Seventy sick people had nowhere to go. Sister Dulce took them to the only place she had left: the chicken coop of the convent where she lived, in Salvador de Bahia.
It was the 1930s. Before the chickens, she had already been thrown out of two other places. First she tried abandoned houses on an island in the city. Then an empty fish market. She was evicted from both.
The chicken coop was the third attempt. It had no beds, no doctors, not a penny. It had a nun in her early twenties convinced that a poor sick person deserved the same care as a rich one.
Dulce Lopes Pontes had been born in 1914 in that same city. At age 13, after visiting a poor neighborhood with her aunt, she decided that this would be her life: caring for those no one else wanted to care for.
What began among chickens became Hospital Santo Antônio in 1959, inaugurated with 150 beds. Over the years, it came to receive up to 3.000 patients per day. Today, under the name Obras Sociais Irmã Dulce, it continues to serve crowds arriving from all over Brazil.
In 1988, she was a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. She met with Pope John Paul II more than once.
She died on March 13, 1992, in the same city where she had started with a borrowed chicken coop.
On October 13, 2019, in St. Peter’s Square, Pope Francis declared her a saint. The first person born in Brazil to be declared one.
No one measures a beginning by the place where it happens. They measure it by who decides not to give up there.