On my side, I have offered half of all my royalties to the heroes of my book. Among the many projects that this money will finance, one is particularly dear to my heart: The royalties of The City of Joy will support an irrigation program affecting nineteen villages of Bengal where more than one hundred thousand people live. Thanks to this effort they will become two meals a day people. Their land, which gave only one harvest or, in case of drought, no harvest at all, will in the course of the next three years yield two and even three crops. This is attacking poverty at its roots. People will no longer have to leave their parched fields in case of a climatic catastrophe to pile up in slums like the City of Joy. And perhaps one day, if projects of this sort multiply, the inhabitants of the City of Joy will be able to leave their inferno to return to the beauty of their countryside. I can assure you that the donations received, as well as my royalties, will continue working relentlessly toward meeting that wonderful goal.
—Dominique Lapierre
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, I would like to express my enormous gratitude to my wife, Dominique. She shared every moment of my extensive research in the City of Joy and she was my irreplaceable collaborator in the preparation of this book.
I would also like to acknowledge my great thanks to Colette Modiano, Paul and Manuela Andreota, and Gerard Beckers, who spent many hours correcting my manuscript and helping me with their encouragement and their extensive knowledge of India.
I also want to thank my friends in India, who with such generosity facilitated my research and made my numerous stays in India so enjoyable and fruitful. It would take several pages to name them all individually, but I would like to mention in particular Nazes Afroz, Amit, Ajit and Meeta Banerjee and Mehboub Ali; Pierre Ceyrac, Tapan Chatterjee, Ravi Dubey, Behram Dumasia, Pierre Fallon, Christine Fernandas, Georges and Annette Fremont, Leo and Fran§oise, Adi Katgara, Ashwini and Renu Kumar, Anouar Malik, Harish Malik, Aman Nath, Jean Neveu.
Camellia Panjabi, Nalini Purohit, Gaston Roberge, Emmanuel and Marie-Dominique Romatet, James and Lallita Stevens, Baby Thadani, Amrita and Malti Varma and Francis Wacziarg.
A book that was especially informative about the past of Calcutta was Calcutta by Geoffrey Moorhouse.
I also wish to acknowledge my gratitude to those who sustained me with their encouragement and their affection during the long and difficult task of researching and writing this book, in particular, Alexandra and Frank Auboyneau, Jacques Acher, Gilbert and Annette Etienne, Jean and David Frydman, Louis and Alice Grandjean, Jacques and Jeannine Lafont, Adelaide Orefice, Marie-Jeanne Montant and Tania Sciama.
Without the enthusiasm and faith of my friend and literary agent, Morton L. Janklow, and of my publishers, I would never have been able to write this book. My warmest gratitude goes to Robert Laffont and his assistants in Paris; Tom Guinzburg, Henry Reath, Sam Vaughan, Kate Medina, Betsy Nolan, Don Epstein and their associates in New York; Mario Lacruz in Barcelona; Giancarlo Bonacina and Carlo Sartori in Milan; Peter Gutmann in Munich; Antoine Akveld in Amsterdam; and, finally, to my friend, collaborator, and translator Kathryn Spink, herself the author of many remarkable books, one of which on Mother Teresa is entitled The Miracle of Love.
A very special thanks also goes to the team at the M6diatec computer agency in Marseilles and especially to its president and general manager, Mr. Jean-Claude Aubin, and the director of the Apple department, Mr. Herv6 Bodez, for their technical help in the organization of my documentation and the presentation of my manuscript.
Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to all the friends in India who gave me so much of their time as I collected the material for this book, but who wish to remain anonymous.
i
A MESSAGE FROM DOMINIQUE LAPIERRE
Dear Friends,
From the bottom of my heart, I want to thank all the readers of my book The City of Joy, of my article "The Man Who Saves Children" in the 1985 Christmas issue of Parade magazine, and those who have seen me on television or heard me on the radio, for their letters and their wonderful generosity.
You are one of the many thousands who have written to offer your help and solidarity for these destitute children my wife and I are supporting in Calcutta.
As I can't reply to each one of you in particular, please accept this printed letter in which I'll try to answer all your questions.
WHAT ARE WE DOING?
We are supporting entirely the 250 children of lepers living in the Home Udayan —which means 4 'Resurrection" —founded in Calcutta by James Stevens, this unknown Mother Teresa of whom I told the story in Parade.
Each year we have to send him 100,000 dollars for this purpose. This money partly comes from a share of my royalties, and partly from donations of the members of the association "Action Aid for Lepers' Children of Calcutta," which 1 created in 1982.
Every cent we receive goes directly to the destitutes we support. We don't spend a penny on secretaries or any other office overheads. We are using one room of our Paris apartment as our association headquarters and those who help us with the secretarial work are all volunteers. Among them are a couple of ladies from our local parish, a retired general manager, and five sisters of my wife, who is also named Dominique.
I have organized our funds transfers to India in such a
way as to make sure every cent we send is going to the right person and will be used for the right purpose. This is very important and sometimes quite difficult to achieve. But because we are a small organization—and we want to remain small for these obvious reasons—we can trace every one of our payments to the last penny.
In addition to the Home Udayan-Resurrection of James Stevens, we have recently adopted two other homes for physically handicapped destitute children from the Calcutta slums. These homes were founded by Father Francois Laborde, another wonderful anonymous Mother Teresa who went to India, some twenty years ago, to share the life of the poorest of the poor. Since then he has done a tremendous job to help them.
Apart from financially supporting these two homes (with about 150 handicapped children) we have sent to Calcutta one of France's top neurosurgeons, Professor Claude Gros, to assess the different medical cases and determine what modern science could do to improve the lot of a number of children suffering from polio, bone tuberculosis, e(c. We brought one paraplegic child back to France for a successful operation on his hands. He can now operate a typewriter and his life's autonomy has been vastly improved. We also sent to Father Francois Laborde a young French specialist in artificial limbs who accomplished real miracles in helping the kids live a better life.
In the near future, we plan also to implant solar water pumps in some Bengali villages. With a proper irrigation system, the peasants will no longer be at the mercy of a drought and obliged to exile themselves to find work in Calcutta. Our hope is that, one day, all the inhabitants of the slums of Calcutta will be able to go back to their family villages and earn their living in their fields.
With your help, we'll be able to do a lot more.
And again I want to stress the fact that we want all our actions to be limited, punctual actions for a precise purpose. We are not the Red Cross or the United Nations and we don't want to undertake any action beyond our capacity to check day after day the correct use of our money for the correct limited action we choose.
HOW YOU CAN HELP US
By sending a donation to our association "Action Aid for Lepers' Children of Calcutta," 26, avenue Kleber, 75116 Paris, France.
If you can, please avoid sending any check below 20 dollars, because bank charges on checks below this amount are unreasonable.
We have no representative in the USA, because we don't want to complicate our very simple organization. Envelopes with your checks sent to our association in Paris will be immediately processed and your donations will reach our children very quickly.
We acknowledge all the donations with an official receipt. Please allow four or five weeks to receive thi
s receipt.
ABOUT VOLUNTEERS WHO WANT TO GO HELP IN CALCUTTA AND ABOUT ADOPTIONS
Many of you have offered to go to Calcutta to help. This is most generous but I am afraid not very realistic. Firstly because Indian authorities only give a three-month tourist visa to foreign visitors. This is much too short a period for anyone to achieve anything really useful. Secondly because only very specialized help could really be useful. Unless you are a doctor or an experienced paramedic in the fields of leprosy, tropical diseases, malnutrition, bone tuberculosis, polio, rehabilitation of physically handicapped, I think your generous will to help could be more of a burden for the locals in charge than anything else. Moreover, you have to realize that living and working conditions on our various projects are extremely hard for unaccustomed foreigners. When you read The City of Joy you understand what I mean by that.
As for adoptions, they are usually very difficult. I suggest you contact directly Mother Teresa.
Many of you have asked the address of Mother Teresa and James Stevens. Here they are:
—Mother Teresa: Missionaries of Charity, 54 A Lower Circular Road, Calcutta, India
—James Stevens: Udayan, Post Box n° 10264, Calcutta 700 019, India
THE CITY OF JOY, A BOOK OF LOVE AND HOPE IN THE INDIA OP MOTHER TERESA (Warner)
Speaking of The City ofJoy I do think that this book should interest you all by giving you an epic picture of what the whole thing is about. It is a huge bestseller everywhere, which is nice for the poor of Calcutta since I give them one half of my royalties. John Paul II invited my wife and I to the Vatican to discuss the message of this book and said that: "It is an inspiration for the world." In the US, I have been invited to speak about The City of Joy on the Today Show, the Larry King Show, the 700 Club, and more than 120 different radio and television programs. The person who reviewed the book in The New York Times wrote that: "It is imprinted on my mind forever." And, in The Washington Post, the reviewer said that: The City of Joy will make anyone a little richer for having read it."
As an example, here is an excerpt of the letter I just received today from Karen Eberhardt, Sebastopol, California: "I was given The City of Joy for Christmas. It's one of the best things I ever read! I couldn't put it down. Reading it so moved me that I had a feeling of 4 I must do something!' ... I thought you might like to know that your great gift of telling the story of the City of Joy will spread ripples that will bring benefits to the lives of others. It is the least we readers can do."
I am proud to inform you that The City of Joy has received the Christopher Award. This very prestigious American distinction honors each year a book which has contributed to making our world a better world.
So please read it and invite your relatives and friends to read it also. Because it's a great story on some of the unknown heroes of this earth, heroes who know what real
love, compassion, and sharing with others mean. And it helps a great cause.
You can help us enormously by photostating this letter and sending it to all your friends and relatives. Little streams make big rivers and every drop is vital. And please share with those around you this beautiful Indian proverb which is the motto of our action: "All That is Not Given is Lost."
Thank you again for wanting to help us. God bless you always. With all my warmest good wishes, Yours truly,
Dominique Lapierre, Writer, author of The City of Joy, co-author of: Is Paris Burning?, . . .Or I'll Dress You in Mourning, O Jerusalem, Freedom at Midnight, The Fifth Horseman. Founder of the association: * Action Aid for Lepers' Children of Calcutta."
Memo: Donations should be sent by check to:
"Action Aid for Lepers' Children of Calcutta"
26, avenue Kleber
75116 Paris, France
or by bank transfer to
"Action Aid for Lepers' Children of Calcutta"
Acct. N°102.283.18.01.01
c/o Barclays Bank
24, avenue Kleber
75116 Paris, France
THANK YOU
By the year 2000,
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Before that America comes to be, you can stop it... by joining the fight against illiteracy today.
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