From competing for food to a gold medal: the stories behind India’s Asian Games winners as reflected on by Sister Maria Teresa Morales
Our clinic kitchen near the dry wash of the border hums with activity. The morning shift begins over simmering pots of beans and the quiet rhythm of morning prayer. We often sit with young people whose bodies bear the silent toll of severe scarcity. They show hollowed cheekbones, calloused feet, and hands weathered long before their time. News reached us this week about the young athletes in India who rose from scavenging meals and borrowing worn equipment. These athletes became India’s Asian Games winners. A wave of profound recognition moved through our hospitality house. The world marvels at their triumph. However, those of us who live alongside the poor recognize the grueling road that preceded the podium.
Scripture reminds us in the Gospel of Luke that God scatters the proud in the conceit of their hearts. He lifts up the lowly. In the secular sphere, attention naturally gravitates toward power, prestige, and well-funded spectacles. In India, for example, the vast commercial apparatus of elite cricket overshadows nearly everything else. Yet the sacred often reveals itself in places forgotten by cameras and corporate sponsors. It appears in rural backyards, dusty fields, and impoverished neighborhoods. Mothers scrape together grain there so a child might run one more lap. This quiet, hidden endurance possesses an inherent holiness.
Resilience of India’s Asian Games Winners
Every day at Madre de Dios Ministry, I witness the extraordinary resilience of young men and women. They have survived unimaginable trials. They walk through arid canyons with broken sandals. They carry their children on their shoulders. Faith and an unyielding will to survive sustain them. What strikes me about the athletes from India is not merely their physical prowess. Instead, their journeys illuminate a profound moral truth. Human dignity is not bestowed by wealth. Capability is not confined to those with leisure to cultivate it. The spark of divine vitality burns just as brightly in a hungry village girl as it does in an athlete blessed with world-class facilities.
We rightly celebrate these remarkable breakthroughs. Nevertheless, Christian conscience forbids us from romanticizing poverty. We cannot look at a child who once fought for food. We must not treat hunger as merely a dramatic prelude to athletic glory. Deprivation is not a training regimen designed by providence. It is a grave social failure. This failure stunts countless lives before they ever have a chance to blossom. For every gifted sprinter who secures a borrowed pair of shoes and catches the eye of a mentor, hundreds more remain buried under systemic neglect. Their God-given gifts are lost to the grinding demands of sheer survival.
Collective Hope and True Justice
The hard-won victory of the Indian women’s hockey team after forty-four years speaks to another virtue. This virtue is central to our community: collective hope. When people endure prolonged marginalization, despair and cynicism constantly tempt the spirit. To keep practicing in the dark, to share scarce equipment among teammates, and to believe in a shared promise across decades requires a form of stubborn communal grace. In our shelter, asylum-seeking mothers band together to cook, mend clothing, and care for one another’s infants. They demonstrate that same shared fortitude. We survive and heal not in isolation, but by leaning on one another.
As Sisters of Mercy, our calling is to accompany the vulnerable. We tend both physical wounds and the wounded spirit. True justice demands that society build a world where a child does not have to starve to prove their worth. Furthermore, no mother must choose between dinner and her daughter’s dreams. We celebrate these medals not because gold confers human worth. Instead, these victories bear witness to a stubborn truth that empires and markets often forget. The least among us carry treasures of unimaginable strength. They wait only for an open door and the dignity of a fair chance.
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