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Chapter Two

Get Over Yourself

A stethoscope can put a swagger in any doctor’s walk. I don’t know that it always makes me feel important, but sometimes, I confess, it does. It did during a visit to Mother Teresa’s House of Dying Destitutes. The name alone is enough to make you shake your head in dismay. It is in Calcutta, a city that combines population density and intense poverty. Add extreme heat and a desperate lack of sanitation, and, well, you get the picture. The House of Dying Destitutes is run by the Sisters of Charity, a Catholic order founded by Mother Teresa. It is the place people are brought when it is clear they are going to die, but they have no one to care for them and no money to pay for someone to care for them. So the people there are truly the poorest of the poor.

I had met Mother Teresa years ago when I was traveling through India, at least ten years before Heart to Heart was started. I witnessed the compassion she and the others had for poor people and vowed that I would return to work alongside her in some way. In fact, I told her that I would come back with medicine to help ease the pain of these people. Maybe the medicine could save some lives, I told her. She smiled, thanked me, and shook my hand. She pointed to a box of outdated medicines that someone had collected and sent.

“We have some medicine,” she said.

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“I’ll bring more than that,” I told her. “And it won’t be American discards, either.”

It was several years later when I did return, this time with 90 volunteers and 50 tons of medicine worth more than $12 million. All of it was donated by pharmaceutical companies. None of it was outdated. It was specifically for use in Calcutta. I could tell Mother Teresa was pleased.

But we didn’t want to just deliver medicine and leave. We wanted to work alongside the Sisters and make a difference in people’s lives. As I look back on it, some of us were a bit full of ourselves. We had arrived to Do Good.

Our group divided into work teams to visit various sites throughout the city. My small team went to the House of Dying Destitutes with a big idea. We were going to Relieve Suffering! This was the location where Mother Teresa’s work had begun. It started when she, a young Albanian missionary, encountered a woman dying in the street. The woman was covered with insects. Rats didn’t wait for the woman to die before they started in. People passing in the streets simply hurried around the body, as if it were trash that someone had neglected to clean up.

Appalled, this newly called Sister picked up the woman and carried her to a local hospital. The medical staff refused to treat the woman because she was unable to pay. But Mother Teresa demanded treatment for her and refused to leave the hospital. When she promised to make a scene the medical staff relented. This experience led to Mother Teresa’s getting city officials to donate a facility where people could bring those who were dying with the assurance that the dying would be properly cared for during their last days. Thousands have come there, or been left on the doorstep, since the House opened in the 1940s.

What galled me as a physician was that many of these people died, and are dying, of treatable diseases. Dysentery is one of the main causes of death there. It is a very treatable condition, with the right medicine and clean water. Other people were dying from diseases that have been eradicated elsewhere.

So, with all of my medical knowledge and certainty, I arrived at the House of Dying Destitutes. I had something to offer, I thought. It is just the kind of place where a doctor should be assigned. I wanted to put this place out of business. With great optimism, I looked at the sign outside the building and thought “Soon I will change that sign and this facility will be called ‘The House of Hope for the Living.’” I knew I would make a difference.

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Sister Priscilla graciously greeted our group and assigned us to various tasks. When she turned to me, I introduced myself as a physician from the United States. I put my stethoscope around my neck. I knew this was a place where little or no medical care was available to these “untouchables.” What we had to offer was miraculous. My mind began to review my medical training. This was a place that needed me.

“Follow me, please,” directed Sister Priscilla with her soft British accent. We entered the men’s ward—a large, open room with rows of cots cradling what I can only describe as skeletons with skin on them. Some were tossing in pain, too weak to fight their afflictions or even to eat. To my surprise, we proceeded quickly through this ward and on to the next. This was the women’s ward. It was a similar room filled with emaciated women whose vacant eyes stared, unseeing. But again we passed through this room without stopping.

“Can there be a needier place than this?” I wondered, my mind reviewing the more serious diseases I might encounter.

We entered a primitive kitchen where a simple lunch of rice was being prepared over an open fire. “How odd,” I thought. “Why would they want a doctor in a kitchen?” But Sister Priscilla led me through the kitchen, out the back door, and into a narrow alley. What were they going to have me do? Were there people waiting outside who were too sick to come into the House?

Sister Priscilla pointed to a very large pile of garbage. It smelled revolting.

“We need you to take this garbage down the street to the dump,” she explained, handing me two buckets and a shovel. “The dump is several blocks down the street on the right. You can’t miss it.” With a nod and a slight smile she was gone.

In the United States we dispose of food scraps neatly in the disposal attached to our kitchen sinks. Paper and plastic are put in garbage cans. Much of what we discard goes in tidy recycling bins. Not so in Calcutta. Every bit of paper and plastic is reused several times. Nothing goes to waste. The huge pile before me was of stinking, rotting, putrefying food garbage—only the stuff that can’t be used again.

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Recovering from a momentary stunned silence, I began to react. Garbage? Don’t they get it? I am a doctor! I felt like quoting the Bones McCoy character in the old television show Star Trek: “Dammit Priscilla, I’m a doctor, not a garbage man!”

Instead, I put my stethoscope in my pocket and attacked the pile. I filled the buckets and headed down the street. It seemed that every pair of eyes on the crowded street looked at me as I carried my fetid burden through the humid morning air. I slung the contents onto the dump and went back for the next load, trying not to notice that people emerged from the shadows of the dump to forage through what I had just added.

I began feeling sorry for myself. I had come expecting to do something meaningful. Did they have no sense of stewardship? Anyone could have carried the garbage. I could have been in the building, saving lives! If anyone could appreciate the educated class, it should be the people of India!

It was mid-afternoon when I finished. Sweating profusely, smelling like the heap itself, I set down the buckets and shovel and headed back through kitchen, the women’s ward, and the men’s ward—places where my gifts could have been used—prepared to rejoin my team and say goodbye to Sister Priscilla for the day. Just before she appeared, I saw it: a small, hand-lettered sign that read, in Mother Teresa’s own words, “We can do no great things, only small things with great love.”

My heart melted. I had completely missed the point. I needed this lesson. Serving others is not about how much I know, how many degrees I’ve earned, or what my credentials are. It is about attitude and availability to do whatever is needed— with love. Mother Teresa had pierced the armor I worked so long to construct. She removed the armor around my heart, through Sister Priscilla.

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My friendship with Mother Teresa blossomed after that. I understood her life and purpose better, and that made me want to work with her in as many ways as possible. I wanted to provide the opportunity for others to see that shoveling garbage can be transforming.

Perhaps the most amazing (and amusing!) manifestation of my friendship came about when she was visiting Vietnam, serving the poor in the northern part of that country. An attorney from Kansas City was in Hanoi at the time, still wrestling with demons from his tour as an American soldier. On a busy street, this attorney thought he recognized Mother Teresa. He had never met her before, or even seen her in public. But, since her appearance was unmistakable, he was confident. So he crossed the street and introduced himself. She was her usual gracious self, and then asked him a few questions. He told her he was an American. She asked from where. He said Kansas City. She said, “Oh, have you heard of Heart to Heart?”

She told him about the work we had done in Calcutta. Intrigued, he phoned me when he got back to the States. Over lunch I told him I wanted to provide medicines and supplies to the poverty-stricken areas of Vietnam. Soon the first U.S. aircraft flew into Vietnam so we could assist people in hospitals, leper colonies, and refugee camps, and it was covered by the major news media from around the world.

As I trace the dots backward, much of my medical service to others arose from the transformative experience of shoveling the refuse of dying people. Before that, shoveling garbage in the sweltering stench of Calcutta would have been beneath me. My gifts, training, and talent were invested for other, more lofty tasks, I assumed. I had the stethoscope to prove it! The sign on Mother Teresa’s wall was a reality check for me. I wanted to do great things. I learned that shoveling garbage with love is different from just shoveling garbage.

“Love should come before logic,” Alyosha Karamazov tells his brother Ivan. “Only then will man be able to understand the meaning of life.”² Logic was telling me that my gifts would best be used in the wards with the patients. But Sister Priscilla, taught by Mother Teresa, knew better. She knew that something else needed to happen first. I needed to start with love—in the garbage pile.

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Service to others, as I understand it now, often starts with what seems insignificant, maybe even unpleasant. It was the lesson Jesus taught his followers when, near the end of his life, he wrapped a towel around himself, took up a basin of water, and washed the feet of his disciples.³ This act took a strong stomach and an enlightened sense of what is real. It starts here at the very bottom, his action said, at the point where the grime of the world meets you, that’s where love begins. I don’t know if you have ever gotten close to other people’s feet. As a doctor, I assure you it can be a challenge.

It is one of life’s great mysteries that, for us to experience love, purpose, and meaning, we must begin at the place where we find ourselves most resistant. What was Sister Priscilla trying to tell me? That what I offer suffering people has to be consciously based in love, or my actions won’t matter.

It made me think of the line I read in Jim Wallis’ book God’s Politics: “Nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor.”⁴

I have brought groups of volunteers back to Calcutta several times. Often the volunteers come with the same kind of certainty, full of themselves, as I was. But every one of them is transformed in the act of serving others.

One of our volunteers fed fish and rice to a man at the House of the Dying Destitutes who was too weak to feed himself. Part way through the feeding, the man became agitated and clutched his throat, mouth open. Fortunately, our volunteer was able to reach into the man’s mouth and remove a fishbone caught in the man’s throat.

The man fearfully shook his head when offered another spoonful of rice and fish. Wondering what to do, our volunteer noticed another man motioning to him. He was offering his two tangerine slices; they would feel soothing on a damaged throat. One dying man offered aid to another dying man.

“I will never, ever again say that I have nothing to give someone in need,” said the volunteer.

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People who had encounters like mine were changed by their experiences. Laying aside their education and their professional qualifications, they simply helped people who couldn’t help themselves. Some returned to their own communities and began volunteering in clinics and missions. My daughter, who had come with me on a Heart to Heart airlift to Calcutta, organized the college women in her dormitory to work in Calcutta during their spring break.

The volunteers who have gone on these airlifts to Calcutta and elsewhere tell me they look at their everyday world differently afterward. Some volunteer at rescue missions or food banks or medical or legal clinics. Some just see their colleagues differently. Looking for ways to serve others becomes a daily practice. It gives meaning to their day. I see a transformation in people every time we do an airlift to some needy area.

Volunteers don’t at first know how to respond to the needs they see. Once they assist someone who lives an ocean away, they see the needs in their own neighborhoods. I have often seen it happen that a person has to leave his country in order to truly see his own community and its needs.

In his book Adam, Henri Nouwen tells of a New York socialite who, despite her marriages to successful businessmen, her wealth, fame, children and social status, was suicidal. She came to visit Nouwen for spiritual guidance because he was a well-known religious scholar, writer, and priest. He had left his prestigious academic positions at both Yale and Harvard divinity schools to work in a home for disabled adults. He immediately put his visitor to work feeding one of the people who could not feed himself.

In the years following the woman’s visit, she told Nouwen that “Something quite profound happened on my visit. . . . I am no longer as depressed as I was before, because I feel more connected with myself.”⁵ It seems contradictory that, in order for us to understand ourselves and connect with our true selves, we must go outside of ourselves and serve the needs of others. But I am convinced this is the way it works.

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I know that my job as a physician is to help people feel better. They pay me to do that. But I also know that my true vocation lies somewhere beyond getting paid for my services. Who am I, apart from being a doctor? I see the answer most clearly when I work in a refugee camp in Thailand, or organize a bike hike for my son’s Boy Scout troop. That is when I feel most alive. When I get outside myself, my cultural role, as I was forced to do at the House of Dying Destitutes, I see life more clearly. Sometimes my true vocation lies in putting away the stethoscope—the badge that tells the world who I am, or at least who I think I am—and picking up a shovel at a garbage pile in Calcutta.

It feels counterintuitive at first, but the sign on the wall tells us that this is the beginning: Do small things with love. When any of us drop the cultural symbols of who we are, we open ourselves to acts of service that others need. People in our families, our neighborhoods, and our communities need servants, not role players who know themselves only as doctors, teachers, military personnel, mothers, fathers, or business leaders.

There are some similarities between Mother Teresa and Henri Nouwen. Both set aside their self-interest to serve others. What I am most attracted to is their passion. Serving others gave purpose to their days. It became their life. I have seen people break their addiction to materialism, individualism, and sensationalism when they began serving others. Serving makes us see ourselves as part of a larger picture.

Regarding the disabled young man for whom he was responsible, Nouwen said that Adam’s teaching was that compassion, not competition, is the way to fulfill our human vocation.⁶ This was the lesson of the local Rotary Club in my town when we started looking for places where we could serve—first in a hurricane-damaged YMCA in Belize, then in an undersupplied hospital in Russia, and now throughout the world. We discovered that Rotary could be more than a social and business networking club. It could be, and did become, an organization living out its true vocation.

I have often wondered why we don’t see that we are here to serve others—especially when it is so gratifying to do so. A friend in San Diego, Gail Shingler, said she had failed to see herself as someone who has something to offer others simply because she lacked confidence.

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“I felt that I needed some kind of training before I started doing things for people other than members of my family,” Gail said. “Whenever I heard people talk about serving others I felt as if my heart wanted to do the same, but I didn’t know how. I couldn’t move to another country or anything drastic. But I felt that I needed some training or equipping even for doing something right where I was.”

Sitting in church one morning she sensed that the time had come for her to stop thinking about it and start doing something. She talked to her husband and a close friend. The friend called her a few days later.

“She said that she had awakened in the middle of the night with the thought of where I should go,” Gail said. “She woke up with three words very clearly: Ronald McDonald House.”

The McDonald’s restaurant corporation provides houses near hospitals where families can stay when their children are being treated for cancer and other serious diseases. Gail’s friend had been to a local Ronald McDonald House with her Brownie troop, and noticed that the staff always had too much to do and the house always needed cleaning. Gail called the house near San Diego’s Children’s Hospital and the director invited her over.

“The director just seemed so tired,” Gail said. “I told her I could commit to two hours a week, and would do whatever she needed.”

Now, on Sunday mornings, Gail vacuums, washes walls, and wipes down high chairs.

“The house gets a lot of use, unfortunately, so it’s pretty dirty,” she said. “But given the reason people are there, I felt they deserved better.”

After her first day of cleaning, she said she wasn’t tired.

“My body was excited,” she said. “I felt that this was what I was meant to do.”

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Keep in mind, Gail has three children under the age of ten, and is a talented artist and a certified educator. The best part of her week, she said, is those two hours on Sunday morning. Why?

“We’re here to do chores,” she said. “When I’m driving to Ronald McDonald House, I don’t fret about what my husband thinks of me or what my kids think of me. I only think about what God thinks of me.”

Commenting on getting the idea of going to Ronald McDonald House from her friend, Gail said it showed how interconnected we all are.

“It’s all a web,” she said. “You can walk through a web and be surprised by it and have it freak you out. Or, you can walk up to it, step back, and say ‘Oh my!’”

When Mother Teresa died I was sad but also grateful for the lessons she and the other Sisters of Charity taught me. My admiration for her connected me to a little village in Kosovo a few years ago, when I was working in a military hospital with my Army Reserve unit. I was stationed at Camp Bondsteel, not far from where Mother Teresa lived when she received her call to serve the poor. She was Albanian, just like the people we were in Kosovo to protect. I visited the statue of her in downtown Skopje, Macedonia, where she spent her childhood years.

I spent considerable time gazing at the memorial in the middle of a Skopje street and at the house where she had lived. They reminded me of the sign that pierced my self-centeredness: “We can do no great things, only small things with great love.” Though it made me uncomfortable at first, my discomfort soon gave way to gratitude.

I got into a conversation about Mother Teresa with one of the military chaplains at Camp Bondsteel, and he told me that she visited the area several times while she was growing up. She was born in Kosovo, and her family moved to Skopje. There is a village nearby with a chapel that has a Black Madonna icon. Mother Teresa and her family traveled to this chapel from Skopje every year to visit the special shrine. Before the Serb/Albanian war, more than 150,000 people made a pilgrimage to this chapel each year. It was in this chapel that Mother Teresa received her call to become a nun and serve the poor. It was where the roots of doing small things with love began to grow.

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Naturally, I wanted to go to this chapel but, as a soldier, I couldn’t just organize a convoy to go sightseeing! As it turned out, several things came together one Christmas night that allowed me to go. I attended the Protestant candlelight service with one of the colonels from the base. At the end of the service I asked if he wanted to join me for the midnight Mass in the same chapel. He said he was going with some of the soldiers to a Mass in another town, but I was welcome to go along. I asked where they were going, and couldn’t believe my ears.

A Special Forces team had organized a convoy to take a small group of officers to Letnecia, the town with the chapel where Mother Teresa discovered her true vocation. The officer asked me if I would like to go with them. If so, they were leaving in thirty minutes.

I rushed back to the hospital to get my helmet, flak vest, and weapon, and joined the convoy. Six Humvees made their way up narrow, winding roads into the mountains. Radios crackled and security was tight. About a mile from the village I could see the blazing lights of what is now a beautiful cathedral. We drove up to it, parked our vehicles and climbed the icy stairs, dressed in full battle gear, our M-16s slung over our shoulders and pistols in holsters around our waists. I don’t know what the local people thought, but they seated us in the first several rows, right under the beautiful Black Madonna shrine.

The service started at 11 and ended at about 12:30 in the morning. The priest arranged for some of the soldiers to participate in the Mass by reading the scriptures. I have been to a lot of religious services around the world—country churches, great cathedrals, synagogues, and mosques—but I had never before seen armed soldiers standing next to the religious leader, participating in worship!

In his sermon, the priest said how thankful the people of his village were that the killing had stopped for the time being. After the Mass they had a children’s program where kids sang, recited poetry, and reenacted the nativity scene—just as we had at home!

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Afterward, the priest invited us to the rectory for cookies and coffee. I asked him about Mother Teresa’s childhood visits to the church. He told us that, even after the family moved to Sko-pje, they traveled across the mountains each year to visit this site during a religious festival. On one of those visits, when she was 18, Agnes (her name before she adopted Mother Teresa) sensed God calling her into service. When I told the priest of my connection to her, he seemed very excited. He rushed out of the room to his study and brought back a picture of her, insisting that I keep it. Having had a wonderful time in Letnecia, our unusual convoy returned to the military base at around three in the morning.

As I reflect on that little village in war-torn Kosovo, I marvel that it was the site where a little girl was born who would become one of the most beloved women in history. In his book Great Souls, David Aikman, a former senior editor for Time magazine, calls her a person who changed the twentieth century. She changed the world, won a Nobel Prize, and inspired millions of people, including me, to look at service as a way to find meaning for our lives.

Every one of us is confronted with the option of picking up our stethoscopes (or diplomas or titles or uniforms) or picking up a shovel and doing something small, with love, for someone else. Both have value. Mother Teresa’s example helped me want to create opportunities for others, like for my own daughter, to experience the deeper vocation to which I believe we are all called, that of serving others. An encounter with dying destitutes, for many of us, removed blinders from our eyes and allowed us to see opportunities for service throughout our everyday lives.

What tenets did Mother Teresa live by? What did her life teach us?

She taught me to do small things for others. With love. I hope that is what my life teaches others. I hope that’s what Heart to Heart communicates.

It doesn’t always have to start with a trash heap. It starts with whatever is within reach.