From Mother Theresa’s book, ‘A Simple Path’:
“Shishu Bhavan, our children’s home in Calcutta, is made up of a number of tall buildings behind a wall on a busy main road. At the entrance are the day clinics, where the poor can bring their children, and the day adoption offices. In rooms inside are the infants and small babies, in row upon row of green cots. There is also a small courtyard for the children to run around in as well as a room where they can play games and have their meals.
Shishu Bhavan is run by Sister Charmaine Jose. She and her sisters look after about 300 sick or malnourished children at any one time, as well as poor unmarried mothers, whom they provide with jobs.
There is also an outpatient section at which three doctors dispense medical attention to perhaps 1,000 to 2,000 patients a week. Then there is the adoption parlor for those who want to discuss adopting some of the children. When children reach the age of 10 and are not adopted, we sometimes send them to boarding schools to be educated and then to college, or to a secretarial course, and we get them work. Once they have settled into their own lives we usually help them get married and give them a dowry to start them off. They are very happy about this and they bring their own children back regularly to visit. I often tell them that they are lucky in having not just one mother-in-law but twenty!
On the ground floor of Shishu Bhavan there are cooking facilities to feed over 1,000 people daily. These are usually beggars from the street and this is the one place they can rely on for one meal a day, which is all they get. However there is also unforeseen disasters that occur, and then we need to be in attendance and offer relief services. For instance, when a large area near Calcutta was flooded and washed away, 1,200 families were left stranded with nothing. Sisters from Shishu Bhavan, and also brothers, worked all night taking them supplies and offering shelter.” ~ from the book ‘Mother Theresa, A Simple Path, Ballantine Books 1995, p. 120-121.
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