ORDER STILL TOUCHING MANY LIVES.

Byline: Ranjan Roy Associated Press

A man with stumps for legs makes shoes for lepers. A former prostitute learns a new trade that will give her pride. A retired schoolteacher waits to die among people he's grown to love.

All live in the world of dignity Mother Teresa created for those shunned by society. In such Missionaries of Charity centers, the memory of the order's founder survives her death last week.

``This is God's work; it will go on,'' said Sister Judith, who works in a Missionaries of Charity home for the sick and dying poor.

A blue building with a large courtyard and a garden with blue and white flowers is an oasis amid the poorest slums of Calcutta, a city many see as the bulging underbelly of a hungry nation.

Sister Judith flits between endless rows of cots with uniform gray-checked sheets, supervising the volunteers in the home known as Prem Dan, Hindi for ``Gift of Love.''

There are 150 old men bent double by age sitting or lying on the cots in one large hall. In another sit 117 women, many of them widows abandoned by indigent families.

In an outer alcove, two flowers rest on the sheet-wrapped body of a homeless wanderer.

``Every day someone dies. This person is a Hindu, so we are waiting to take him for a cremation,'' Sister Judith said.

Roamed the slums

When Mother Teresa began her mission five decades ago, she and a small group of nuns roamed Calcutta's slums, scooping up destitute people from the gutters. Today, Missionaries of Charity ambulances scour the city for those in need.

Some drag themselves to the sisters, just for companionship in their final moments.

Joseph Singh, a 65-year-old former schoolteacher, came after his family grew up and moved away.

``I am slowly fading and am epileptic, so I need some caring before I go,'' he said.

Dignity for the dying was among the first tasks taken on by Mother Teresa, a small woman in a white, blue-trimmed sari leading a band of similarly clad nuns.

Since then, Missionaries of Charity sisters have held bottles of milk to the lips of orphaned infants, changed the soiled sheets of dying widows, and held the hands of innocent young women jailed because authorities had no other place for the mentally handicapped.

Her work has not been free of controversy. Mother Teresa was criticized for focusing on giving people a dignified death instead of trying to make them healthy; for being satisfied with changing lives ``hovel by hovel'' instead of devising large-scale programs to wipe out poverty; for preaching Catholicism's opposition to abortion and birth control instead of helping India cope with the problems of overpopulation.

Fatalistic view

British journalist Christopher Hitchens, who turned a caustic eye on Mother Teresa in his 1995 book ``The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa In Theory And Practice,'' accused her of deepening fatalism in the hovels of this city of 13 million - crowded with rickshaw-pullers, street vendors and shack dwellers.

``I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people,'' Hitchens quoted her as saying.

But her life in Calcutta's slums ``illustrated something that the high priests of development often overlook: In order to pull people out of poverty, it is important to first empower them with the hope that change is possible,'' commentator Pranay Gupte wrote in a recent Newsweek column.

There has been concern the order will falter without Mother Teresa. For decades, she was the public face of the Missionaries of Charity, touring the world to raise funds.

The order's finances are not public, and there are no reliable estimates on how much it takes to run its more than 500 missions in 100 countries, from the Third World to the ghettos of New York.

Mother Teresa taught children the alphabet in Calcutta's back alleys, and comforted the hungry in Ethiopia, the radiation victims at Chernobyl, the survivors of Armenia's earthquake and the oppressed of South Africa's townships.

Following the example she set, the order's members clearly demonstrate a respect for the living and their future - in the workshops turning out artificial limbs for leprosy patients, and the job-skills classes for former prostitutes.

``I met Mother the morning she died. She always asked about the sisters and then about `my girls,' '' said Sister Jovita, who runs Shanti Dan, or ``Gift of peace,'' the newest Missionaries of Charity project in Calcutta.

Out of jail

Some of Shanti Dan's women are former prostitutes who have served their jail terms. The center, which opened in 1989, teaches them sewing skills so that they can resume a dignified life.

Mother Teresa ``wanted to give them a future,'' Sister Jovita said.

Most are mentally handicapped or disturbed women abandoned by families who saw them as burdens, picked up off Calcutta's streets by police and put in jails without charges for want of any alternative.

``Some have been in jail for 20 years,'' Sister Jovita said.

The home houses 160 women between the ages of 20 to 60, attended 24 hours a day by volunteers and psychiatrists.

Women walk around the gardens unsteadily or just sit with vacant expressions, peering through the bars of the second-story railing. Some greet visitors with a traditional Indian ``namaste'' - the palms of their hands pressed together. Others glare and moan.

While most residents at Shanti Dan don't know Mother Teresa, those in Shishu Bhavan - which means ``Children's Shelter'' in Hindi - felt her loss. They filled a bulletin board with photographs of her and a handwritten banner: ``Mother we love you. We will miss you.''

Priests and nuns tried to shift the mood from one of loss to one of thanksgiving for the memory of the frail, Nobel Peace Prize winner who often visited the 429 children at the center, about 500 yards down the road from her own home in the Missionaries of Charity headquarters.

Leprosy patients

Twenty-five miles away, more than 1,200 leprosy patients and those ostracized because of their distorted, crippled limbs live and work in rooms neatly painted blue and red, or stroll in a garden of sunflowers, acacias and palms. The center is run by the Missionary Brothers of Charity, which Mother Teresa founded in 1963 to accommodate men who wanted to join her in her work.

``These people are so valid here. And outside, the people call them invalids,'' said Brother Vinod, head of the leprosy center. Vinod's hands rested on the shoulder of the facility's chief electrician, Ram Chander, a 52-year-old man whose arms, now covered in generator grease, end in stumps just beyond the wrist.

Eighteen years ago, leprosy cost Chander his job as a mechanic and driver. He had heard of the leprosy center and came here for treatment. He never left.

``She used to love me a lot,'' Chander said.

The residents weave, sew and make shoes. Women and men, some with fingers and limbs contorted at odd angles, tug at wooden weaving looms while in a room across a courtyard another man molds an artificial leg.

``I once thought that we could earn money by selling the cloth made here, but the moment people heard it was made by ex-leprosy patients, they refused. Even religious bodies,'' said Brother Vinod.

The center's products - shoes, bed sheets, sarongs, towels and bandages - are used by the Missionaries of Charity. Even the nuns' trademark saris are made by patients.

``This place has saved me,'' said 24-year-old Sashi Sardar as he changed the bandages around the putrefying leprosy ulcers of a middle-aged woman's right foot.

Sardar has no world outside the center known as Gandhi Prem Niwas, the Gandhi Friendship Building. He has married another resident, Manju, and has a 10-month-old son. Inside, they are immune from the stigma of leprosy.

``When I was 15, I was diagnosed with leprosy. My parents were brutally harassed by neighbors and relatives asking them to remove me from the neighborhood. So I left,'' he said.

``Baba (God the father) gives me a home, food,'' said Mohammed Rashid, another leper. ``But it is the self-respect that I have acquired here that keeps me.''

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos

Photo: (1) Sister Judith comforts Saruvala, a sick woman in Calcutta's Prem Dan home for the destitute and dying.

(2) Children at the Shishu Bhavan orphanage embrace Sister Leatrice, a nun in the Missionaries of Charity order founded by Mother Teresa.

(3) A woman prepares an earthen furnace for cooking in one of Calcutta's slums, where food donated by the Missionaries of Charity is sometimes the only meal residents receive.

Associated Press