Mother Teresa: A Biography

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clinics and, in time, would take over the day-to-day work at the leprosy
colony in Titlagarh.
Like Mother Teresa’s own Missionaries of Charity, the Brothers grew
rapidly. Within a decade of their creation, Brother Andrew opened up the
first overseas house in war-torn Vietnam. From there, the order began
opening houses all over the world, usually in places where the Missionar-
ies of Charity did not have a presence. In 1975, the Brothers opened a
house in a poor, crime-infested neighborhood in Los Angeles, California,
where they began working with drug addicts and alcoholics who had been
living on the street.
There was no shortage of rough neighborhoods in the world, and
Brother Andrew sought out as many as he could find, establishing homes
in Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Guatemala, the Philippines, El Sal-
vador, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Brazil. Everywhere they went,
the Brothers undertook the jobs they knew best. Their mission, more than
that of the Missionaries of Charity, brought them into contact with the
residents of many a city’s mean streets and society’s outcasts: the crimi-
nals, the drug addicts, and the hopeless alcoholics. The Brothers also con-
tinued their work with orphaned and wayward boys. Wherever they went,
they established soup kitchens and helped those in need to receive medi-
cal attention.
Still, the Brothers’ road to success was not without its bumps. Pre-
dictably, Brother Andrew and Mother Teresa clashed over the order’s
management. One issue was dress; Brother Andrew requested that the
brothers wear no uniform and instead dress in jeans and T-shirts. While
this made them more accessible, it also made them at times harder to dis-
tinguish, and on more than one occasion, a brother was picked up along
with those he was helping to spend a night at the city jail. Mother Teresa
wished for the Brothers to wear their clerical garb. She also did not agree
with Brother Andrew’s willingness to delegate authority and wished for
tighter, stricter management, much as she did with her own order. The
final straw came when Mother Teresa established a contemplative branch
of the Brothers without consulting Brother Andrew. Her actions caused a
temporary rift between the two orders; in 1987, Brother Andrew left the
order. His replacement, Brother Geoff, brought with him a management
style and an attitude that was more complementary to Mother Teresa’s vi-
sion for the Missionaries of Charity Brothers.


COME AND SEES AND CO-WORKERS

Assisting the Missionaries of Charity and the Brothers were volunteers
whom Brother Andrew called Come and Sees. This group consisted


100 MOTHER TERESA

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