'Missionaries of Charity homes are Overdue for improvements!!!

This is one of many letters volunteers provided me over the years to present to the then 'Missionaries of Charity CEO -Superior General Nirmala to encourage her to improve conditions. Over the years attempts to alert the nuns that their homes and conditions were nowhere near good enough fell on deaf ears!!!AND CONTINUE TO!!  I spoke with Nirmala more than a dozen times. I presented letters from volunteers who were concerned enough to speak out even at risk of being possibly subsequently disallowed to continue volunteering. The tragic thing remains that due to the 'Missionaries of Charity using below minimum staffing levels, seriously low wages and discouraging locals from volunteering, the foreign volunteers are providing essential functions!

Irressponsible CEO of 710 Mother Teresa homes!

In December 2010 Sister' Mary Prema as the current Superior General/CEO of Missionaries of Charity  IS ONLY available for consultation on the state of the 710 institutions she is in charge of when she wants to be! Yes when I wished to remind her that there were problems in her Mumbai/Bombay/Byculla home dating back and still existent she was unavailabe for at least the next three following weeks!  This CEO has no Deputy.  One of the nuns from Missionaries of Charity Managing Council with whom I discussed the situation was visibly and audibly diisnterested in any  problem and became furious when I said that I would xerox my letter to her Superior. Though Missionaries of Charity DO have had a website for years there was no available email contact or any Deputy who could attend to any complaint or suggestion that all other companies usually provide. This num was visibly annoyed that someone had pointed out that  the five blind girls in Byculla were being ignored and neglected so much that none of them could utter a single word! 
This refusal to attend to problems involving residents by simply dismissing the complainant from continuing or ever volunteering in this organisation again is a common experience when I've talked with volunteers in Calcutta.Most companies are concerned with profit but this company uses a zoo-like environment to emotionally compel generous people to donate money and in Mumbai they donated acres of items- I saw truckloads taken away in 2008 alone.  People also give an undisclosed amount of money- which one ex Missionary of Charity told me amounted to thousands of dollars daily on her watch back nearly 20 years ago! But the conditions in the 'homes' remain in 1950s style and the food miserable and non- nutritous- I've tasted it! and some of it made me dry-retch!

Mother Teresa WAS the BAD one!

Because I started volunteering just after Mother Teresa died in 1997. In Trivandrum the capital city of Kerala in a leafy street I saw conditions in her home which have given me nightmares ever since. Firstly I was asked to help look after the five toddlers. These children were trapped in cots painted with paint containing lead and on sodden sheets. Their physical state was pitiful. One child was scratching his head relentlessly- his hair was full of lice; another boy was banging his head against the cot, a little girl was imitating the head banger; another little girl, Judy, started screaming the moment she saw me but there was one perhaps normal child who held out her arms for me to hold her- saying 'Amah, amah' [mother]. There was an Indian girl who was also volunteering that day- and she said that Judy had screamed when she had first set eyes on her as well. Why were these children in such a condition? during the entire day after they were given a cold water bath they were not allowed to leave their cots. We had to watch them cry because they were not allowed out to play until 5pm [when we had gone]  Needless to say I didn't see the Indian girl the next day and the children themselves disppeared without a trace another day later.
Actually the first person to notice and worry about the problems in Mother Teresa's in 1988 did tell me he believed the conditions improved after she died- though sadly not immediately.- and only in little ways such as allowing music to be played... to be continued...

Your help could change children's lives!

Due to personal technical difficulties -[fortunately now resolved!]this blog is late. However I'm wondering if any of you people could send emails to the Archbishop's House  bombaydiocese@vsnl.com  or to any reliable Catholics about improving especially the state of life for the five blind girls [who as I wrote about earlier in my blog] in late 2010 were still enduring a miserable existance- not even learning how to talk and spending most of the time alone inside  metal cots. In 2008 I had been unable in 3 months to encourage the Missionary of Charity nuns to let them attend the Bombay Dada Blind School. I went to the Bishop - one of five in Bombay/Mumbai and spoke at length and wrote several pages describing their situation and sadly that of many other neglected children]in 2008.  He emailed 6 months after our meeting  to say how co-operative the nuns were. BUT when I returned in 2010 and visited NOTHING had changed for these girls - nothing in their life had improved!!!  The usual- nameless cots, nothing of their own, nobody speaking to them...