This is about my experience with Mother Teresa’s mission at Prem Dan, where I volunteered for just one day in December, 2015.
After 6am mass at Mother House and a breakfast of Indian tea, white bread and banana, I walked for 20 minutes with a group of 10 or so volunteers (mostly from Europe and Latin America) through some gritty, poor neighborhoods. When we arrived, I walked past a van where they were loading a very skinny dead body wrapped in a white sheet, with a small flower arrangement laid on the abdomen of the covered body (wrapped like a package). I appreciated the clean whiteness, and the beautiful simple flowers on this body being carefully placed alone in the van. I said a prayer for the recently departed soul, still floating around, perhaps.
We went towards the women's dorm, as the men in our group went to the men's area. There was a covered area with a long concrete slab with 4 sinks and concrete slab in between. Two sinks were for washing and two were for rinsing with slab space for sliding laundry to the next stage. At the last stage, three resident ladies and a young volunteer was doing the wringing by hand of the sheets, towels, washrags and smocks. The older ladies were a bit tired, sitting, not able to wring too well… I was wringing strongly, gotta get more water out! I and a girl from Argentina worked the stairs to get buckets of wringed laundry up 3 flights to the roof where it would get hung to dry on the 100 clothes lines.
One young volunteer from China who was so beautiful to me, had bought jasmine flower garlands in a market on the way to the place, and gifted them to two ladies by putting them around their neck. One lady was very out of it and doing repetitive actions near the staircase where I was transferring laundry buckets. She kept opening a metal gate that was behind her as she sat in a wheelchair. She wanted to reach back and close it, or open it... or close it. Then she discovered this garland. As I brought buckets of laundry to the staircase for my Argentinian friend to haul to the roof, I saw the process of her inspection and dissection of this foreign and interesting object someone had placed upon her. She wasn't seeing beautiful flowers, but interesting shapes and textures, I think. She dropped the garland, I gave it back to her. A few times... There were lots of buckets going to the staircase...
After all laundry was done (40 or 50 metal buckets worth), we went up to hang… I loved this part, up on the roof, able to see out to the neighborhood. We looked at the other rooftops where there is quite a bit of life in India... Many people sleep, visit and hang laundry on rooftop terracess. Cats hang on rooftops to be safe from all the dogs. There could have been some great pics but no pics were allowed. Alis from Mexico said she would send me pics, but I have yet to email her to ask!
We then went to the ladies sitting at tables in their little cotton smocks with a random flower print. All but a few had shorn hair and no jewelry. They were sitting dutifully at the tables… maybe they had metal cups of water. Now it was time to be with these Bengali-speaking ladies. How to spend time with them?
There was a little toiletry bucket of nail polishes, combs, brushes and oils. We could paint their nails, comb/brush their hair, or massage them. Massage seemed the most therapeutic and intimate, so I decided to take the glycerine and offer massages. I massaged about 12 ladies… first arms and shoulders. Then decided to do full arms, hands and shoulders. One lady asked for leg massage after, so I did her legs and feet after arms, hands and shoulders.
One lady spoke to me in Bengali for 10 minutes before I started any massages, and she was telling me her dramatic story, of some injustice, I think… maybe how her family left her there… because Alis told me later that day that she saw a horrible thing when she arrived that morning. A man with a cane asked where is the exit, “I can’t find the door, where is the door?” and a pair of younger men came at him and pulled him away from the entrance while he protested, “No, I am not supposed to be here! Where is my family! I need to find my family, we just came here to go to mass! They will wonder where I am, I have to find my family!” They dragged him toward a building and obviously the family had abandoned him there without telling him. Will they ever visit him? Will they explain later, why he could not live with them anymore?
How many of these women I was with, were abandoned by their families at the stage of life where they are supposed to be relaxing after all the work of their lives, enjoying their grandchildren, and enjoying the labors of the children who would not cook and clean for them as they enjoy their elderhood. But now they are stuck in a Catholic home stripped of their Indian clothes, their long hair, their jewelry, their deities, and even of their pranams and “Namaskar.” I was told by a volunteer that the sisters do not like it when people pranam or say Namaste, or Namaskar. These women I massaged had interesting tattoos on their forearms, a relic of their past devotion and it was clear to me that many of them must be Hindus, and many probably are not Catholic converts in this Bengali city where women are extra proud of their extra shiny red and white sarees and Durga and Laxmi festivals.
I could not get a good sense of the mental capacities of these women that mostly didn’t speak. Some did speak to each other but without knowing the language, I could not tell how lucid and in reality they were. The hired staff were super efficient and logistical, not giving much loving empathy to residents in the tiny short time I was around them. After massages, the lunch was served onto plates and the ladies were given plates of rice with a rice/chicken/potato stew which looked pretty good.
One lady needed to be fed, as her hands were folded in and useless. She hardly had teeth, but was a vigorous eater. I would bring a spoon of food to her mouth and she would help me guide it in. She successfully communicated that she wanted more food on each spoon. She ravished the food. Not sure why... She was happy to be eating. She smiled at me after many of the bites. Maybe those were the bites that had the best amount of food and went into her mouth at the right angle. In a place like this, those little things make a person happy. I worked the side of the spoon to cut the chicken hearts into bitesize pieces... I think she liked getting little pieces of chicken heart in each bite like that. This was the highlight of my day. Helping a woman eat and catching the food not making it into her mouth with my other hand, and seeing her smile with a lot of the bites.
It was time to help some of the ladies to the dormitory now. Everyone moved with the routine and were tuned in to the timing of it all. I think they depended on teh timing of it all, like babies love the security of feeding, bathing and nap times. It was time to nap. I wheeled a few ladies to the dormitory. The beds are covered with clean sheets. The beds are about 2 and a half feet apart from each other. Set up in 4 rows with one aisle down the middle. There are beds in the breezeway area. It looks like an overflow, they couldn't fit more beds into the proper dorm hall. Soon there were traffic jams of wheelchairs as volunteers and staff were delivering their charges to their respective beds. One lady needed to use the bathroom. It's times like these that having a physically handicapped father who was unashamed of his limitations and asking for help comes in handy in my life. I didn't bat an eye going into the shared toilet area with water running constantly into a trash can for I have no idea what purpose so that the floor had a 1/4 inch of water on it... but when I wheeled my lady towards a toilet, she eased off her wheelchair, I struggled to help her to the seat, but she grunted that she would do her thing which was to move slightly away from the chair to pee right on the floor that had that constant flushing of 1/4 inch of water. OK, I see why the water is running over the edge of that container. Another woman was naked sitting on a toilet facing away from the door, hoping for something to happen. It looked like some level of struggle, but she was balanced and stable as far as I could tell. We were standing in the water she just peed in, but oh well, here we go back to the dormitory (attached by the door) tracking in the pee-water. But this place is clean. It looks and smells clean and the huge quantity of laundry we did that morning was a profession of the cleanliness. The ladies were all accumulating on their beds... sitting, lying. If they were sitting, I thought, "they must get so bored," but if they were lying I thought "it's nice they have a clean place to rest their body."
This is not the home for the dying, this is a nursing home for ladies that are not all there mentally, many probably rejected by their families... I wish I knew that their families visited them. I wish I felt that my visit had helped them some how. They seem unphased. Maybe I was just one of many new strangers that looks strange and speaks a strange tongue that comes to do something interesting overseas. I am not their daughter or husband. But I hope the human touch and gentle regard does support them somehow at some level they may not even be too aware of. The most important thing is for us to have an intention to help and give.
In India, Christians love St. George, the dragon slayer. A statue was installed here on an exterior wall. You can pick which dragon you are slaying in any particular time of your life - it seems we always have to be slaying one. Maybe anyone who needs to (me or some of the ladies) can slay the dragon of attachment to holding on to life as it likely was for many of these ladies in their rich Hindu Bengali culture living with their immediate families, all factors which are gone in this place. But who am I to say these ladies are sad for that, I am assuming... and projecting, perhaps, but it seems at the end of life people need their spiritual practice more than ever. I hope the internal practice can happen for these ladies, as their external world that I saw does not reflect the spiritual life that is practiced by most Hindu Indian people I have seen.
#motherhouse #motherteresa #kolkata #premdan #volunteering #hinduculture #missions #catholicmissions #india
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