Those Hardest To Love

Preparation for India had me concerned.  Everyone said that it would be extremely difficult and I would be pushed to my limits there both physically and emotionally.  I wondered if all of the preparation was necessary and I thought that excessive concern had the potential to make people more susceptible to emotional trauma.  I thought that everyone was blowing things out of proportion and setting up the team for an explosion of mental breakdowns.  While in many cases my predictions were right, I did find myself tried more than I anticipated.

Rather than the typical tugging on the heart strings that one might expect, I found myself often feeling in the way and frustrated with the fact that I did not have anything useful to do.  Surprisingly, large portion of this uselessness was placed on me by one of the staff at the home, a hired staff member that instills fear into the hearts of any who volunteer at Nirmal Hriday, Mother Teresa’s home for the destitute and dying at Kalighat.  A woman whose petite stature and slight features deceive many into thinking her harmless before she strikes with barrage of berating broken English.

My first interactions with this woman happened on the first day I volunteered.  I had no idea what I was doing and I was looking for ways to make myself useful.  As I was making my way over to the multistage dish washing station to see if I could be any help there, suddenly she grabbed me by the arm and dragged me over to another part of the building where she attempted to instruct me in some task that she apparently wanted me to do.  Unable to understand anything she was saying, I simply nodded and when she was gone, I found another place to make myself useful.  Little did I know this was just the start to a long struggle to please this woman who I dubbed Kim Jong Nun.

The next day I found myself actually doing dishes in the aforesaid dish line.  At Nirmal Hriday, dishes were done progressively in many stages.  A few people scraped excess food and bones into a colander that strains into a bucket and then passes the dishes on to the scrubbers.  When the dishes were scrubbed they went through two phases of rinsing in tile sinks that drain on to the polished concrete floors, plugged only with a rag stuffed in the drainage hole.  After the shiny steel dishes have gone through all these stages, they ended up with me and two German girls who were volunteering for the first time.  We were minding our own business, drying and stacking the newly washed dishes in the designated area, when Kim Jong Nun pounced.  “Just a moment! Just a moment!” she yelled frantically, running at us waving her hands in a gesture indicating we should stop immediately, lest we unintentionally throw off the entire balance of the home and send all of the patients into a frenzy.  At least that is what I imagined would have happened based on how hysteric she was.  When we attempt to continue with our given task, she exasperatedly says “I speaking English! You no understand?!”  Obviously we did not.  We never did find out why we had to wait to dry those dishes.

She did not only preside over dishes though.  Her reign extended over the vast kingdom of laundry as well.  Almost every article of clothing, sheet, and rag is washed every day at Kalighat.  This means that every day there is a strict regimen of tasks that are to be followed to get all of the laundry done which includes a four stage washing process before the sopping garments get hung to dry on the roof.  I decided to use my physicality to haul loads of freshly washed laundry up the many flights of stairs to be sorted and hung and then bring the dried clothes back down to be folded collectively by the patients and volunteers.  I was in a steady routine of making trips up and down the stairs with the baskets and feeling very productive until Kim Jong Nun intervened once again. 

Kristine and Zach were helping me bring some laundry back down to the patients so they could begin folding when we ran into Kim Jong Nun at the bottom of the stairs.  There she is yelling at another volunteer who has just come down with another bundle of clean clothes.  Kim Jong Nun quickly snatched the bundle out of the volunteer’s hands and brusquely came back up the stairs toward the three of us who were frozen in terror of this tyrant.  When she saw us, she scowled, shooed us back upstairs, and gruffly barked some command at us.  We did not even hear what she said since we were so far up the stairs already that the clomping of our running feet drowned out whatever she was trying to convey.  When we reached the roof, we dropped the clothes on the ground in a pile and hid in the jungle of emerald green sheets, cowering in fear of what the repercussions of our actions would be.  Luckily our actions did not anger her as much as the other volunteers and we escaped unscathed.

Kim Jong Nun had very strong views on the volunteers that came through Kalighat.  We were able to see this when a group of unwell volunteers were instructed to fold gauze for bandages, a seemingly simple task that turned out to be quite difficult, at least when supervised by Kim Jong Nun.  Many of the members who were feeling under the weather went to fold gauze in the break room because they were not feeling well enough for other work but they still wanted to be helpful.  Large pieces of gauze were folded over a piece of cardboard that was cut to make perfectly sized bandages.  And when I say perfectly sized, I mean perfectly sized.

  Kim Jong Nun came to check on the progress of the bandage folders and was appalled by the quality of the work.  She quickly pushed aside Christina, one of the German girls, and began dismembering her pile of completed bandages.  Christina and the rest of us looked on helplessly as Kim Jong Nun proceeded to move the fold in the bandage a millimeter over before replacing the bandage in the “good” pile.  Obviously, these bandages would all have to be redone because it would have been catastrophic if the gauze was a millimeter too long.  There was no way the insufficiently large pieces would have gotten the job done.  After the disappointment of failure in such a simple task, many of the volunteers moved on to other jobs at which they will be more likely to succeed.  When all the offenders had left, Kim Jong Nun apparently confided in Kristine that she only likes certain kinds of volunteers.  Chinese, Korean, and Japanese volunteers were the only good ones, though there were some Americans that were not so bad.  She must have added that caveat because she was speaking to an American.

It did not matter what nation a volunteer came from though, they still had trouble communicating with her.  Another regular task at Kalighat is helping distribute pills to the patients.  There is a detailed log book of each patient’s medical needs that Kim Jong Nun flipped through every day to remind herself what pills to pass out to each patient.  After retrieving the medications from the bank of nondescript white bottles with the drug names written on the side, she unloads the handful of pills and says the name of one of the patients who is supposed to receive that dose.  A large majority of the volunteers are only there for the short term so they are not able to build as strong of relationships with the patients.  I was one of those short term volunteers.  When Kim Jong Nun told me the name of the patient I was meant to deliver the dosage too, I obviously had no idea who she was talking about.  When I asked her who that was, she simply repeated the name multiple times until she called over one of the able bodied patients and with great frustration told him to direct me to the patient. 

Looking back, Kim Jong Nun greatly affected my time at Kalighat for better or worse. I now realize the motivation behind her strictness and intensity.  The tight adherence to the rules was for the benefit of the patients.  The patients needed stability in their ever chaotic lives and Kim Jong Nun provided just that.  At times she may have taken her strictness to an extreme level but it was all in love for the patients.  She wanted to make sure that they were cared for in the best way possible.   The volunteers are not the ones who need to be cared for, the patients are.