Father Pierre Ceyrac: A life of service

A life of service

Father Pierre Ceyrac, S.J., who was honoured by the French Government recently, has devoted all his life to the service of the poor and the needy.
 
ASHA KRISHNAKUMAR


FOR over 60 years he has worked for the poor and the needy. He has also served refugees in strife-torn Rwanda and in Cambodia. He takes care of the basic needs of some 18,000 poor and abandoned children in Tamil Nadu. He works for the cause of women, peasants and Dalits. And Father Pierre Ceyrac, S.J., has gone about doing all this work ever so quietly.
The services rendered by the 84-year-old French missionary came into focus last fortnight when the French Government conferred on him the Chevalier De La Legion D'Honneur for a lifetime dedicated to the cause of the poor and the deprived. According to Claude Blanchemaison, the French Ambassador to India, the decision to honour Fr. Ceyrac was taken at the initiave of French President Jacques Chirac himself.
But Fr. Ceyrac is self-effacing. All he has done, he says, is to make the poor, the destitute and the sick feel cared for. According to him, "more than doing something for them, what is important is to make them feel wanted and cared for".
Born in 1914 in the French province of Limozane, Pierre Ceyrac grew up in a large family along with five brothers and a sister. Keen to serve the poor, he joined the Society of Jesus in 1931. His interest in Third World issues, particularly those concerning India, led him to learn Sanskrit in the University of Paris. In 1937 he came to Chennai, where he took a bachelor's degree in Tamil literature at Pachaiyappa's College.
He became a priest in 1945 and moved to Loyola College in 1951 when he was appointed adviser to the All India Catholic University Federation (AICUF), which was then active in 86 universities. The next year he became AICUF's chaplain-general, a post he held for 16 years.

K. PICHUMANI
Father Pierre Ceyrac, S.J.

As the national adviser to AICUF, then as its chaplain-general, and later as a missionary-social worker, Fr. Ceyrac encouraged activism among the youth, and organised camps, conventions, seminars and consultations. He made students work in the rural areas and encouraged them to discuss and share their experiences and problems with others. A pioneer in the National Service Scheme (NSS) movement, Fr. Ceyrac is convinced that more than reading and hearing about socio-economic and political realities, students need to experience them.
According to Dr. S. Joseph Amal Packiaraj, Professor of English, Loyola College, who has known Fr. Ceyrac for 35 years, in the early 1950s when Jawaharlal Nehru gave a call to the youth to "build a new India", Fr. Ceyrac gave the youth the slogan: "We are the India. We are the revolution." He launched a drive to sensitise students to the needs of the country and make them realise where they can serve best. For this he organised leadership education programmes, workshops and training camps with focus on rural India. Of the thousands of students influenced by Fr. Ceyrac, a large number today serve the country as senior officials and political leaders in government.
After working with AICUF for 16 years he was involved in rural and child development projects for the next 13 years, concentrating on those interior villages of Tamil Nadu's drought-prone Ramnad district (now divided into Ramanatha-puram, Sivaganga and Virudhunagar districts) where government schemes hardly reached. He started an 'Operation 1,000 Wells' programme and helped take new farm technologies to poor farmers.
In 1980, he was chosen by Caritas India, an international Christian Charity organisation, to head a 12-member team, including doctors and nurses, posted to the Thai border to help Cambodians rendered refugees following the Khmer Rouge action. Although the other members of the team returned to India at the end of their six-month term, Fr. Ceyrac stayed on there for 14 years serving the victims of landmine blasts. He then went to serve the refugees in Africa's strife-torn Rwanda for a year. He returned to India in 1994.
IT was with reluctance that the media-shy missionary (who says "publicity spoils people as they become self-conscious") agreed for a "small chat". At the Loyola College Jesuit residence in Chennai, where he has spent almost half a century, the octogenarian briskly walked into the visitors' lounge, apologised for a slight delay and began talking passionately about the poor, helpless children, widows and Dalits, and on current political and social issues.

LES JESUITES: OU LA GLORIE DE DIEU
A young Father Ceyrac, with a group of children, in an undated photograph. The French missionary today takes care of the basic needs of some 18,000 poor and abandoned children in Tamil Nadu.

Fr. Ceyrac comes across as a simple, passionate, progressive, secular and tough human being with the fire and zeal to serve the poor and the destitute burning brightly in him.
Fr. Ceyrac classifies his work into four areas. First is emergency or charity work, where help to the needy is rendered on an emergency basis. Relief work during floods and providing aid to the critically ill come under this category.
A second area relates to social work. Sending poor and abandoned children to school, and helping destitute women, widows and youth to acquire skills to take care of themselves, fall in this category.
The third category relates to development work. Under this comes his work in the dry, drought-prone interior villages of Ramanathapuram, Sivaganga and Virudhunagar districts.
The fourth task relates to "liberation." For instance, mobilising Dalits to fight for their rights. The liberation of human beings, he says, is the aim of all his work. His idea is that one must help the needy to help themselves, for that is ultimate liberation. Asked if he works on human rights issues too, he said, "I am fighting for the rights of Dalits to be humans, leave alone their human rights."
Interestingly, he does not run any institution nor does he operate from any fixed premises. According to him, if there is an orphanage, the children would be called orphans and society would see them differently. What he does is to help the family of, say, a widow who agrees to take care of a couple of orphans. Fr. Ceyrac then provides the person with a means of livelihood and takes care of the children (hers and the two she takes into her fold) till they complete schooling. Of the 18,000 children he takes care of, 3,000 are orphans and over a thousand have only one parent.
Fr. Ceyrac has three major programmes running in Tamil Nadu. One programme is for the children of daily wage earners and farm workers, as also for orphans and abandoned and sick children. The second is a rural development programme in Sivaganga district covering 120 villages. Under this programme, over 1,100 wells have been dug for poor farmers. And the third programme involves organising Dalits to fight for their rights. This programme also operates in Sivaganga district, covering 20 villages and three lakh people. He has formed 90 cooperatives for Dalits and other downtrodden people of the region.
Fr. Ceyrac gives credit for all this to the efforts of six men who work with him. He says, "I am just with them. That is all."
Fr. Ceyrac's basic dictum is "As much to be done for so many by so few with little means." Indeed, he has managed much, with limited resources. Getting funds, he says, has always been a problem. He relies largely on philanthropists and charitable organisations. "It is amazing," he says, "how much we can do by just touching the lives of people."
In the middle of the conversation he took a little time off to talk with one of his six lieutenants about the progress of some work in Sivaganga district. And then, with the same enthusiasm he met a couple of leprosy patients who had come seeking medical help. Putting his arms around their shoulders, he listened to their problems patiently and promised help. And, then, as he saw them off, he shook their hands. "More than giving them money it is the hand-shake and respect that matters most to them," Fr. Ceyrac then remarked.
For such a man, obviously religion or caste do not matter as much as his work. A devout Christian with a secular outlook, he considers communalism the bane of India. He is also a champion of women's causes, and supports the demand for reservation of women in Parliament and the State legislatures; but he feels that 33 per cent reservation is not enough, and that it should be 50 per cent. Politics, he says, cannot be seen in isolation from the socio-economic reality. Thus, it is imperative that women get into politics in a big way. For, change, particularly in the rural areas, can come only through women.
Quoting from the Upanishads and the Mahabharata, the French missionary-social worker sums up his life through a verse of the Tamil savant Thayumanavar: "Apart from wanting people to be happy, I want nothing else from life, God."

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