Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1997, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My cast away this week is a woman with a highly personal mission. From Ho Chi Min's

city in Vietnam she runs a foundation devoted to helping the country's poor, orphaned and

abandoned children.

She understands their suffering better than most.

She was a Dublin slum child brought up in appalling poverty whose mother died when she was

ten and whose alcoholic father abandoned her and her

brothers and sisters. She was gang raped when she was 16 and lived on the streets.

Later she suffered in marriage to a violent and unfaithful husband. Then eight years ago

she began to realize a dream she'd had many years previously. She went to

Vietnam to help those who are as she was the innocent victims of cruelty and

neglect. Since then through the foundation that bears her name she's provided

food, medicine, education and love for more than 60,000 children of the street. She is Christina Noble.

It was a dream, Christina, a dream that you had back in 1971 that's at the root of this remarkable work.

Tell me about that dream first.

It was a dream but it was so real.

There were children running, a lot of children,

but two in particular up the front and the face, as I'm telling you I can remember

the face of the girl. Her face was screwed up and the tears were coming down and you could feel in her body her desperation and I tried

to catch her hand to stop them falling into the ground that was opening up and behind them there was smoke lots of smoke red black and beyond the smoke was Vietnam but Vietnam was written in the

sky in the history bold huge bold lights huge bold

...