Word: calcuttas
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After a brief period in Rathfarnham, where she learned English at the order's abbey, Sister Teresa sailed for India. She spent the next 17 years as a teacher and then principal of a Calcutta high school for privileged Bengali girls. It was on Sept. 10, 1946, during a train ride to Darjeeling for a religious retreat, that Teresa received a "call within a call" in which she felt God directed her to the slums. "The message was quite clear," she told colleagues. "I was to leave the convent and help the poor whilst living among them...
...years later, after her adopted homeland won independence, Teresa received permission from Rome to strike out on her own. Attracting a dozen disciples, she started what she called her "little society." The nuns crept along the harsh streets of Calcutta in search of mankind's most miserable; the sisters had to beg for their own support, even their daily meals. "There were times during the first three or four months," says Teresa's biographer, Navin Chawla, "when she'd be humiliated, and tears would be streaming down her cheeks. [She] told herself, 'I'll teach myself to beg, no matter...
...Missionaries' first projects, in 1952, was to turn a former hostel beside a Hindu temple into a place where the poor of Calcutta, who often died alone in the streets, could spend their last hours in comfort and cleanliness. As a Catholic mission, the sisters faced alienation and neighborhood hostility. The temple priests even asked city authorities to relocate the newly named Nirmal Hriday, or Home for the Dying, hospice. But then one of the Hindu priests was found with advanced stages of tuberculosis after he had been denied a bed in a city hospital, reserved for those who could...
...order's Home for the Dying in Calcutta also attracted criticism. Unlike in modern hospices in the West, the dying at the mission home are not provided with pain-killing drugs. In November 1996 a German volunteer questioned one of Teresa's nuns. "I have heard you don't give any medicines," he said. The nun replied, "This is not a treatment center. This is a place where the dying can die with dignity...
...sometimes refers to distances by the number of Rosaries she can pray while traveling them, did not make her Christian conversion until age 17. She was moved to a new faith by the terrible religious carnage that attended the Indian partition in 1947 and by observing Mother Teresa in Calcutta, years later, attending to its refugees. "It was inspiration at first sight," says Nirmala, who became one of the order's first volunteers...