GONXHA AGNES BOJAXHIU was born on August 27, 1910, at Skopje, Yugoslavia, one of three children of an Albanian storekeeper, Nicholas, and his peasant wife, Rose. Her interest in missionary activity was aroused at the age of 12 while attending the German Gymnasium, when she heard of work being done by Jesuits near Darjeeling. By the time she was 18 any doubts had been resolved. Taking her vows as a nun, she became SISTER TERESA in the Institute of the Virgin Mary in Dublin, Ireland. Soon thereafter, on January 6, 1929, she was sent to the Loreto Community in Calcutta, India, to teach at St. Mary's High School.

Surrounded by the great city's teeming slums and unfamiliar with the languages of Calcutta, the first months were difficult, but the young nun was not to be deterred. Soon able to speak enough English to be understood, she next took up the study of Hindi and later mastered Bengali as well.

Her response to the human tragedies unfolding daily around her posed a greater test of discipline for the small, grey-eyed nun. She had sworn obedience to the strict rules of the Loreto Community whose principal objective was education, but she would never learn to walk through Calcutta's slums, seeing the misery of bruising poverty, malnutrition and disease without feeling she must help in some way.

For 20 years, SISTER TERESA fulfilled her obligations as a teacher until, in 1948, her petition to follow a calling to the people of the slums was granted. With consent of the Holy Father, Pope Pius XII, she founded a new Indian congregation, the Missionaries of Charity, devoted entirely to the poor.

Thus, while a new era was opening for India with independence, when her leaders would begin to see their high hopes materialize in huge dams, industrial plants and in the political awakening of their people, a small band of women joined together to serve by easing the sorrow of Calcutta's destitute.

Mindful of the new congregation’s mission, MOTHER TERESA assumed Indian citizenship and chose for the Missionaries of Charity a habit that would be both symbolic and practical. Their simple, white cotton saris edged with blue, with a cross and rosary tucked in their waists and open sandals help the Sisters identify with the people of the slums and are well-suited to Calcutta's searing climate.

The Missionaries of Charity consists now of 169 nuns, serving also in Ranchi, Shansi, Agra, Ambala, Asansol, Amravabi, Bhagalpur, Bombay and Delhi. All were trained by MOTHER TERESA. Most are Indians but several come from Pakistan, one each from Nepal, Albania, Yugoslavia, Germany and England, two are Maltese and two American. The majority are very young, though a doctor recently joined as a novice at the age of 40 and with her professional skills has done much for the medical services rendered by the small community. Six others are training to be doctors, several to teach and serve as secretaries. Cautioned by MOTHER TERESA, "Unless we are poor ourselves, how can we know our people?", the Sisters practice poverty as severe as their slum neighbors.

The first institutional undertaking of the new Congregation grew from MOTHER TERESA's long repressed desire to give succor particularly to the men, women and children who died, untended, in Calcutta's slums. In Kalighat, the ancient quarter of the city dominated by the Temple of Kali, the snake-formed Goddess of Destruction of the Hindus, a unique hospital known as Nirmal Hriday, or Pure Heart, has stood, since 1952, near the Temple gates accepting only those left in the streets to die. The Calcutta Corporation entrusted to MOTHER TERESA a building for this Home for Dying Destitutes and provides a monthly subsidy of Rs.l,000 which is used almost entirely for medicines. All other provisions must come from charity.

With space for only 100 patients at one time, the Sisters have taken in some 13,763 dying destitutes over the 10 years Nirmal Hriday has been in operation. Some are restored to useful lives but more than half have succumbed to the relentless effects of a lifetime of undernourishment and disease. Of these MOTHER TERESA says: "We can only hold their hands, give what comfort we can and a decent chance to die in peace." Those who recover are allowed to stay as long as space is available but when more dying are brought in they are asked to leave.

MOTHER TERESA follows with keen interest the children who have regained their health under the Sisters' loving care. An example is a boy brought to her dying of starvation, who, after a little time at Nirmal Hriday and a few good, square meals, grew healthy again. Given a shoeshine outfit, he set up shop near The Statesman where he is today, now married and ready with a helping hand for those whose lives seem as hopeless as his once did.

Medical treatment is freely given in the Home; many doctors now offer MOTHER TERESA all the help she needs, even paying for hospital treatment out of their own pockets. But Nirmal Hriday's major purpose is simply to help the unfortunate, who have lived huddled, underfed and resigned in the slums, spend their last days as "human beings." The makeshift beds are nothing more than old mats padded with rags and spread on cement flooring, but the bath, clean sheets, clothing, food and compassion offered are frequently the first such kindness a destitute has known.

A second institution run by the Missionaries of Charity is Shishu Bhavan. Begun in 1954 as a 20-bed home for unwanted blind, lame and tubercular children of the slums and as a relief center for the poor, it was equipped and is maintained principally by annual donations from the American Women's Club of Calcutta. In 1959, the Club financed the addition of a new six-room wing to provide a dormitory for older girls, a commercial classroom, maternity clinic, general dispensary and chest clinic. The home now accommodates 140 children from one week to 16 years of age, provides dispensary and other facilities for the poor and a laboratory for diagnosis and treatment of leprosy.

In Delhi, the Sisters manage a third institution which functions as a combined orphanage and home for retarded children.

Since the first dispensary was opened in 1949, six are now operating in Calcutta, one equipped with a TB chest apparatus, treating an average of 49,000 patients a year with the assistance of volunteer doctors. And at 52 centers whatever food has been donated to the Missionaries of Charity and can be spared from Nirmal Hriday is given to the needy.

Education for the young has not been neglected by MOTHER TERESA and her nuns. In six of the poorest districts of Calcutta they conduct 13 primary day schools, some with only a tree for shade, teaching daily from 2,000 to 2,500 children from the slums and bustees (small villages or settlements). Instruction in reading, writing and simple sums is given in Hindi and Bengali and in the upper classes English is also taught. Students who apply themselves are encouraged to attend special classes in carpentry or sewing, and two commercial courses for girls in shorthand and typing are now offered in the new wing of the Shishu Bhavan.

A particular concern of MOTHER TERESA in recent years has been the lepers. In Calcutta, with a known 30,000 cases of leprosy and beds for only 3,000, the Missionaries of Charity have operated for some years a mobile unit donated by the Catholic Relief Services-U.S. Catholic Conference, New York, treating weekly an average of 4,200 lepers who roam the streets, and a dispensary administering to over 500 in the same period. A mobile unit in Delhi makes weekly visits to a leper station near the Red Fort to distribute medicine and rations of flour. In Agra, Ambala, Shansi and Amravabi such units are also operating.

Eleven nuns trained in the Leprosy Department of the Hospital for Tropical Diseases now visit eight centers each week in Calcutta's bustee areas, sometimes treating patients by the wayside, sometimes going into squalid homes on their errand of mercy. The Sisters have charted over 4,200 cases and the registered numbers are increasing steadily as word goes around that help is offered.

The nuns' work in the leper colony at Asansol, a suburb of Calcutta, is typical. Five years ago these outcasts slept under trees on a vacant lot behind the law courts. Chased away, they moved to vacant railway land and on to a fallow lot owned by a steel factory at Burnpur before they found a desolate area on the outskirts of Asansol beside a nullah (drainage ditch) where the owner collected a fee of Rs.3 for each shack. By 1961, there were 115 lepers living in 32 flimsy shelters constructed with tattered gunny sacks, old tins, leaves and scraps of wood. Coming daily to Asansol and Burnpur to beg for food and money was their only contact with society until the Missionaries of Charity several months ago began visiting once a week bringing medicine and a kind word. From the Sisters the wives of local railway officials heard of the lepers' plight and raised enough for 100 blankets—to MOTHER TERESA only a beginning.

Next, she intends to establish a "town of peace" where cured leper families will live and learn together with the nuns' encouragement to face the difficulties of resuming normal lives.

In response to her appeal, January 29, since 1956, was set aside as Flag Day in the city of Calcutta, and men and women of many nationalities and creeds are seen in the streets, in offices, eating houses and at schools selling flags to help support the work of the Missionaries of Charity among the lepers. The symbol on the flag is a hand holding a clapper, recalling medieval times when lepers were outcasts in Europe, not allowed to live among their fellowmen, obliged to wear long white robes and masks over their faces, and to ring bells to warn of their approach, calling out "unclean, unclean." Over this symbol is written "Touch the leper with your compassion."

Managing these many philanthropic enterprises requires every resource MOTHER TERESA and her small community can command. After Mass each morning the Sisters, working in pairs, visit assigned neighborhoods, scouting streets and alleys for the sick, calling children to school and giving advice to those who seek it. For dying destitutes, whether found by the Sisters and brought in an ambulance or taken to MOTHER TERESA by police or others, there is a place in her special building alongside Kali Temple. "Because they are unwanted," MOTHER TERESA says simply, "I want them." But faced with great needs and small means, she sadly must turn away from Nirmal Hriday those not sick enough to die or from the relief centers those not poor enough to starve or willing to comply with her frequently relaxed rule that regular petitioners come bathed and cleanly clothed. She insists on cleanliness wherever possible and a daily demonstration of hygiene to their slum neighbors is the Sisters washing at the public well their second saris.

Working chiefly among Hindus and Moslems, the Roman Catholic Missionaries of Charity make no attempts at conversion. They simply seek out the poorest of the poor of all castes, creeds and colors and are concerned solely with injecting dignity into slum life and so bring God closer to them and them closer to God.

The pale-complexioned dynamic woman who began this work divides her time between administering drugs at Nirmal Hriday, soliciting funds and food from officials and private donors, and conducting classes for her nuns. She also tries to spend some time each day at Shishu Bhavan. Now residing with several of her nuns in a small apartment given to her one evening by a stranger who walked into Nirmal Hriday and left the keys saying she should have a decent place to live, MOTHER TERESA stops only to eat and sleep.

Supplies for the homes, clinics and feeding centers are continually a pressing problem. In their leaflet the Missionaries of Charity ask for:

"Any oddments lying about the house.

Old clothes, especially children's.

Old household linen.

Any bedclothes you have finished with and mattresses.

Toys—even old and broken ones can be used.

Paper wrappings and tinfoil.

Children's books.

Christmas cards for reconditioning.

Bottles—half-used bottles of patent medicines.

Tins and boxes of all kinds.

Excess vegetables from the garden.

Leftovers from a party.

Any surplus food."

Every item is used frugally—worn textbooks are passed along from class to class, slates and chalk guarded like gold—but despite these handicaps, the work progresses steadily.

In January 1962, MOTHER TERESA received from the President of India the Padma Shri, a national award for service to the nation. Her response when congratulated bespoke the firm faith which is her guide: "But what have I done? It is His work and I simply follow."

August 1962
Manila

REFERENCES:

Amrita Bazar Patrika. October 14, 1959.

The Current. March 24, 1962.

Hindusthan Standard. October 17, 1959.

"A Mission of Love and Charity." (An article from Indian press) n.d.

Missionaries of Charity. "Mother Teresa's Leprosy Appeal Fund." Calcutta, July, 1960.

"Mother Teresa." Jubilee. Vol. 5, no. 10. February, 1958.

The Statesman. July and November 23, 1961.

USIS Special Release. Calcutta, October 13, 1959.