A slum in this southwestern Indian city was once known as the “Enclave of Darkness” be-cause it was the den of thugs, alcoholics, drug runners and psychopaths.
It is now called Udaya Colony (Sunrise Enclave) after Catholic nuns dared to enter it 33 years ago as part of their mission to reach people in the peripheries.
What now welcomes visitors to the enclave in the middle of Kochi, the commercial capital of Kerala state, are buildings of two and three floors, paint-ed with attractive colors, that were once one-room, cramped tenements.
“The sisters faced stiff resistance in the beginning but people relented when they realized the sisters meant them good,” Anil Kumar, vice president of the Udaya Colony Residents Welfare Association, told Global Sisters Report.
Sister Anisha Arackal, who led the Sisters of the Destitute to turn the place into an upmarket residential area, recalls the slum’s notoriety.
Her congregation’s 1979 general chapter decided to help impoverished people and the marginalized on the peripheries, but it took 10 years for the first nuns to enter the Kochi slum. Sisters Redempta Alapp-at and Naveena Pulickal, the pioneers, started living in the slum in 1989, the year the congregation received pontifical status.
Alappat, 83, recalls reading an article in a magazine asking who will spread light in the enclave of darkness.