God Sister Teresa
Aged six, at the end of the school day I would run into rough primary-school children walking back to their orphanage in the Essex countryside.
They would stop squabbling among themselves for long enough to jeer at me as I rode by: a clean little girl on a well-groomed pony. They embarrassed me. I was too young to know about privilege, but I knew that their lives were not happy. The sound of crying was seldom absent from the orphanage. No wonder. In 1994, Mark and Caroline Cook visited a bomb-damaged orphanage in Sarajevo, where they saw violent, intimidating feral teenagers living by their wits alongside piteously filthy, unkempt babies. These infants were crammed into the only semi-warm room of the building, barely heated by a highly dangerous gas jet.
The couple came back to England, took their dog for a walk in the water meadows and decided they must find a way to ensure that such children were given what they really needed and was so glaringly absent in their lives: love.
Whenever the Cooks questioned a desolate child, they always got the same answer: ‘Please, please find me a family. I want a home.’
Anyone suffering from compassion fatigue should read their book, A Silent Cry, the story of the charity they founded, Hope and Homes for Children. Its dedication page states their aim: ‘For our grandchildren … in the hope that they will see, in their lifetime, a world free from children’s institutions.’
For a quarter of a century, this retired colonel and his wife have been carrying out, to the letter, what St James urges in his epistle: ‘Pure, unspoilt religion, in the eyes of God our Father is this: coming to the help of orphans when they need it.’
The Cooks were innocent of planning requirements, fundraising, the languages of the countries in which they worked and terrifying bureaucracies. They didn’t even know, until they were advised by a friend, that they would need an office. This was set up on the top floor of a barn without windows, heating or lavatory. It bore, inside and out, a close resemblance to the grim buildings that housed so many of the children they were aiming to help.
The Cooks’ astuteness lay – and still lies – in their grasp that compassion is vital. They stress that love is fundamental to all the work they undertake, and such is their eloquence that Hope and Homes for Children has gained international governmental support.
The Bible is full of references to the desirability of alms-giving. It is a relief and a privilege to give practical support to people who are generous and brave enough to undertake tough, heartbreaking work which we know we could not do ourselves.