Mother Teresa: a biography

“IT WILL BE A HARD LIFE”
On March 19, 1949, the feast day of St. Joseph, foster father of Jesus
and the protector of the Virgin Mary, a young girl appeared at 14 Creek
Lane. Subashni Das had been a boarder at St. Mary’s at Entally since she
was a small girl, and had been one of Mother Teresa’s students. She was
now in the last year of secondary school. She had come to join Mother
O U T O F A C E S S P O O L — H O P E
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Teresa in her work. Mother Teresa remarked, “It will be a hard life. Are
you prepared for it?”
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The young woman said yes, and in doing so became
Mother Teresa’s first postulant, taking the name of Agnes, Mother Teresa’s
Christian name. She would, in time, become Mother Teresa’s closest aide:
she replaced Mother Teresa as the mistress of novices, the nun who over-
sees the training of new nuns, and took over the duties of the mother su-
perior when Mother Teresa began traveling.
Some weeks later, another former student Magdalena Gomes also came
to the house. She, too, wished to join Mother Teresa in helping the poor.
She took the name of Sister Gertrude and became the order’s first doctor.
By Easter of that year, the three women were sharing the tiny quarters at
the Gomes’s home and traveling everyday to Motijihl. They lived as nuns,
though the Church had not yet recognized them as a formal religious
order.
Soon, two more women arrived to join them. By the beginning of sum-
mer, there were 10 young women, all former students of Mother Teresa,
living at the Gomes’s home. Since none had graduated from school,
Mother Teresa made sure that they completed their studies and that they
all passed their final exams. Of the original 10, only 2 eventually left. The
others went on to become some of the first novitiates of Mother Teresa’s
Missionaries of Charity.
To make room for the new arrivals, the Gomes’s opened the upper
room, which was really more like a large loft. The group used one area of
the room as a chapel. Father Henry donated a wood altar and candle-
sticks. Above the altar was the picture of the Virgin Mother that Father
Van Exem had given to Mother Teresa.
Mother Teresa instituted a schedule for the young women. Each morn-
ing, they were awakened by a bell, which also summoned them to meals.
The same bell also signaled periods of prayer, rest, and work. Every morn-
ing, clad in their saris, the young women and Mother Teresa left for the
poorest areas of Calcutta. The days followed a set routine: mornings were
spent teaching school, while afternoons were given to the sick and dying.
By this time, there were two schools to tend to: the first one in Motijihl
and another in the slum of Tiljala, where Mother Teresa rented another
small room for her new students.
The young women and Mother Teresa also established a dispensary,
which was located in a classroom in the local parish school. After school
hours, the large room was turned into a screening room for tuberculosis
patients. The classroom, which opened onto a veranda, was often the
scene of long lines of people waiting to be examined. The nuns tried to get
the most seriously ill into city hospitals. However, when necessary, they
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cared for the sick on the spot as they lay in the streets and alleys of the
city.
Mother Teresa worried about her charges. Remembering the advice of
the sisters at Patna, she was especially concerned that they were getting
enough to eat. Michael Gomes remembers one instance in which Mother
Teresa, sitting in the back of a truck with some bags of rice and flour, re-
turned at the end of the day from one of her begging expeditions. She had
not eaten all day nor gotten any water for fear that someone would steal
the food meant for her postulants. She went without in order that the
food would be delivered safely to the house.
To help the sisters, Father Van Exem and Father Henry made an an-
nouncement at Sunday mass calling for 
mushti bhikka,
a Bengali custom
where any families that were able put aside a handful of rice for a beggar.
This effort marked the start of the feeding program that the Missionaries
of Charity oversaw and that would in time include not only food, but
clothing and soap for the poor.