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About the Name
Mother Teresa & Me
I am One of the Happy Few, the Adopted, a
Blessed Starfish
An old man was walking on the beach one morning after a storm; on the shore were thousands of starfish, washed up beyond the safety of the tide and baking in the rising sun. In the distance, the old man noticed someone moving like a dancer, bending and turning towards the sea. As he approached, he saw that it was a young man, picking up the starfsh and tossing them back to the ocean's briny embrace. Smiling half to himself, the old man said, "Good morning! May I ask, what are you doing?" The boy replied, "I'm throwing the starfish back. The surf is up and the tide is out. If I don't throw them back, they'll die." The old man scoffed. "There are hundreds of miles of beach and thousands and thousands of starfish. You cannot possibly make any difference," he said. The young man listened politely, bent down, and picked up another starfish. He tossed it back to the sea and, turning to the old man with a smile, he shrugged and said:
"It made a difference to that one."
I was born sick and premature on the streets of a slum in Calcutta, where I was instantly abandoned and forgotten. Gender inequity in India is such that even today there are issues; back in the seventies and eighties, there was very little chance of survival for an Untouchable such as myself. I had a rendezvous with Death. Who could or would step in to save someone as undesireable as me? My fate was sealed.
Except there was a woman in Calcutta. And there was a family, in Portland, Oregon.
That woman was Mother Teresa, who through some providence took me into one of her orphanages and made me whole and got me out of India; and that family was here in Portland, and they're the ones who saved my life. The name first bestowed to me, in India, was Menoka; my Christian name is Kristin.