A preview video for "Marianne and Margareta", a documentary film. [Sorok Church YouTube channel]
A campaign to put up two retired Austrian nurses as Nobel Peace Prize candidates gathered speed after a former South Korean prime minister agreed to head a committee comprised of about 50 figures with high social reputation.
The committee headed by Kim Hwang-sik, a former Supreme Court justice who served as prime minister from October 2010 to February 2013, would be off to work probably in September. Kim agreed to chair the committee this week but First Lady Kim Jung-sook has yet to accept an invitation as honorary chairperson.
The campaign dates back to 2005 when Marianne Stoeger, 82, and her Austrian colleague left home after ending their voluntary sacrifice caring for South Korean lepers for four decades at an isolated shelter on Sorokdo Island off the southern coastal county of Goheung.
The shelter was built in 1916 during Japan's 1910-1945 colonial rule over the Korean peninsula, as a concentration camp for leprosy patients. South Korea later transformed it into a state-subsidized community center with a modern hospital, farm land and welfare facilities.
After graduating from the nursing college of the University of Innsbruck, the two started working as volunteer nurses in the Sorokdo hospital respectively in 1962 and 1966. After their departure in 2005, they were respected as "Angeles" among community people or likened to Mother Teresa, known in the Catholic Church as Saint Teresa of Calcutta.
In 2006, the two nurses were offered given honorary citizenship. "Marianne and Margareta," a film depicting their life, was screened last year at the government complex in Seoul.
In December last year, Lidia Tallone, a 73-year-old Italian nun, was honored with a prestigious order of merit in reward for her 48-year-long work to help lepers in their village in Gochang, about 230 kilometers (142 miles) southwest of Seoul. She arrived in the village in 1968 and is still caring for some 10 lepers.
reporter
Lim Chang-won
cwlim34@ajunews.com
