Ian Botham
Headline:
Sir Ian Botham's faith, hope and charity
Synopsis:
Sir Ian Botham finds reasons for optimism amid the chaos and poverty of Mumbai.
The magic. How to explain it? Let’s start with the goodness of Beefy. No, let’s start with Heena and the eight-grand watch. No, let’s start with the freshers and the bulge in their foreskins. No, let’s start with the chaos of the Dharavi slum. No, let’s start with the football in Shivaji Park. No, let’s start at the beginning. Let’s start with a lesson in how to be good.
The date is December 3, 1984. Matthew Spacie is sitting in the front room of his parents’ home at Leigh-on-Sea, Essex watching the nine o’clock news. Forty-two tonnes of methyl isocyantic gas have leaked from a storage tank at the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India. The government is calling for volunteers to clear the thousands of bodies and dead animals from the streets. “I want to go,” he tells his parents. “I’d like to help.”
That is not normal behaviour for a 17-year-old.
A few months later, he takes a flight to Delhi and a train to Bhopal and seeks work at a huge new orphanage but the city is still in chaos; there are too many kids for too few places; too many bureaucrats playing God. He travelled to Dharamsala and considered joining the Tibetan monks who had sought refuge from China but decided he would do better in Calcutta, where he introduced himself to Mother Teresa one morning after six o’clock Mass.
A tiny, crumpled woman with a huge heart, she had just the job for him. How would he feel about helping the missionary brothers at the leper colony? “Sure,” he gulped. So he crossed the bridge to Howrah next day and was escorted to work. The first hour was tough - the only lepers he had ever seen were in Ben-Hur - but just beneath the surface of the rags and rotting flesh he discovered something he never expected: laughter and warmth and generosity and kindness. These were truly beautiful people!
“Leprosy is absolutely curable,” he says. ...
- Publish date:
- 30 November 2008
- Author:
- Paul Kimmage
- Source:
- Sunday Times
- Media:
