Published March 7, 1993, in The Tampa Tribune
Copyright 1993 Anastasia Stanmeyer
Helping the Helpless -- Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity
CALCUTTA, India -- Mother Teresa slips into an unadorned room and leans against the back wall as 140 nuns in white kneel before her, silent, lost in prayer.
Milky light filters through the windows, cascading softly over the sisters as if candles are being lit, slowly, one by one.
The 82-year-old holy woman, under 5 feet tall, bends over a book clutched in both hands and begins reading aloud a prayer in a low, strong voice. She pauses after each line, and the nuns, most of them Indian, repeat the words in unison during Mass at Mother House.
Mother Teresa's deeply wrinkled face looks like an intricate road map. A sari-like habit, white with blue trim, cloaks her body. Her large, bare feet are twisted and contorted, as if tied in knots. Her hands are gnarled, out of place for someone who appears so fragile.
She calls the streets of Calcutta home. They are where she began her empire, the Missionaries of Charity, an order dedicated to the poorest of the poor.
Calcutta is a city of 11.8 million people, about 5 million of whom live in slums and perhaps another quarter-million on the streets. Calcutta's population per square mile is 56,927 people; New York City's is 11,480.
Born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, Mother Teresa taught middle-class students in Calcutta for 20 years before founding the order that has 2,535 missionaries working in 72 countries.
"There are very many people all over the world ... who are in deep poverty," she says. "Each person must help.
"We must do things one at a time."
Mother Teresa, an Albanian who grew up in Yugoslavia, is a Roman Catholic nun who lives in poverty in India. She has survived two heart attacks and a bone disease that knots her spine, hands and feet.
In 1990, she resigned as head of Missionaries of Charity -- a group that operates homes for the poor in India and other countries -- because of poor health. She picked up the reins again, though, after an unsuccessful attempt to find a successor.
She believes the more a person has, the more one is occupied and the less one gives. Poverty for her is freedom, not a penance.
The 1979 Nobel Peace Prize winner says that the dying, the crippled, the lepers, the mentally ill, the unwanted, the unloved are Jesus in disguise. She considers death as something beautiful; it means going home to God.
Mother Teresa began her Missionaries of Charity to help those living and dying in the streets with nothing to eat, no where to sleep, no money and no education. The nuns have picked up more than 54,000 people from the streets of Calcutta in over 40 years, and more than 23,000 have died at the Home for the Dying in Kalighat, a Calcutta neighborhood.
Kalighat, like everywhere else in the city, is overloaded. It's as though someone built an enormous backdrop and is directing people to act out their lives in the streets. Aging cars, trucks, buses, taxis, horse-drawn surreys, bullock wagons, human-pulled rickshaws, mangy dogs, men, women, children and wandering cows clog the streets.
Calcutta wasn't always like this.
There were three villages of fishermen, weavers and priests for at least 1,000 years before the British East Indian Company established Calcutta in 1690 as a trading post.
At the height of its glory in the 19th century, Calcutta was called the second city of the British Empire, rivaling London in its riches and social refinement.
The city's decline started in 1911, when the capital of British India was moved to Delhi, just north of the present capital, New Delhi. Calcutta had to make room for more people with the 1947 partition that ended British colonial rule, making an independent India and Pakistan and creating a flow of refugees across the newly created borders.
In the wake of the Bangladesh war in 1971, another population surge overburdened the city and urban services since have been on the verge of collapse.
The city is attached like an ear to the banks of the Hooghly River. The inner ear is the "White Town," the former European city of spacious homes and broad avenues. Beyond that, encompassing the villages, lies the native section, or "Black Town," of narrow lanes, slums, bazaars, temples, mansions and warehouses.
Street scenes
Everywhere, people sleep on the ground, many with nothing to shield them from the hard concrete or dark cold. The smell of steamy, pungent trash heaped at the sides of the streets is smothering.
The homeless cook in the streets. Rice and scraps of food simmer in tin pots resting on an overturned square steel container with wood burning underneath.
People sell vegetables, and hot tea is served in leaves twisted into cones. Lining the streets are small shops where nearly everything is sold, from tourism services to T-shirts to Campa-Cola -- India's version of Coca-Cola.
Many men wear red-and-white checkered cloth wrapped around their waists and nearly reaching their ankles. Women dress in brightly colored saris.
The same scenes are repeated hundreds of times. Along the Hooghly River, people cook and sleep, and they bathe and wash clothes in the dirty waters.
On every road, young women with dirt-smeared faces and outstretched hands loosely holding naked babies beg to anyone who walks by. Some children are deliberately deformed so beggars can entice more rupees.
At one street corner, a dog and a teen-age boy sleep side-by-side. Ten yards away, a small sign next to two wood doors reads, "Mother Teresa In."
A PERSONAL TOUCH
The doors open to two- and three-story concrete buildings where Mother Teresa and other Missionaries of Charity live and hold services. The Mother House is a refuge that blocks the ugliness outside.
Inside, in the calmness, sisters are everywhere -- a sea of white against clean stone floors and walls. Nuns in the courtyard beat white clothes against a concrete ground and pour water on the garments from a tin pail.
Work halts during morning service, then resumes afterward. As the sisters continue their daily tasks, Mother Teresa slowly makes her way down a hall, coughing and pressing a white handkerchief to her mouth.
She disappears into a room, then emerges about a half-hour later to talk to visitors. With prayer book in hand, she walks toward the handful of guests.
She speaks quietly to each person, her gray-blue eyes twinkling like a child's. She firmly grasps each outstretched hand in both of hers.
One man asks her to say a prayer for his dying mother. She nods, then blesses and gives shiny pendants of the Virgin Mary to him and other visitors. She hands out slips of paper with a prayer and photograph of her.
"This is my business card," she says jokingly, doling out small cards that read, "The fruit of silence is prayer; the fruit of prayer is faith; the fruit of faith is love; the fruit of love is service; the fruit of service is peace."
Her mission is to do all she can for the poverty-stricken.
Family values, she tells another visitor, are the way to overcome problems in the world.
"The family that prays together stays together," she says.
Mother Teresa asks the visitors to help at one of the homes for the ill and the homeless and at a school for street children.
She turns to leave, and visitors press money into her hands. She acknowledges it with a faint smile and walks to the chapel again, a solitary figure crouching against the wall. She stoops over a prayer book, mouthing the words in silence as her index finger touches every line.
Selfless service
Meanwhile, nuns and volunteers prepare for another day of helping the needy.
Chris Jenkins, in her 30s, left her job as a waitress in Exeter, England, seven months before to help the sick and homeless, joining thousands of volunteers who come in any given year.
Although she plans to go back home soon, she says she'll be back.
"You receive much more than you give," she says. "A lot of people come out here to sort something through in their lives, to sort out problems, and they're unhappy at home."
As she talks, eight nuns pile into a mini-ambulance, carrying huge wicker baskets with white pieces of cloth inside.
The ambulance driver honks his horn every 30 seconds to get through the crowded streets of Calcutta. Twenty minutes later, the nuns reach their destination: Home for the Dying in Kalighat.
A funeral procession is leaving the home as they arrive. A hand-held stretcher carries a body wrapped tightly in white cloth and adorned with bright red, orange and yellow flowers.
Inside the building, a sign reads, "Let my hands heal thy broken body."
Sister Luke is in charge of the Home for the Dying and asks whoever walks through its doors to volunteer. Many do.
The place is spotless, with four rows of green cots lined up in two rectangular rooms that separate the women from the men. The upper two rows are for those who likely will recover; the lower two are for those near death. Young and old are being treated, and amidst the sickly are children, running, laughing and smiling.
Death and life mingle under the whizzing of ceiling fans.
MECCA FOR THE DYING
Mother Teresa's first contact with the destitute was when she found a woman dying in the street, eaten by rats. She took the woman to a nearby hospital, but the people there were reluctant to take her. She was so insistent that they finally treated the woman. From then on, Mother Teresa decided to find a place for the dying and take care of them.
She asked the government only for a place; the rest she would do herself. City officials allowed Mother Teresa to use a building next to the Kali temple in Kalighat where pilgrims worshiped a Hindu goddess with the power to give and destroy life.
That's where the Home for the Dying began more than 40 years ago. Relatives, friends and passers-by bring the patients, or they come on their own. Volunteers assist the nuns, priests and monks, bathing, comforting and feeding the dying.
About 20 volunteers from the United States, Germany, France, England and other countries bathe and change the clothing of 60 or so once-healthy bodies. In the men's dorm, a 23-year-old German man sits on a cot, facing a young boy.
The child grabs at keys dangled in front of him, but the man quickly pulls them out of reach. The boy laughs and his eyes dance as the two play. Later, the man gives the boy a shot.
On the lower tier, volunteers lay a man on a cot. He pulls his knees almost to his chin, his skin stretched taut over protruding bones.
The German man stops playing with the boy and helps a nun stick an intravenous needle into the dying man's thin arm. It takes them 20 minutes to find a vein. Afterward, the ill man leans over the cot and spits up mucus, a sign of tuberculosis. The German man wipes it up with tissue paper and throws it into a pail.
Volunteers carry garbage from the home to a huge, open-air dump nearby. Street people rummage through the trash, looking for food or usable items.
Many people have tuberculosis when they come to the Home for the Dying. Some also have scabies and must have their heads shaved.
In a two-hour period in the women's dormitory, three people die. Nuns wrap each in white cloth and tie thin strips of material around the waists, feet and chests. The frail bodies look like giant matches, with their dark, peaceful faces peeking out.
The bodies remain on cots until they are carried by stretcher to a small morgue where nuns prepare them for a procession and cremation.
Work never slows for new volunteers, who stand back and watch, slowly catching on. First they might scoop water from a pail into tin cups and hand them to the sick. Or they might go to the back room, where huge batches of food are cooked and clothes and sheets are washed by hand and foot.
Volunteers twist the laundry to remove the water and throw it into wicker baskets to be carried outside and hung to dry.
As the volunteers work, they chat and laugh. They say what they're doing is fulfilling. Some have been here for years. Others for months or days.
"I enjoy helping the ill and the dying," said 18-year-old Nick Walford.
Walford, of London, who took a year's break between high school and college, has been volunteering at the home for several weeks. He's wearing a blue apron and washing clothes that morning, along with Jim Pearl.
"I've always dreamed of working for the poor and coming to India and seeing Mother Teresa," says Pearl of Nevada City, Mont., who worked in construction and in restaurants in the United States.
"It's really quite joyful," said Pearl, 34, who's been at the home for eight months and plans to stay another year. "There's a different consciousness of death.
"People come here from all over, for different reasons, from all religions. Mother Teresa has inspired the whole world by her unconditional love."
People don't fear death here, he says.
"It's the most beautiful experience, holding someone's hands at least for a few minutes. For those who are dying, we give them some warmth."
s2f.com |
