The Reality of Suffering
Prominently placed on the wall of Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying Destitute is a sketch of Jesus on the cross, alongside are the words, “I thirst, I suffer”. My most vivid and distressing memory of an unforgettable trip to Calcutta was sitting in view of this image with someone who was also experiencing acute suffering.
The patient I was nursing was probably dying, I didn’t even know her name. She had no possessions, and without this home she would be on some Calcutta street or gutter. I cannot begin to recall or describe the agony of holding a dying person in your arms. She was critically malnourished, probably weighing about 4–5 stone. I must have spent several hours just holding her, she was shaking with pain and we were both soaked in her vomit. We clung to each other, unable to communicate, both crying … perhaps my first tears not borne out of the self pity which those of us from wealthy countries can afford to indulge in, but tears from a new knowledge of utter anguish, the pain with which Jesus constantly empathises.
I begin with this because learning about suffering was the very essence of the lessons I learned in India, and I thank God for a Saviour who choses to identify with it. I actually spent just five weeks in India last Summer, working mainly in Mother Teresa’s home for Dying Destitutes but then also in her mental institution and orphanage. After this I moved out of Calcutta into a rural area on the Bangladesh border to work in a YMCA orphanage.
The horror of Calcutta is inconceivable. The population exceeds twelve million, half of these are living in slums and shanty towns and an additional two miillion are just sleeping on pavements. In reality this means that there are people living everywhere, whole families make their homes in doorways, rubbish heaps, basically anywhere they can get space. The empty sewage pipes near where I stayed were each occupied by at least two or three families, and they would be considered extremely fortunate. There is no clean water, hygiene is both unrealistic and impractical, the whole place is pretty smelly, filthy, rat-ridden and generally dilapidated — through Western eyes very ugly. In addition to this are the vast shanty towns, although ‘vast’ refers to the population rather than the area. The conditions are repellent, I found exploring such places, and facing such mass poverty personally devastating.
Initially my reaction to the situation in which I found myself was one of sheer brokenness. No amount of reading and investigation can prepare you for what I was seeing. You cannot anticipate what happens to your heart when surrounded by the dark, appealing, often desperate eyes of begging children — they say it gets easier each time, perhaps I’m too soft, but for me it didn’t.
Even more dreadful was the begging indusrty that existed, when parents would deliberately break their children’s arms and legs, so they became deformed, and can beg more effectively. In the YMCA orphanage I worked at we had a little bboy called Meious. He had the most horrific burns down the side of his head and he had lost several fingers because his mother had deliberately thrown him on a fire when he was just five years old.
Although I was heartbroken by my surroundings I gradually began to see a fascination in the so-called “City of Joy”. It is like being in another world. The whole atmosphere, even when just walking around at night, seems to heighten every sense. The markets, where your meat is killed before you, the endless invites to carpety factories, the hand-pulled rick-saws, the little cafe we used to enjoy where the washing up was passed out of the window to be done in a puddle on the street, and of course the two mile traffic jam that would develop because of the sacred cow in the middle of the road. The culture is rich and intruiging although I found the voluptuousness incongrous amongst such poverty. However, India is a land of extremes, I still find it attractive and repellent simultaneously.
My work was physically and emotionally exhausting. Mother Teresa’s home for the Dying Destitutes contains about one hundred and twenty patients, all of whom are people who no-one else will care for, often AIDS victims, lepers, those at the bottom of the caste system … There are probably about ten to twelve deaths per day, the stench of the place alone is nauseating, the medical problems encountered are horrific, and the constant wailing and crying of the patients heartbreaking. There was so much need, but in Calcutta you are faced with the situation of the Good Samaritan in at least ten to twenty people each time you walk down the street.
God took away so much of my fear (as well as my rat, curry and cockroach phobias!). I was privileged in actually meeting Mother Teresa, she had stressed the importance of loving God first, loving others is just a natural and obedient reaction. Being a Christian in that situation meant I had to try to fully participate in the suffering, to have my heart broken by the things that break Jesus’ heart.
The other work I did was not quite so difficult. Working in Mother Teresa’s orphanage provided a multitude of gorgeoous babies for me to cuddle! While a mental institution of three hundred patients supplied hard work and some very memorable if hazardous moments. Moving outside Calcutta into a very primitive area provided me with another new perspective, as well as an orphanage full of the most loving and loveable children (but I guess that’s another article).
Perhaps the most difficult thing was coming home to this society. From being in a situation where my worries and fears centered around whether the person I nursed yesterday would be alive tomorrow, I suddenly had to face University life, which however enjoyable, felt so trivial in comparison. Basically my priorities have radically altered. I still feel a tremendous sense of guilt for my current lifestyle, this is a necessary and deserved reaction although I need to channel it in pproductive ways. Occasionally I wish that I hadn’t been exposed to some of the things I saw and felt, they were of such devastating propensity. However, I know how privileged I am. Perhaps if more people saw real suffering we would be less likely to ignore the needs Jesus cannot forget.