Christians by Greg Sheridan

Author:Greg Sheridan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2021-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Christians who keep giving

Immense love does not measure, it just gives.

Mother Teresa

In a gentle way, you can shake the world.

Mahatma Gandhi

Watching a television program changed Gemma Sisia’s life forever, and the lives of thousands and thousands of others. Or maybe not. Maybe her extraordinary life would always have taken something like the course it did. Maybe the TV show was the occasion, not the cause. Gemma grew up on a huge sheep and cattle property near Guyra, just north of Armidale in the northern tablelands of New South Wales, and she had the kind of large country life, the big bush experience, which makes Australian legend, but which is becoming an ever-smaller slice of our nation.

She was born Gemma Rice, the fifth of eight children, all the others boys. Plenty of older brothers to compete with fiercely in farm work with cattle and sheep, and mastery of horses; and plenty of younger brothers who sometimes needed a hug and a bit of big sisterly mothering. The Rice spread was huge, 100,000 acres, and there was plenty of work to do.

Gemma’s parents, Sue and Basil Rice, were Catholics, religious—their family home has a dedicated prayer room—and life for young Gemma was a rumbustious country adventure, though there was also a big stress on education and culture, learning a musical instrument, taking elocution lessons. It’s a kind of big country life in some eclipse today.

‘Our thing was horses,’ Gemma tells me.

‘On weekends we were at agricultural shows and horse jumping and travelling on country show runs. I thought this was completely normal. Gee, we were blessed. It was the best childhood. But every Sunday, wherever we were, mum and dad would find a church for mass. I still go to mass. I’ve never abandoned the faith.’

Gemma is 49 when I talk to her. We connect via Zoom. She is in Tanzania, near the city of Arusha, at the School of St Jude, which she founded 20 years previously, and I am in distant Melbourne. In our long discussion she takes me, via her laptop, on a bit of a tour of some of the school. I meet some of the people working in the office, have a look at the playground where I see hundreds of African kids running around enjoying themselves at lunchtime. It looks like a happy playground looks anywhere.

This school—three schools now—has become Gemma’s life’s work. The three schools—one primary, two secondary—have nearly 2000 students between them, more than half of them boarders. The students share only two things in common: they are very poor, and they have some academic ability.

Oh, and a third thing—because of Gemma, they will get as good a school education as almost anyone in Africa.

The road from Guyra to Arusha was long and winding, lots of stops along the way, and yet you have a sense that something like this was always in Gemma’s destiny.

‘When I was in Year 9 there was Live Aid, and I thought I’d just love to go to Africa and help.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.