MEGASTARS

Sister Emmanuelle
France's Mother Theresa--Advocate for the Downtrodden

By Ambassadors Staff

One century ago on November 16, 1908, a child was born in Brussels who would become a truly exceptional individual whose influence would be felt far beyond her hometown. Sister Emmanuelle, born Madeleine Cinquin, lived an engaged and compassionate long life and died peacefully in her sleep at a retirement home in Callien province, France. She was 99 years old, just four weeks short of her centenary. In her funeral in France last October, her life and contributions to humanity were commemorated by dignitaries, diplomats and citizens--people from all walks of life who lamented her loss at a ceremony in Notre Damn, Paris.

Sister Emmanuelle spent her childhood between the Belgian capital, Paris and London in a family of lingerie manufacturers. Little is known about her childhood but she experienced a major trauma at the age of six when she saw her father drown before her very eyes. As she grew older, she would go on and receive a degree in philosophy from the Sorbonne. At the age of 20, a gregarious, sociable and bubbly young lady would decide to take her vows and enter the convent after hearing the call from God and being inspired by the work of Belgian priest Father Damian, who helped leprosy victims in Hawaii. Following in his mentor's footsteps, Sister Emmanuelle left Europe for a new life in Alexandria, Egypt where she committed her energy to teaching at a school run by her religious order, the Order of Zion. Prior to her move to Egypt and shortly after took her vows, she departed for Turkey and Tunisia in 1930 where she taught at various schools.

A visit to the highly impoverished and destitute Zabaleen community of trash collectors in Cairo, Egypt. This would changed the course of her life as she decided to live among them. Based in El-Mokatam slum district of Cairo, she lived like them, ate like them and slept like them. Notoriously unspoken for, neglected and forgotten, the Zabaleen lacked access to even the most basic necessities of life. During her two-decades among the Zabaleen, Sister Emmanuelle helped create a network of clinics, schools and gardens for the children of these slums. In fact, so success was her initiative in transforming the lives of thousands, that she founded an organization to help the poor which served in several countries including Senegal, Philippines, Haiti, Burkina Faso and Lebanon.

Sister Emmanuelle dreamt of build a paradise in the giant acres-wide mound of garbage for her adopted children. Over the years, she would oversee the transformation of the area with the creation of a school, a functional clinic, a maternity hospital and workshops for 14,000 men, women and children. Her school, which became an exemplar for others worldwide grew to about 700 pupils was the first and only one in El-Mokatam area. In the twenty years she spent living in Cairo's Zabaleen slums she earned a reputation akin to that of Mother Theresa in Calcutta.

Dr. Mounir Neamatallah, an expert in environmental sciences and poverty reduction who worked alongside Sister Emmanuelle throughout the 1980s, explained that "you could see one of the worst qualities of life on the planet but in this inferno was an enterprising population that worked like ants." Where she organized a composting plant to process the vast amounts of manure produced by animals which was then processed and sold as fertilizer. Over the years, she attracted broader attention to the plight of the Zabaleen which led to more schools, healthcare projects and income generating strategies for the slum dwellers. Her association's expanded work addressed the needs of marginalized groups in places like Ezbet El-Nakhl and elsewhere in Egypt. The Sister Emmanuelle Association, which she founded in 1980, eventually extended its work to Brazil, Burkina Faso, Haiti, the Philippines, Senegal and Sudan.

Her work came to the attention of Egyptian officials as well as church charities around the world. In 1987, Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi was the first to make an explicit comparison between Sister Emmanuelle and the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Mother Theresa. Yes she often distanced her self from these contrasts and saw them as hyperbolic and exaggerated, and on one occasion describing them as "ridiculous".

In 1991, the Egyptian government expressed its gratitude towards Sister Emmanuelle and her programs for Egypt's poorest with an honorary Egyptian Nationality. Two years later in 1993, she retired and settled in France where she became a superstar and a beloved icon among the French. Her honesty, compassion, wit, personability, and candour became hallmarks of her personality and she was an instant media sensation on French television and in pop culture circles for her advocacy on behalf of the poor. In 2003, French television broadcast Soeur Emmanuelle: An Exceptional Woman and two years later she became a household name when she was chosen fifth on Walloon, a television version of Le plus grand Belge (The Greatest Belgian). It was surprising for most observers to see an elderly nun who spent most of her life outside of France become immensely popular among all generations. In fact, so popular that in 2007, she was voted 27th place in a poll of the 100 Greatest French people of all time on France's second television network. Le Journal du Dimanche named Sister Emmanuelle France's fourth most popular person behind the former tennis player Yannick Noah, soccer star Zinedine Zidane and actress Mimie Mathy.

An always energetic and vibrant force, Sister Emmanuelle was very much a free thinker, sometimes taking public stances not usually associated with members of her order or not in concert with her Church's authority. For instance, she was known to favour allowing priests to marry. She also shook the establishment with her benign indifference if not tacit approval of homosexuality. She also wrote to Pope John Paul II in defence of contraceptive use and explaining to him the plight of the Egyptian girls in Zabaleen, who were marrying at the tender young age of 12 and having babies every year.

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Sister Emmanuel died in her sleep on October 20, 2008 at a retirement home operated by her order--the Congregation of Notre-Dame de Sion, in Callian, south of France. At the funeral, representative of every segment in French society, members of her order from around the world, and admirers of the late humanitarian gathered to remember her. French President Nicolas Sarkozy described Sister Emmanuelle “a woman of faith with high convictions, but also a woman for whom charity existed through concrete actions.” Representing Egypt, Sister Emmanuelle's adopted country and home to her most colossal and landmark contribution, was the first lady Suzanne Mubarak, wife of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. Thousands of  mourners attended the memorial service for her at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris. She leaves behind a formidable network of charities for the poor including her namesake Les Amis de Soeur Emmanuelle (The Friends of Sister Emmanuelle) is an organization based in Brussels.

In a classic example of Sister Emmanuelle's showmanship, gave an interview shortly before her death that was to be release along with a book to be released posthumously. She told an interviewer in last August that she was "not afraid of death" but that she hadn't completed her earthly tasks and duties. The interview, as part-farewell and part-public relations blitz, was released by her publisher Flammarion as part of the announcement that her autobiography, completed two years ago and withheld for for release, would be published just days after her death. “In telling of my life — all of my life — I wanted to bear witness that love is more powerful than death,” Sister Emmanuelle said in the interview, which was recorded when she completed the book. “I have confessed everything, the good and the less good, and I can tell you about it.”

In book itself is playfully and perhaps scandalously entitled “Confessions of a Nun.” While the volume focused predominantly on her life of faith and service to God and those of lesser means, her soliloquies are perhaps the most powerful as she implores herself to “remember the simple soul of your brothers and sisters in rags” and “Do not turn yourself to the ‘beautiful world’ unless it is useful for the slums; do not let your original vanity carry you off to the heights.”

Never shying from controversy, Sister Emmanuelle's writings--just like her spoken words--pushed the envelope of social acceptability. In her memoirs, she wrote of the insatiable urges and sexual appetite. She wrote frankly of her lifelong feelings of lust, of masturbating as a girl, of falling in love and having to renounce physical love for the love of God. In a very unusually honest account for a nun, she writes: “when desire assaulted me, only some outside presence had the power to stop me; otherwise I was powerless against the avidity of pleasure. A penchant for voluptuousness and an obsession for sensuality developed in my flesh, the intensity of which is difficult to describe. The fact that the needle has not left my old woman’s body is a source of constant surprise and humiliation. I thought that, with the years, its tip of fire would completely disappear. Not at all.” She also discussed how she grappled with and overcame her early fear of Jews. Since her grandmother was Jewish, she eventually reconciled that with her religious order which promoted the conversion of Jews to Christianity. She elaborates that “little by little,” she wrote, “I went from rejection of, to pride in, my origins.”

One thing that came to identify Sister Emmanuelle more than anything was her tireless effort and unceasingly work ethic on behalf of the most needy in society. Even in the face of difficulties, limited resources and rigid bureaucracies, her optimism and charisma broke down barriers and improved the lives of many. In 1996, she made an appearance on Bouillon de Culture--a popular television program resembling James Lipton's Inside the Actors Studio--where she was asked what her favourite word was. Without hesitation, Sister Emmanuelle responded with an Arabic word for 'lets go'--"Yallah!" Then asked for the word she hated the most, she responded with the English word "stop." Even after her death, Sister Emmanuelle's inspirational commitment to her fellow brethren still beckons with the jubilant call for action in the language of the garbage-collectors she loved so dear "Yallah."

Commemorating Sister Emmanuelle

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