Teresa and Her Missionaries of Charity, offers some clues about her change
of heart. Rae, who had previously worked with the terminally ill and
dying, was no stranger to places such as Nirmal Hriday. However, she was
distressed that while helping Mother Teresa, she saw disposable hypoder-
mic needles used over and over again; in some cases as many as 40 or 50
times.
Rae, who was also a passionate opponent of abortion, was bothered by
the approach the nuns took toward single, pregnant mothers at the
Shishu Bhavan. For a young, unmarried Hindu girl to become pregnant
was a scandal, and for many, abortion was often seen as the only solution.
For those unwilling to terminate their pregnancy, there was the possibil-
ity of sanctuary at the Shishu Bhavan. Often these girls were taken in by
the nuns with the understanding that they would receive a place to sleep,
medical care, and help in placing the infant up for adoption in return for
helping with domestic chores. According to Rae, these arrangements in
fact often resulted in the girls being treated as the lowliest form of servant
with only the barest of necessities provided for them. She also found a
kind of moral superiority on the part of the nuns, certainly not in keeping
with the charitable expressions toward unmarried women espoused in
public by the order.A WOMAN IN DEMAND
Beginning in the 1980s, Mother Teresa stepped up her visits, traveling
all over the world to meet with world leaders or to open another founda-
tion somewhere for the Missionaries of Charity. Her travels kept her away
from Motherhouse even more; it was usual for her to be gone for 10
months out of every year. At the behest of Pope John Paul II, with whom
she developed a very close relationship, Mother Teresa used her travels
and the media attention to air her views, giving her a platform second to
none among religious leaders.
The new decade opened with Mother Teresa traveling again to her
hometown of Skopje as a guest of the city. Months earlier, she also had
the opportunity to open a house for the elderly in Zagreb, Croatia, mark-
ing the first time the Missionaries of Charity had opened one of their
homes in a communist country. She attended a conference on family life
in Guatemala; then went to visit the desperately poor island of Haiti,
where she met the then-president Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier and
his wife. From Haiti, she traveled to Egypt where, much to the Egyptian
government’s dismay, she urged Egyptian housewives to have many chil-
dren. The government, which had just finished producing a series of
118 MOTHER TERESA