After Sorrow Comes Joy: One Woman's Struggle to Bring Hope to Thousands of Children in Vietnam and India

Cherie Clark, the internationally famous nurse and mother of ten children, has devoted more than thirty years of her life to helping orphaned and abandoned children.This book, planned to be the first of a trilogy, starts with her early life in Peru, Indiana, and leads the reader quickly through her awakening concern for war-tom Viet Nam, resulting in the decision to adopt three children of mixed race from that country. Eventually, as a nurse, Cherie decides to go to Viet Nam, along with her husband and seven small children, to open a home for abandoned and orphaned children. The book is a moving and dynamic account of her ceaseless struggle to nourish and find adoptive homes for hundreds of children, while living within the hell that followed the American withdrawal from Viet Nam. The story culminates in April 1975 when, through Operation Babylift, Cherie is safely airlifted out with her children, only to return to help others escape on the last planeload of babies to be rescued from Viet Nam.The final two chapters give a glimpse of what is to come in the rest of the trilogy. Following her departure from Viet Nam, a restless Cherie went to Calcutta and met with Mother Teresa, who invited her to come and work with her. Determined to carry on her work with orphans, Cherie returned to India with her own young children in 1976. There they lived in some of the poorest slums as she opened dispensaries and clinics and rescued thousands of babies and children from orphanages, prisons, and the back streets of Calcutta. In the process she helped nearly ten thousand children find adoptive homes in America and throughout the world.In 1988 Cherie accepted an invitation to join a delegation to become one of the first Westerners to travel to Viet Nam, by then an entirely communist country. Returning to Saigon after an absence of twelve years, Cherie felt she was returning home. Picking up from where she had been forced to leave off years before, she began working with Vietnamese officials and plunged headlong into the task of helping the poor, the unwanted and the orphaned. This book has 130 dramatic pictures to take you through the journey. This is a story that will inspire you as well as bring you to tears. It is one of those books that simply cannot be put down.About the Author:Cherie Clark is a courageous, giving woman who embodies a love that transcends color, race, religion and politics. She is fiercely determined to give all children a chance in life that fate has seemingly cheated them out of. Cherie founded the International Mission of Hope, now a thriving and respected organization, funded solely by donations, which is involved in feeding and caring for children and elderly people, helping with disaster relief and reforestation, and facilitating the adoption of some 250 children every year. Cherie's group has also built a rural health care clinic in My Lai. She and most of her family currently live in Hanoi and operate child care centers throughout Viet Nam.