Ghetto school
In 1948, at the age of 38, Mother Teresa left the Loretto Convent in Ireland for Calcutta, India. One of the first things she did was to take off the blue cassock worn by the Loretto nuns in favor of the white cotton sari often worn by civilian women in India.
Mother Teresa began her work in the slums behind the station. It was full of ramshackle huts and dirty children in rags. One day, a Bengali-speaking child, who had only one leg and was still bleeding from the amputation, asked Mother Teresa for something. Mother Teresa was about to take medicine to dress him when the child said he wanted something to eat, making a show of eating as he spoke. At this time she had only five rupees with her, so she apologized and said to the child, "I am a poor nun and I can only dress your wound." As she was about to apply the medicine, the child suddenly grabbed the medicine, screamed, "Give me this," and ran towards the slum on his crutches. Wanting to know what was going on, Sister Theresa followed the child into a small hut, where, in the darkness, she could faintly see a woman lying on a plank, and beside her a baby and a girl of about five years of age, all three of them thin and weak, with dull eyes. She spoke to them in Bengali and learned that the child's name was Babu and that he was eight years old, that the woman was his mother and was suffering from tuberculosis, and that the other two children in the shack were his younger siblings. Sister Theresa could only give them the vitamin pills she had brought with her, and the woman was so grateful that she bowed to her with clasped hands and said, "There is also the old woman here who is ill, please see her too." When Mother Teresa heard this, she was shaken to the core: why would the poor have such kind hearts? They themselves were suffering from a disease, and they still cared for others!
That day, Mother Teresa visited many families in a row, and Babu, a one-legged man, and some children kept following her curiously. Babu even requested Mother Teresa to come back the next day.
The day's experience made it difficult for Mother Teresa to sleep. Not only did these poor children have no food to eat and no clothes to wear, they could not even write their own names or count the simplest numbers, so what would they do when they grew up? The only way to save these children was to equip them with knowledge! So the idea of an open-air school in the slums matured in Mother Teresa's mind.
The next day, in an open space under a big tree, Mother Teresa announced that it was the classroom, the ground was the blackboard, and those who were willing to read sat down. After her patient persuasion, Babu sat down first, followed by four more children. Gradually, Mother Teresa's interesting lectures drew them in, and the other children slowly approached the tree. When Mother Teresa came to the tree again the next day, she found that a tent had been set up with rags and boards, and that there were many more children sitting in it than yesterday. Babu told her, "Everyone helped build this shed, and I got all my friends to come to class."
In this humble "classroom," Sister Theresa teaches the children not only simple reading and writing, but also hygiene, such as brushing their teeth, washing their faces and bathing. She took the children to the well and taught them how to bathe one by one. The women of the slums took all this to heart, and soon they followed Theresa's example and bathed their own children.
The word of Mother Teresa's open-air school in the slums soon spread, and after a week the number of children who came to hear the lessons reached more than a hundred, and later increased to more than five hundred.
Calcutta is a city where India's poor are concentrated. Because of the poverty, the number of abandoned children and the misery of the scene is really rare in the world. After organizing schools for the poor, Teresa, along with the other nuns, took on the task of adopting abandoned babies who were skinny, sickly, and born with disabilities.
The sisters not only took in babies abandoned at the convent gates, but also those they saw elsewhere, and some of the poor even sent children they could not afford to feed themselves. As the number of adoptions grew and the impact grew, there were regular shortages of funds to buy medicine, powdered milk and food. But strangely enough, whenever there is such a shortage, someone is bound to send money, food, medicine, clothes, etc., to help them tide over their difficulties.
Hospices
Outside India, Mother Teresa and her associates became widely known after their services to the dying were reported. To most people, there is nothing special about feeding malnourished children, bringing rice to the poor and the like; but in a country where the population has exploded to the point of despair, building homes for people who are about to be sacrificed to death and who have only a few hours or days left to live, is an incredible thing to do. For, nowhere else in the world will you find the kind of spirit that Mother Teresa showed in this work - an unconditional respect for any suffering person.
Journalist Michael Zomes, who once described Mother Teresa's first hospice in Calcutta, said that one day a dying man was lying on the road immediately outside Gambell Hospital. Sister Theresa tried to get him into the hospital, but when she came running back from the dispensary with the medicines, the man was already dead, lying on the ground with no one to ask for him. Outraged, Theresa said, "They treat cats, and dogs, better than their own kind of brothers. If it had been their own beloved pets, they would never have let them die like that!"
Sister Theresa often encountered such things. One day she found an old woman collapsed in the road as if dead, her rag-wrapped feet crawling with ants, a hole in her head as if bitten by a rat, and flies and maggots crawling around the wound that remained bloodstained. Theresa measured the old woman's breathing and pulse and, realizing that she seemed to be breathing, rushed her to a nearby hospital. When the hospital learned that it was a homeless old woman, it refused to accept her, but Sister Theresa was adamant: "It is not the hospital's responsibility to save the grandmother, but as a hospital it is necessary to find a way to give her treatment!" It was only because of Sister Theresa's righteousness that the hospital was able to treat the dying woman.
Sister Theresa was determined to improve the situation through her own efforts. For, with more than one dead body on the streets, collecting bodies on the streets of Calcutta every morning was like collecting garbage. The poor in the slums of the Pearl Sea had pooled their money to build a waiting house for the dying, a modest two-bed house with a poetic name - "The House of the Clear Heart". But the house soon closed its doors, due to strong opposition from neighborhood residents who feared the stench of death.
Sister Theresa went to the Calcutta city health department, where she was received by a warm-hearted official and taken to the famous Kali monastery in Calcutta, which promised to lend them, free of charge, one of the places where devotees can rest after their pilgrimage.
After finding this place of respite for the needy and sick, in just one day the nuns settled more than two dozen of the poorest and most distressed.
One day, a few meters away from the garbage pile, Sister Theresa found a ghostly skeleton, an almost jagged, paper-like skeleton wrapped in human skin, but there was still a breath of life left in him, and maggots had begun to eat away at his skin. Sister Theresa moved the old man into a shade-covered lobby, fed him, cleaned his forlorn, poop-stained body, and removed the maggots from the old man's wounds.
"How can you stand my stench?" The debilitated, dying man gasped softly.
"It is nothing compared to the pain you are carrying." She replied softly.
The old man muttered confidently, "You're not from here. No one here would do what you did." As he was dying, he tried to make himself smile, "You are to be praised."
"No," she returned the smile, "It is you who should be praised, you do not praise me."
Another old man, who passed away in the evening of the day he moved in, took Sister Theresa's hand before he died and whispered in Bengali, "I lived like a dog and I am dying like a man. Thank you."
It was this unassuming nun who once made it possible for countless people, outcasts of the secular world, to be compensated with dignity in the last hours of their lives.
Leprosy Rehabilitation Center
Leprosy is also known as candle disease in folklore, because after the disease, certain parts of a person's body will be like candles melted by fire, slowly festering away until they finally die. Around the middle of the twentieth century, this disease was very rampant in India, according to estimates at the time, there were about five million leprosy patients in the whole of India, and there were as many as 80,000 in Calcutta alone.
The whole society was full of fear of leprosy: patients were abandoned by their families, living on the streets or hiding in the wilderness, or trapped in caves; and some healthy people see lepers, but also rush to avoid or even throw stones at them; the police saw lepers, and even armed with a gun to catch them put into concentration camps ......< /p>
One day, an official from the city health department approached Mother Teresa and asked her Missionary Sisters of Charity to help care for those who had fallen ill on the streets because of leprosy, and that the government could provide a suitable place to gather them. The young Sisters found this difficult, as the convent was already overloaded with work - a slum school, a children's home, and a hospice - and it was too much for them to add a rehabilitation center for the lepers. But Mother Teresa agreed to the official with great alacrity, because for her selfless charity was God, and she thought more of the poor lepers.
In 1969, the first rehabilitation center for the treatment of leprosy, founded by the Missionary Sisters of Charity, was established in a place called Dedagarh, just outside Calcutta. It was situated on a disused plot of land adjacent to a railroad trackbed and was constructed using burlap sacks, bamboo poles, iron sheets and tiles as building materials, along with a lot of imagination to construct a hut, the roof of which was partially built over the stakes of an open drain.
Teresa and the nuns began to seek out lepers who had been thrown out of their homes by friends, family and relatives, often going into the foul-smelling huts to chase away the maggots and flies that licked at the wounds of the lepers, to give them injections and dress their wounds, and to soothe their broken hearts.
The day the Dedaga Leprosy Rehabilitation Center began its services, Sister Theresa made a point of touching the body and hand of each leper as a gesture of care for each patient. She kindly said to everyone, "Please cheer up, God has definitely not abandoned you, let us all work together." Those women who had ulcerated off their fingertips, the elderly who had lost their legs, and the children who had rotted off their ears ...... immediately felt a warm current pass through their whole body, adding confidence to overcome their illnesses.
But for each leprosy patient, the medical miracle can not at the same time on their forehead "leprosy" tattoo scraped off, cured after the discharge of the patient is still subjected to social discrimination, no one is willing to employ them. So, in order to stay in the protected hospital, the patients were willing to tear their scabbed wounds ......
Faced with the reality of the leprosy survivors' return to the community, these rehabilitation centers founded by the Missionary Sisters of Charity began to arrange vocational training for the cured patients --Some patients were engaged in simple jobs such as weaving their own bandages and making their own medicine capsules; others worked in carpentry workshops, shoemaking workshops, brick kilns, and small farms within the leprosy rehabilitation centers, using their own labor to provide for their own basic needs; or cultivated their own rice and wheat fields to make them self-sufficient. Mother Theresa also got an old printing press with which the sick could print some leaflets and newspapers to get back into life and earn some money. In order to give the sick people the same life as the normal people, at Christmas, Mother Teresa always arranged for them to attend midnight mass, organized them to perform in plays, assisted the nuns in handing out Christmas gifts, and participated in lunchtime concerts, and so on.
All in all, the lepers living in the Rehabilitation Center can enjoy the joys of a normal person and live a normal life in every way, and they enjoy the dignity of a normal person again.
Excerpted from "A Life of Compassion and Love" compiled by Qu Yajun and other compilers, Zhuhai Publishing House, January 2002 edition
The words of Mother Teresa:
We are often incapable of doing great things,
but we can do some small things with great love.
----- Mother Teresa