Tainan resident Ruth Brown and her husband Lin Cheng-hui (
The 488-ping (1,613m2) parcel of land alone is valued at an estimated NT$100 million.
Samaritans
PHOTO: HUANG WEN-HUANG, TAIPEI TIMES
Over the years, Brown, 88, and her husband have donated land worth more than NT$400 million in the Tainan area to build churches and daycare centers. The new service center for the elderly caps off Brown's 57 years of service to the people of Tainan.
In 1944, 25-year-old Ruth Brown, a trained nurse, became a missionary and left her home in Texas for China to work with people suffering from Hansen's disease, also known as leprosy.
Six years later, she was expelled from the officially atheist new China and came to Taiwan.
Hansen's disease was so feared in Taiwan at the time that medical professionals who worked with patients suffering from the disease were often ostracized.
Huang Te-cheng (黃德成), executive director of the Tainan YMCA Social Welfare Foundation, said that families with members suffering from Hansen's disease were ashamed and would not let them leave home. Brown often had to go to patients' homes to persuade their relatives to let them be treated.
In 1950, Brown opened the first home for Hansen's disease sufferers from Yunlin, Chiayi, and Tainan counties.
Fear and ignorance
Fear and ignorance forced Brown to locate the home on the outskirts of Tainan City, in an area then largely given over to fish ponds.
Frightened by Brown's disfigured patients, local residents referred to the home as "the filthy hospital."
Brown's response was to move into the home and live with the patients.
Her courage and dedication attracted the attention of local landowner Lin, who eventually married the nurse from Texas.
After their marriage, Lin built the Linan Presbyterian Church on land that he donated.
He also supported Brown's work at the home for Hansen's disease patients until 1975, when the last patients were transferred to a specialized dermatology clinic at the new Sin Lau Hospital in Madou.
Brown also ran a center for victims of childhood polio, a serious health problem in Taiwan until the early 1970s.
With construction on the new service center at their old home about to begin, Brown and her husband have moved to a modest apartment in a nearby high rise.
Over the last six decades, Tainan's health care needs have changed as Taiwan has developed from a poor agricultural country into an aging post-industrial society.
What has not changed is Brown and Lin's generosity in serving those needs, Huang said.
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS