Mother Teresa: A Biography (11 page)

Mother Teresa also instituted a rule that everyone from novitiate to nun work at Nirmal Hriday. It was backbreaking work as one had to be doctor, nurse, porter, and attendant at any given time. The hours were long, usually extending far beyond the normal workday with 18-hour days a common occurrence. There was little respite, for there always was medicine to be given, patients to be washed or fed, or prayers to be said. A sense of humor helped to counter relentless suffering and death. But few Sisters complained; more startling perhaps, many Missionaries of Charity asked to work at Nirmal Hriday.

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AN ONGOING MISSION

Despite all she had done, there was residual anger over Mother Teresa’s presence so near a Hindu temple. One Calcutta city council member introduced a motion that called for moving the home to a more suitable location. City leaders debated the issue and then agreed that, as soon as a suitable location was found for Nirmal Hriday, the facility would be moved.

As most officials were happy with what Mother Teresa was doing, however, they tended to downplay complaints. And since they did not want Mother Teresa to leave, no one even proposed an alternate location for Nirmal Hriday, which continues to operate in the same location even today.

Most patients at Nirmal Hriday fell into two categories: street cases, or people who had no family and were destitute, and family cases, where family members were unwilling or unable to care for those, especially the elderly, who were sick. In family cases, if the elderly patient recovered, the sisters made every effort to reunite the family members. Later on, those patients abandoned by their families were transferred to Prem Dan, a home established in 1975 for the elderly poor, and those ill but with a good chance of recovery. No matter the distinctions, the sisters tried never to turn anyone away who was in need.

Since it first opened in 1952, Nirmal Hriday has rescued more than 54,000 persons from the street. Of that number, half died at the home. Although a mortality rate of 50 percent is high, Nirmal Hriday was a home for the dying. In this respect, Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity succeeded in their mission to provide a sanctuary for those with nowhere else to go to make their peace with God and to die with dignity.

The home also emerged as one of the most potent symbols in the West for Mother Teresa and her work. As she later wrote, “In my heart, I carry the last glances of the dying. I do all I can so that they feel loved at that most important moment when a seemingly useless existence can be re-deemed.”5

EARLY CRITICS

No sooner had the criticism of Nirmal Hriday died down, then rum-blings about Mother Teresa herself surfaced. These criticisms grew throughout the decade and followed her for years. As the number of Mother Teresa’s detractors increased, the debate about her character and her attitudes toward such controversial topics as abortion and family planning intensified. As donations to her order increased, Mother Teresa came under scrutiny for accepting contributions from questionable donors.

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One of the first to question Mother Teresa’s handling of Nirmal Hriday was a young medical student named Marcus Fernandes. Before coming to Nirmal Hriday, Fernandes was already familiar with Mother Teresa and her work. His sister had attended Loreto, and through her, he had learned a great deal about the Missionaries of Charity.

As inexperienced at medicine as he was, Fernandes, nonetheless, was unhappy with the haphazard clinical practices that he found at Nirmal Hriday. He made several suggestions to Mother Teresa about how she could improve the chances for patients’ recoveries. According to Fernandes, the biggest problem at Nirmal Hriday was not cancer, tuberculosis, or heart ailments, but malnutrition. Fernandes suggested that giving patients rice fortified with vitamin supplements would improve their chances of survival. He also suggested new approaches to diagnosis along with a separate area where he could make a more thorough examination of patients.

His recommendations failed to convince Mother Teresa. His widow, Patricia Fernandes, remarked, “He could not persuade her to treat them with vitamins. She did not want them treated; she expected people to die and would simply say, ‘Well, she’s gone to God.’ She was not particularly interested in medicine.”6

Others who visited or worked at Nirmal Hriday similarly noted Mother Teresa’s seeming nonchalance over others’ deaths. One visitor recalled how, when her sisters asked Mother Teresa to try to save a 16-year-old boy from dying, she simply blessed the ailing young man and said, “Never mind, it’s a lovely day to go to Heaven.”7 A young woman volunteer, who had been thinking of joining the Missionaries of Charity, helped a young woman with a heart defect enter Nirmal Hriday. Mother Teresa told her that there was nothing more she could do, it was in God’s hands as to whether the young woman would live or die.

Dr. Fernandes stayed at Nirmal Hriday for two years, before leaving for London to complete his medical training. When he returned to India and again offered his services to Mother Teresa he saw, to his dismay, that nothing had changed at Nirmal Hriday except that some conditions had become worse. A great deal of the money that had been donated to Nirmal Hriday was being wasted, and the facilities needed improvement. Fernandes was particularly angered by the sight of an X-ray machine that was now useless and rusting. When he approached Mother Teresa about it, she told him that there was no one trained to use it. Dr. Fernandes continued off and on to see Mother Teresa, but after her refusal to pay for his treatment of a skin ailment that had been plaguing her, he severed his association with her. He did, however, volunteer his time and services with other charity and missionary groups in Calcutta. But, when asked, he K A L I G H AT

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never changed his assessment of Mother Teresa. To him, she was a hard and extremely ruthless woman.8

Another vocal critic of Mother Teresa was a British doctor of ophthal-mology, Major E. John Somerset, who was affiliated with the Calcutta Medical College Hospital from 1939 to 1961. During the early 1950s, when Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity were first becoming known, Dr. Somerset was donating his time to five or six charitable homes for the aged and sick in Calcutta. He soon began getting regular visits from Mother Teresa, who would bring him patients she had found in need of treatment. Many of the cases Somerset treated were children who suffered from severe vitamin A deficiency to such a degree that their corneas were melting away. Although Somerset promised Mother Teresa that he would see as many cases as he could, he asked that she let him know beforehand and not come when he was seeing his regular patients. But to Somerset’s dismay, Mother Teresa ignored his request and continued to bring patients to him without an appointment. He came to regard her as a nuisance and a bother.

Another volunteer, Sue Ryder, who had worked as a nurse during World War II, also had her problems with Mother Teresa. When Ryder came to India with her husband, she occasionally visited the slums with Mother Teresa. She approached Mother Teresa about merging the Missionaries of Charities ventures with her own charitable foundation, but was rebuffed. The two women had other problems with each other. Ryder strongly suggested that the night staff at Nirmal Hriday be increased, as it was often overnight that patients needed the most comfort and care.

However, Mother Teresa refused to consider a change in schedules: her sisters were to return to the convent at night to say their prayers. The matter was closed.

THE BRITISH, COLONIAL GUILT, AND MOTHER

TERESA

Complaints about Mother Teresa did little to dampen the tremendous goodwill many felt toward her and her congregation. This was particularly true in the English Catholic community of Calcutta. Many women volunteered to help raise funds or provide toys, food, and clothing, especially for the children. One volunteer, an Englishwoman named Ann Blaikie, coordinated volunteer efforts and on occasion spoke to civic organizations and other groups about the Missionaries of Charity.

As Anne Sebba, one of Mother Teresa’s biographers, noted, the attitude of the English, especially English women, was very important in 7 6

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Mother Teresa’s early successes. Many of these women lived in the exclusive areas of Calcutta, belonged to certain clubs, and socialized only with each other. Their only interaction with Bengalis came through their domestics or in some official capacity. Some British who spent time in India before and after its independence believe that Mother Teresa went a long way in helping them to justify the privileged life that many English living in India enjoyed. As more than one person recalled, by stepping out from their upper-class surroundings and journeying to the slums or to Nirmal Hriday or to one of the many clinics or schools Mother Teresa had established, they could, for a moment or two anyway, say that they helped Mother Teresa and eased their guilt. And Mother Teresa knew how to manipulate her audiences, whether she was speaking to one person or an entire roomful. One man who grew up knowing Mother Teresa described how she solicited funds and supplies. According to his account, Mother Teresa fixed her gaze on the person and stated how the Missionaries of Charity really needed such and such an item, and that they did not know how they would find the money. The person often found himself rooted to the spot; almost always that person ended up pulling out the checkbook to provide Mother Teresa with whatever she wanted.9 Other English men and women who spent time in India and also helped Mother Teresa felt something much more profound. As one man explained it, when he was in India during the war, he rarely came into contact with poor people, though he realized he should have. He also believed that the British had taken far more out of India than they had contributed. In the end, the British failed in their duties to aid the poor and helpless of India.10

Helping Mother Teresa was a way to make amends.

Although this attitude may have eased many consciences, it also angered the people who were the supposed beneficiaries of such generosity, who resented Western condescension. For many Indians, the efforts of Westerners, and the British in particular, promoted the false impression that the people of India were indifferent to the suffering of their own. Further, these critics charged, Westerners, as symbolized by Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity, appeared to be the only ones who do help the poor and infirm in India, when in fact this was not the case.

Still, there is little question that with the establishment of Nirmal Hriday, Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity gained a reputation for good works not only in Calcutta, but throughout the nation and the world. By 1955, though, Mother Teresa had other things on her mind. She turned her energies and attention to two groups who needed her help and for whom she had done nothing specific: children and lepers.

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NOTES

1. Raghu Rai and Navin Chawla,
Mother Teresa
(Rockport, Mass.: Element, 1992), p. 159.

2. Kathryn Spink,
Mother Teresa
(San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1997), p. 55.

3. Rai and Chawla,
Mother Teresa,
p. 160.

4. Spink,
Mother Teresa,
p. 57.

5. Mother Teresa with Jose Luis Gonzàles-Balado,
Mother Teresa: In My Own
Words
(New York: Gramercy Books, 1996), p. 70.

6. Anne Sebba,
Mother Teresa: Beyond the Image
(New York: Doubleday, 1997), p. 60.

7. Sebba,
Mother Teresa,
p. 60.

8. Sebba,
Mother Teresa,
p. 61.

9. Sebba,
Mother Teresa,
p. 65.

10. Sebba,
Mother Teresa,
pp. 63–64.

Chapter 7

SHISHU BHAVAN AND

SHANTINAGAR: PLACES OF

PEACE

By 1955, Mother Teresa turned her energies to another group in need: the children of the poor. In a relatively short time, Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity had made progress in providing education for poor children with the creation of schools in the slums. But providing children with an education paled beside even bigger problem: what to do with the growing number of unwanted and abandoned children in the city.

Since India’s independence, the number of unwanted children roaming in the streets of Calcutta has increased. Orphaned, sick, and disabled children were often cast into the streets to fend for themselves. Some children tried to eke out a living by begging, others through petty crime such as stealing. Poor families, faced with the growing burden of supporting their children, abandoned them. Young girls and infants particularly were at great risk, because in Indian society boys are considered more valuable.

Evidence of this cultural bias was everywhere; for the Missionaries of Charity the sight of a newborn female infant, alone and left to die, was common. For Mother Teresa, children were a special gift from God. She wrote:

Children long for somebody to accept them, to love them, to praise them, to be proud of them. Let us bring the child back to the center of our care and concern. This is the only way the world can survive because our children are the only hope for the future. As older people are called to God, only their children can take their place.1

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Even though many Catholic charities were active in this area and Calcutta had a number of orphanages, the number of children on the streets were growing too quickly for these groups to manage.

SHISHU BHAVAN

To Mother Teresa, the sight of so many unloved children was heart-breaking. It was not enough to rescue as many children as possible from the streets, the gutters, the garbage heaps, and the alleyways. What was needed was a refuge where the children could be taken, nurtured, and loved. For Mother Teresa, these children were nothing less than a symbol of the Christ child. Although other charities in Calcutta did their best to deal with the problem, it was clear that they needed help. As with Nirmal Hriday, Mother Teresa had once again identified a problem that was causing the city officials of Calcutta a great deal of embarrassment. As a result of her previous successes, she received recognition and cooperation from the highest offices in the city.

During one of her many forays through the city, Mother Teresa made the acquaintance of Dr. B. C. Roy, Chief Minister of West Bengal and a medical doctor. Dr. Roy often gave free consultations at his home office and Mother Teresa lined up with the rest of the poor every day at 6 A.M.

More often than not, her requests were political, rather than medical. She told the doctor about the needs for water or electricity in a slum area that she had visited. Dr. Roy dutifully wrote memos to the official responsible, informing him of the problem. In time, he began to pay closer attention to the tiny nun who showed such great concern for the poor of his city. He then told her to come to his office, where he helped open the doors of various city offices to her. Mother Teresa now could call on him freely; in turn, Dr. Roy trusted her completely. With his help, she began to implement her latest project for the children of the poor.

And so it was on September 23, 1955, Mother Teresa opened the first Shishu Bhavan, a home for children. Located near Creek Lane, and just a short walk from the Motherhouse, the small unpainted bungalow was the first of several children’s homes established by the Missionaries of Charity.

Like Nirmal Hriday, the sisters had to clean the house thoroughly to get it ready for its new occupants. Though the house was small, it opened into a spacious courtyard; Mother Teresa had rented the home from a Muslim who had left the city.

When the first Shishu Bhavan was ready, the sisters went about in search of residents. They did not have to look far; most everywhere they went, they found children in need, many of them infants, some not even S H I S H U B H AVA N A N D S H A N T I N A G A R

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a day old. The infants were brought back to the house, cleaned, fed, and given medical treatment, as many suffered from malnutrition and tuberculosis. Those that survived were dressed in green-and-white checked clothing, then placed in boxes, packing crates, or even on the floor.

Those who were too sick were held lovingly by the sisters until they died. Like the home for the dying, Mother Teresa wanted these small infants and children to be cleansed, held, and loved, even though death was imminent. As crowded as the Shishu Bhavan was, Mother Teresa never turned away a child, even if it meant that infants slept three to a cot; for those fighting for their life, a box heated by a light bulb was used.

By 1958, the Missionaries of Charity had established Shishu Bhavans to care for more than 90 children. In addition, Mother Teresa accepted a government grant that provided 33 rupees for each child. But after a few months of working within the government guidelines, Mother Teresa decided to stop taking the grant money. She believed she could do just as well spending 17 rupees per child; this allowed her to take in more children and provide them with the care they needed.

Besides seeking out children themselves, the Missionaries of Charity also sent letters to all medical clinics and nursing homes in Calcutta, stating that they would welcome any child without a home. Periodically, young pregnant women, many of whom had been cast out of their homes, would show up at a Shishu Bhavan seeking refuge. The sisters took them in, and the expectant mothers worked in the homes until they gave birth.

If for some reason the new mother could not care for her child, the sisters took the child, but only as a last resort. The home also acted as an afternoon high school for young boys who would otherwise have been on the streets learning to rob and steal.

CARING FOR THE CHILDREN

As with many of her undertakings, Mother Teresa chose a practical approach in overseeing the Shishu Bhavans. She firmly believed in teaching the older children a skill or giving them a practical education that would allow them to make their way in the world. Among the first things she did when opening the home was to acquire some old typewriters. She taught some of the older girls how to type with the hope that they could find sec-retarial jobs. The sisters also taught carpentry for boys and needlework for girls. Because Mother Teresa’s schools were not recognized by the government, nor would the Calcutta schools accept the children unless they paid tuition or fees, she depended on the largesse of benefactors to sponsor the 8 2

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children. One of the first was a wealthy Hindu woman who sponsored 10

children for 10 years.

In time, other donors would do the same. This practice helped the children to receive the education or technical skills they needed to become self-supporting. It was common, for instance, for an Indian donor to pay tuition for an infant from birth to the end of the child’s school years. Over the years, the circle of donors widened considerably, as donors throughout the world sponsored children at the Shishu Bhavans. The support monies donated for the children were placed in a bank account until the child reached school age; the funds were then used to pay for the child’s education. This system proved so successful that in 1975 Mother Teresa organized the World Child Welfare Fund, which shared the financial assistance among all of the children under the care of the Missionaries of Charity.

THE PROMISE OF A NEW LIFE

For residents of Shishu Bhavan who were of marrying age, Mother Teresa, in accordance with Hindu custom, helped arrange marriages. Acting as a marriage broker, Mother Teresa worked with other Hindu families seeking a bride for a male relative. While the social status of the girls who lived at Shishu Bhavan was, in general, low, Mother Teresa made sure that each young woman had a dowry, or gifts, to present to the prospective bridegroom’s family. These dowries always included a new sari, a few trinkets, and a wedding ring. Local benefactors also helped in many instances adding to the dowry some gold ornaments, household utensils, furniture, and in many cases, money in a small bank account opened in the future bride’s name. On any given day, the couples could be found gathering outside the Motherhouse to greet Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity. In time, a joke started to make the rounds that a prospective bridegroom had better watch his step as he was inheriting not one mother-in-law, but several.

Perhaps the most important program that Mother Teresa created for the children’s homes were adoptions. When the program began, the majority of children were placed with Christian families. Slowly, many Hindu middle-class families opened their homes to unwanted and abandoned children. Initially, boys were still preferred over girls, but, over time, many Hindu families were happy to welcome a new child, regardless of sex, into their homes. Soon, Mother Teresa began to find homes for Indian children with overseas adoptive parents from Europe and North America. However, the majority of families wishing to adopt wanted only S H I S H U B H AVA N A N D S H A N T I N A G A R

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healthy children. Though physically disabled children might find a home with European families, children with severe mental disabilities stayed at the Shishu Bhavan.

In emphasizing adoption, Mother Teresa was also battling abortion, which she strongly opposed. She once wrote that with abortion: the mother kills even her own child to solve her problems.

And, by abortion, the father is told he does not have to take any responsibility at all for the child he has brought into the world. That father is likely to put other women into the same trouble. So abortion leads to abortion. Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love but to use violence to get what they want.2

For Mother Teresa, adoption was the best way to combat not only abortion, but the growing practice of sterilizing women to cut down on esca-lating birth rates. The Indian government advocated female sterilization as a way to combat population growth. To combat abortion clinics, Mother Teresa and her sisters sent word to medical clinics, hospitals, and police stations that the Missionaries of Charity would accept all unwanted children.

In addition to adoption, Mother Teresa also became involved in family planning. The Missionaries began instruction in what Mother Teresa called Holy Family Planning, which emphasized natural family planning based on the rhythm method, the only family-planning practice sanctioned by the Roman Catholic Church. The Missionaries also set up a number of family-planning centers where young married couples not only learned how the rhythm method worked, but also learned that abstaining from sex was another way to avoid unwanted pregnancies. Despite the simplicity of these methods, teaching them to the poor had its drawbacks.

One familiar story involved a woman who had already given birth to a large number of children. Wishing to avoid another pregnancy, she received instruction in the rhythm method and was given a string of beads of various colors to help her keep track of her ovulation. Several months later, she returned to one of the family planning centers, obviously pregnant. She told the sisters that she had hung the beads around a statue of Kali, and forgot about them. Then, she could not understand why she became pregnant.

As they had with her practices at Nirmal Hriday, detractors criticized Mother Teresa’s stance on abortion and sterilization. Many argued that there were too many unwanted children in India and that there was no 8 4

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way that the Missionaries of Charity could possibly care for every single one. Although abortion clinics were available, they were rare and costly, hardly justifying Mother Teresa’s outrage. Outlawing abortions might cause women to try to abort their unborn child themselves, often with terrible and fatal results. In the face of such criticism, Mother Teresa stood her ground and never veered away from the Church’s teachings on birth control and abortion. But the controversy was far from over; in the years to come, Mother Teresa would be a visible target for pro-choice advocates the world over.

REACHING OUT IN OTHER WAYS

Besides organizing the children’s homes, Mother Teresa reached out to the poor in other ways. In 1956, she organized her first mobile clinic to help those who could not get to one of the free clinics. She was aided by Catholic Relief Services in New York City, which donated $5,000 to transform an old van into a traveling medical dispensary that visited the slums throughout the city offering free medical services. With the help of some doctors, a small laboratory was set up in Shishu Bhavan to do medical testing.

The Shishu Bhavan also became a buzzing center of activity for feeding the poor. In the home’s small kitchen, the sisters cooked as much rice as they could, which they handed out along with bananas. On any given afternoon, there were anywhere from 50 to 100 women with children waiting to receive food. For many, this was the only meal of the day.

There were some hazards in providing the free food. On one occasion, the sisters had nothing to give out for that day, for the agency that supplied them had stopped sending food to the home. The hungry crowd grew angrier and angrier; some even tried to set fire to the home. At one point Mother Teresa pushed back with surprising strength a whole line of women who rushed forward to receive their food. It was only because of the arrival of the police and fire brigade that the incident did not esca-late into something more serious. On another, less dangerous occasion, the kitchen ran out of plates and the sisters used dinner plates from the Motherhouse to give to the poor.

TENDING TO THE UNCLEAN

Mother Teresa introduced the mobile dispensary in 1956 in response to another growing problem on the Calcutta streets: lepers. Earlier, the Gobra hospital, which housed many of the city’s leprosy cases, had closed, S H I S H U B H AVA N A N D S H A N T I N A G A R