Mother Teresa’s 27 years of service

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34042, 5 January 1976, Page 6

Mother Teresa’s 27 years of service

(By I

PETER O’NEIL.

, through N.Z.P.A.)

NEW DELHI. I Twenty-seven years ago, a small Albanianborn nun called Sister! Teresa decided to dedic-i ate her life to helping: the dying destitutes of i Calcutta.

Now, this 65-year-old woman has 60 homes across India and her mobile dispensaries are treating 1,600,000 people. When terrible floods ravaged Patna, the capital of Bihar province. recently, stranding more than Im people for over a week. Mother Teresa was there helping the victims. Yet her first 20 years in India were spent in the protected environment of the convent school. Mother Teresa, who was educated in Yugoslavia, first went to India in 1928. She became principal of the Indian religious order of Saint Anne, attached to the I Loreto nuns. Mother Teresa’s call came jin 1948 when she was travelling to the cool hill resort of Darjeeling. In classic tradition, she was granted permission to abandon her nun’s habit and wear the plain dress of the [local people. Wearing the Methrani’s ;blue-bordered white saree — i caste dress of the lowest of the Hindus — she left her I fashionable convent walls !for the degradation of the ! alleys, the open city drains and the destitutes lying among the rats on foetid | rubbish tips.

All she had to distinguish her from the “untouchables” — wjiom Mahatma Gandhi renamed “hariyans” or “the children of God” — was the small crucifix on her left shoulder. She spent four months [picking up the rudiments of medical knowledge in Patna, and then moved to Calcutta. Within two years she was given permission to found her own order, the congregation of the Missionaries of Charity. Her life’s work had officially begun. Many of her former pupils i had begun helping her by 'begging from door to door, ■ seeking medicine and food. But a woman she found dying outside a city hospital convinced her that she would ■ need walls to shelter the destitute. The woman was ■ too poor to gain admission to the hospital and too ill |to survive. The rats were alreadv gnawing at her. Mother Teresa’s “Treasure House” of Calcutta, as she calls it, sprang from the ‘charitv of the Hindus she ■served. They gave her two ' rooms in a Hindu temple and wayfarers’ rest house. 60 HOMES From that beginning she has established 60 homes across . India, offering refuge to the dying and the children abandoned in the streets and treating people suffering from manv diseases. Although money is always in short supply, there are [occasional Government grants, and the auctioning of a car given to Pope Paul VI by Americans brought in a 'considerable sum.

The Imperial Chemical Industries of India gave her a new building which now functions as a hospital.

In addition, she has won a number of international awards whose accompanying prizes have been a great help in her work.

The size of her chosen task is enormous in a country where more than 200 m people live below the official subsistence level. Speaking on the twentyfifth anniversary of the founding of her order, Mother Teresa said: “Poverty is the result of the selfishness of those who have and want to have more at the expense of those who have not and have less and less. God is love and His love is [for His people. He has put enough in the world to feed ■ and clothe them all.”