SACRIFICE
The Anacostia section of Washington, D. C. sits on a bluff overlooking the capital city. Just across the river from the imposing Capital itself, Anacostia — a ghetto of hunger, war, crime, drugs, and hopelessness — might as well be a continent away. None of Washington’s celebrities and power brokers, nor the reporters who track them, cross that natural divide. However, one balmy June morning in 1981 proved the exception. Black limousines and television camera trucks lined the curb in front of the old red brick Assumption Catholic Church in the heart of Anacostia. Soon after the cameras and reporters were in place, a small group of nuns and priests arrived, clustered about a wisp of a woman in a white muslin sari. The tiny figure moved with unusual grace up the steps of the church, waving at a cluster of children nearby and brushing past the reporters crowding the doorway. This celebrity who somehow managed to understate her own arrival, an attitude…
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