History of the Province 2

Here are some more newsbits of unrecorded history of our Province (source is Fr Benjy himself):

• We bought the Don Bosco School, Sanathnagar place for merely 6 lakhs - and the cash payment was done in the United States! Today the same property (land alone) would fetch nothing less than 6 crores!
• In the days when Fr Di Fiore was the Provincial of the united Madras Province, there was an offer of 10 acres of land in Banjara or Jubilee Hills by one Mr Papaiah. We did not take it then, rejecting the land as barren and very rocky. It was said that we would have to invest more to clear the rocks and all, so... Today not an inch of land is available in those areas.
• When Fr Benjy was the vice-Provincial of Chennai, he was the one who proposed the setting up of three institutions in the then Madras Province. St Theresa's, Sanathnagar was one among them. The first Salesians to take over that diocesan run Parish were Fr John Lens, Fr KS Joseph and Sr Paula JMJ (she used to bring food for these two Salesians in those early days).