LORD Puttnam yesterday handed a degree to the adopted
daughter he and his wife rescued from an Indian leper
colony 12 years ago.The film-maker, who is chancellor
of Sunderland University, presented Rina Kumari Puttnam
with a 2:1 masters degree in pharmacy.
The Oscar-winning producer of Chariots of Fire, Midnight
Express, Local Hero, The Killing Fields and The Mission,
and his wife Lady Puttnam, adopted 26-year-old Rina
when she was just 14.
NRI, "non-resident indian" Rina,
who Lady Puttnam describes as a "shining star",
won a scholarship to attend the prestigious Gordonstoun
School in Scotland and came to live in the UK with
her newly-adoptive parents.
After achieving A-Levels in chemistry, physics and
mathematics, Rina enrolled at the University of Sunderland
in 2001 on the Masters of Pharmacy degree course.
NRI Rina, who was born in India, came to live
with Lord Puttnam and his wife after the two women
met in 1994 when Lady Puttnam visited the Little Flower
Leprosy Association in India.
The association had been established 10 years earlier
by Catholic priest, Brother Christdas, who had worked
with Mother Teresa in Bihar, to support leprosy patients
and their families by developing education and employment
opportunities.
Rina's natural father had been one of his earliest
patients.
Lady Puttnam said the association enabled young girls
like Rina to get into further education. She added:
"Rina's parents were very courageous – they
allowed her to go to the local college. It was breaking
with tradition and many in the village would no longer
talk to them or her." Rina's family in India
are proud of their daughter's achievements.
"My family are very happy with me and now all
four of my sisters have been properly educated,"
said Rina.
"My dream is to go on to do medicine so I can
go back to India and work there."
Lord Puttnam added: "We could not be more proud
of Rina – it's a wonderful achievement and she
has thoroughly enjoyed her time as a student in Sunderland.
"She came here and immediately fell in love with
the place and it fell in love with her.
Leper colony girl
graduates
London, July 12, 2005
Christopher Middleton
The Chancellor of the University of Sunderland, Lord
Puttnam of Queensgate, had a special reason to be
proud yesterday as he congratulated this year's crop
of 3,000 graduates.
The award-winning film producer paused during the
ceremony at the city's Stadium of Light to whisper
a few words of praise to one particular student -
his adopted daughter Rina.
She has graduated with a 2:1 in pharmacy at the university's
School of Health, Natural and Social Sciences. Lord
Puttnam said he "couldn't be more proud".
"It's a wonderful achievement," he added.
"She has an extraordinary combination of vision
and determination."
It has been a long journey for Rina, who grew up
in a remote leper colony in one of the poorest states
in India, before being educated at one of Britain's
finest public schools, Gordonstoun in Morayshire,
north-east Scotland - alma mater to several members
of the Royal Family, including Prince Charles.
Now that she has her degree, she hopes to return
to India to help fight the disease that devastated
her family.
NRI Rina's extraordinary journey began in 1994, when
Lord Puttnam's wife Patsy visited India with Daphne
Rae, the wife of the former Westminster School headmaster
John Rae.
"I'd been asked by Daphne to be her eyes and
ears on a tour of community projects that were being
funded by a Laura Ashley charity," said Lady
Puttnam.
"One of those projects was the Little Flower
Leprosy Mission. I was given the specific task of
helping this lovely little girl called Rina to improve
her English. To be honest, I've never really encountered
anyone like her before; she was like a mini-Concorde,
absolutely jet-propelled in the intensity with which
she did things.
"She was so keen to learn, she never left my
side; she stuck to me like velcro."
For her part, Rina remembers everything about that
first meeting.
"It was a very hot sunny day and in front of
me was this lady wearing a lovely white blouse - very
clean and tidy," she said. "I thought she
looked so strict, so forbidding; but when I got close
to her, I found she was nothing like that at all."
NRI Rina Kumari was seven when she arrived at the
colony with her four sisters and their parents. They
had been driven out of their village after her father
developed leprosy in his fingers and toes. For Rina,
it was a frightening experience.
"We were not used to all the deformity,"
she says. "We found it very hard to see people
not having a nose or feet. My older sister, Mina,
was very scared; she didn't want to live alongside
all that suffering, so she ran away and found her
way back to the village where our grandma lived."
For Rina's father, taking his family to the Little
Flower Leprosy Mission at Sunderpore was a last resort;
before that, he had been reduced to begging on the
streets of Raxaul, a down-at-heel railway town on
the Nepalese border.
"Rina is our blossom in the dust," said
Father Christdas, an Indian-born Catholic priest who
came to help the lepers in Sunderpore 25 years ago,
after spending 13 years working with Mother Teresa
in Calcutta.
In that quarter of a century, he has treated some
50,000 leprosy sufferers and built a permanent, self-sufficient
community, whose 400 residents no longer have to depend
on charity.
After learning to read and write at the little mission
school (something neither of her parents can do),
Rina was encouraged by Father Christdas to go to boarding
school in a nearby town, at the age of eight. Rina
and Lady Puttnam quickly struck up a rapport, but
after a few days, it was time to bid each other a
sad farewell. However, at the last moment, Lady Puttnam
got an inkling that the separation might not be permanent.
"I was sitting around waiting for the flight
home when I realised Christdas and Daphne were hovering
over me and clearly wanting to say something,"
she said. "They told me that Daphne had been
talking to Gordonstoun about a free scholarship place
that they were prepared to offer Rina and, that being
the case, would I be her mother while she was in the
UK?
"I didn't really think about it, to be honest.
I just said yes, straight away. That was in February
1994. In May, I was picking her up from Heathrow".
For Rina what followed was not so much a crash course
in British culture as a head-on collision.
"It wasn't so much the obvious things, like
teaching her to use a knife and fork instead of her
hands," said Lady Puttnam. "It was her attitudes
and instincts that were harder to change.
"For example, we went to the John Lewis children's
department to get her some clothes (at 15, Rina was
about the same size as a typical English 12-year-old),
and when I tried to come in the changing room and
see if the vests fitted, she was horrified.
"I said to her: 'Look, darling, you're going
to the north of Scotland and you'll need a good vest,
so just shut your eyes and let me have a little look'."
Gordonstoun is known as much for its philosophy of
a cold bath before breakfast as for its famous former
pupils. But Rina was not intimidated by the traditions,
said Lady Puttnam. "As for the idea of putting
on a swimsuit and jumping into cold water, she just
kept saying: 'Why? What is the reason for doing that?'"
Rina said that everything was so strange. "Yet
at the same time it was so wonderful. I found myself
going on expeditions to the mountains; I found myself
on a sailing boat feeling seasick; and playing hockey
in the snow."
Before long, her cheerful acceptance of soakings
and sub-zero temperatures began to win respect throughout
the school.
"No question about it, Rina was a hit right
from the start," said Gordonstoun's headmaster,
Mark Pyper, who offered her the scholarship, which
was donated anonymously.
"As I recall, she was out playing hockey before
she had even got used to wearing shoes. And when she
went off on an expedition to the Cairngorms, her rucksack
was bigger than she was."
Despite being several clothes sizes smaller than
her contemporaries, and despite the difference in
her economic circumstances (the school fees are £21,000
per year), Rina said she never felt left out.
"With 35 different nationalities here, people
are expected to have a fairly broad outlook,"
says Mr Pyper. "From our point of view, one of
the most fascinating things to see was how Rina, who
is from what's perceived to be the lowest level of
the Indian social system, became great friends with
a couple of Indian girls from a very high-caste background.
"Back home, they probably couldn't have shared
the same street - yet here they shared the same corridor."
It wasn't all plain sailing, though. Early on, it
became clear that Rina's English wasn't strong enough
to get her through her science A-levels. Her scholarship
was duly extended from two years to three.
"Right from the start, Rina brought something
special to this school," said Jenny Pyper, the
head's wife. "She has this incredibly open, charming
quality to her. She just says the loveliest things
out loud. I remember one evening we were all dressed
up for the Leavers' Ball, and she turned to me and
said: 'You are so beautiful'.
"At the same time, there's no flannel with her.
She has a certain toughness that goes hand in hand
with her honesty. Throughout her time here, I never
once heard her talk about her past - she was much
more interested in the future."
NRI Rina agreed. "Ever since I was eight, I've
been away at school," she said. "As a result,
my concept of home and family is perhaps a little
more vague than other people's. But I call Patsy and
David 'mother' and 'father' when I am with them, and
I know they will keep me close to them forever. I
feel so fortunate that they found me.
"At the same time, of course, I have my own
mother and father back in India, and I know they love
me, too. That - and all the help that my teachers
have given me - gives me the faith to keep straight
on the track."
There's no question in Lord Puttnam's mind about
the unswerving strength of Rina's determination.
"She's an unstoppable force of nature",
he said with a laugh. "I remember saying to her
once that she should learn to use a computer keyboard.
We bought her a teach-yourself tuition programme,
and six weeks later she could touch-type."
So how did Rina end up studying at the university
where Lord Puttnam happens to be Chancellor?
"It sounds like nepotism, doesn't it?"
he said. "Actually, it was a bit of an accident.
Patsy was sitting at a Sunderland home match next
to our vice-chancellor, and she asked him if he knew
of somewhere that Rina could study pharmacy. To which
he replied: 'You know we've got one of the best pharmacy
departments in the country, don't you?' "
And that was that. After four (Puttnam-funded) years
at Sunderland, Rina, now 26, received her degree from
her "father". It was a great moment for
Lord Puttnam, in more ways than one.
"I'm incredibly proud of what Rina's achieved
- both personally, as a sort of surrogate dad, and
in a broader political context with my president-of-Unicef-UK
hat on. The great thing about her is that she has
this genuine personal ambition, but, like a lot of
people in the developing world, she also understands
the purpose of that ambition, which is that it should
be used for the public good. It's a very Gandhi thing,
that combination of self and selflessness. He didn't
see the two as mutually exclusive, whereas we in the
West tend to think it has to be one or the other.
"On top of all that, Rina is a triumphant example
of what we are trying to promote through Unicef, which
is to show that educating girls and young women is
of overwhelming importance if developing countries
are to make progress. In places where female education
has been actively encouraged, the benefits to society
as a whole have been disproportionately large."
Rina is concentrating not so much on the broader
picture, but on the next immediate challenge. Far
from being content with three A-Levels and a 2:1 in
pharmacy, she is agitating to get into medical school.
"To be a qualified pharmacist and to know about
healing drugs is wonderful, but to be a doctor who
can prescribe those drugs would be the perfect combination,"
she said.
"So many people in India do not understand that
leprosy can be simply cured with drugs - that if you
catch the disease early it can take only three months
to heal the skin.
"Unfortunately, people are afraid and ashamed.
They get patches on their skin and they think it might
be something less serious. Or else they hide it under
their clothes, and the bacteria might be spreading
and starting to damage their nerves, so that if they
burn their hand or leg on a fire, they won't feel
it.
"That same ignorance was the reason we had to
leave our village. People thought my father's leprosy
was incurable; to them, it was the same as Aids."
According to Lady Puttnam, now a regular visitor
to the Little Flower, Father Christdas has greatly
reduced the stigma of leprosy in Bihar - not least
through the way in which he successfully treated himself
after contracting it. Nevertheless, the disease is
still a long way from disappearing in the region.
"The bacteria thrive in the kind of dung-walled
houses that people build in northern Bihar,"
said Lady Puttnam.
"That's why Father Christdas has built these
little concrete houses at the mission. His whole approach
is a positive one - he insists that people don't allow
themselves to be defeated by leprosy, and that even
if they do suffer from the disease, they all still
contribute to the running of the mission.
"The children do an hour of weaving every day
before school, and even the old lady with no hands
still makes the chapattis with her stumps."
What's more, some of the Little Flower residents
are starting to see a future beyond mere self-sufficiency
- if not for themselves, at least for their children
(leprosy is not hereditary). And that future - thanks
in large part to Rina - is education.
"When Rina's mother and father first sent her
away to school, they were rather ostracised by other
parents at the mission," said Lady Puttnam.
"It just wasn't the traditional thing, especially
for a girl. Now, though, everyone has seen what Rina
has accomplished and they want the same for their
children."
It is exactly what Father Christdas hoped for when
he sent his little "blossom in the dust"
across the sea to Scotland.
"I think Rina has a very big role to play in
this world of ours," he said. "In time to
come, she will make the lives of the broken a little
more livable."
If you would like to make a donation to the work
of the Little Flower Leprosy Mission, Sunderpore,
please send a cheque (made payable to the Little Flower
Leprosy Association) to 15 Queensgate Place Mews,
London SW7 5BG
