Reading Mother Teresa--The School at Motijhil

“If you have faith as small as a mustard seed,

 you can say to this mulberry tree, 

‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ 

and it will obey you.” Luke 17:6 

After 20-some years of with the Sisters of Lorato at the Entally Convent, after two years of waiting, sometimes impatiently, on the will of her superiors, after just a four long months of medical instruction at Patna, Mother Teresa, dressed in what might well be considered a shoddy sari, the wardrobe of the poor, walked out into the streets of Motijhil, a place whose name translates “Pearl Lake,” but, in 1948 at least, was anything but.

Today, guidebooks say, Motijhil is an almost middle-class suburb; but back then it was a bustee, a slum, a desolate place full of refugees from the starving countryside. India – and Calcutta specifically – was suffering through the after-effects of World War II, immense poverty and starvation, and a glut of country folks looking merely to stay alive in India’s cities. People lived in shacks, had little food, and lacked the wherewithal to send their children to school. Motijhil was no “pearl lake,”; the only source of water something putrid and sewage-filled. In 1948, Motijhil was infested with “the holes of the poor.”

But ministering to the poor in those holes is what Mother Teresa claimed Jesus himself had called her to do, and, once ready and able, she walked into the world of hunger and sickness and starvation as if charmed by none other than the Holy Spirit. From the local priest, she obtained the names of several families who made their often windowless homes in the neighborhood and told parents that she was about to start a school for refugee children right there within reach. Starting a school seemed without question the right alternative for her, having been a teacher herself for so long.

“Tomorrow,” she must have told them. “Tomorrow, I will begin teaching.”

That she had nothing – no blackboard or chalk, no slates, no pencils, no tablets, no books – seemed of little importance it seems. “Tomorrow,” she must have said, “have your children there ready to learn.”

That night, she returned to an old folk’s’ residence maintained by the Little Sisters of the Poor. Likely as not, she lay awake for hours, dreaming of what was to come.

What was to come was peculiarly her dream, not the dream of most of us. Right there beside a stinking pool, right where she had directed those parents, the next morning, bright and early, she found five little children waiting for her.

So she started beneath a tree, this odd European woman in a third-rate sari and dusty sandals. “I took a stick and used it as a marker on the ground where the children sat,” she told her biographer. “We began right on the ground” {34}.

Mother Teresa was no first-year teacher, and the children who showed up that day, on the first day of a school with a dirt floor, were not part of her first class. But somehow I can’t help but think that, if she were still alive today, she could remember each of those five faces, each of the children who’d found their way to the school beneath the tree from the holes of the poor.

Somehow, I can’t help thinking that that afternoon, after school, when Mother Teresa spent an hour or so walking back to the old folks’ home where she was staying, she was praising God, praising God on high.