative
writing faculty meeting at Arizona State University.
One of our faculty asked – is anyone interested
in going to India to work with sex slaves
Everyone reared back in a kind of shock, someone
murmured, ‘that sounds dangerous,’ and though I
didn’t say a word, every cell in me, every fiber, or
more accurately, my soul, said ‘Yes.’
That single decision, that ‘yes,’ to the unknown,
changed my life. Within ten hours of landing in
Calcutta, I was walking, at night, with my guide
Bishan, a twenty-four year old graduate of Calcutta
University, through one of the worst slums in
the world and into the
narrow, winding alleyways
of a working class brothel.
Kalighat was nothing like
my fears, my stereotypes or
even my limited knowledge
had imagined. Bishan
seemed to know everyone,
a n d c h i l d r e n s w i r l e d
around me, like children
everywhere, curious and
spirited. During my ten
days in Calcutta, I taught
a workshop for around
twenty young Kalam poets,
visited shelter homes and
toured Nirmal Hriday
(Pure Heart,) the first home
Mother Teresa established
for the dying and the
destitute. I met the nun in charge, a woman I am
convinced is a saint, a woman so selfless and holy,
so radiant with love, that had she looked at me,
asked me to stay on at Nirmal Hriday, I would
not be here today. I met Indian women, attorneys
and doctors who had given up affluent marriages,
traditional caste status and social approval, to help
the women of Kalighat attain legal status, receive
proper medical treatment, and provide education
and a safe place to sleep at night for their children,
so they would not be trapped in a hopeless life
ending, as the lives of more than 80% of these
trafficked women did, by dying, before the age of
thirty, of HIV/Aids or other preventable diseases.
I met unsung heroes, witnessed lives of selflessness,
saw the difference between the ego’s satisfaction,
the self ’s thirst for recognition, and the more
enduring joy of using one’s gifts and talents for the
benefit of uplifting others. Something in me woke
up in the presence of these individuals, woke up
as I walked through the narrow, foul alleyways of
Kalighat, shyly smiled at by girls stolen from their
villages, forced into a brutal life from which there
was no escape. Most of Kalighat’s prostitutes are
mothers, and like most mothers, they adore their
children.
I came home from that first trip to Calcutta
in early 2006, determined to build a link between
our creative writing program and Kalam. One year
later, in January, 2007, I returned with five MFA
students, and this summer two graduate students
worked, fully funded by ASU, with Kalam and
New Light.
In the past year, I have felt that same intuitive
pull to begin an outreach program with Phoenix
Children’s Hospital, and for two or more years, I
had dreamed of making documentary films but
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