Finding My Calcutta Marilyn R. Gardner

Finding My Calcutta

By Marilyn R. Gardner

When I was four years old my mom gave me a doctor set. She didn’t actually give it to me—rather, I earned it.

We were living in a small city in Pakistan and I was a thumb sucker. My mom was rightly concerned about the germs that were finding their way from the world around me into my body by way of my thumb. She was desperate for me to stop this habit. Finally, she told me that if I could stop sucking my thumb for a month, she would buy me a doctor set.

A real, live, fake, plastic doctor set! My fouryear-old self could not contain the excitement. But when you’re four years old, a month is an eternity. Resolute, I pushed forward. I would get that doctor set! Each day, I would set about my chores and play and just as I was ready to put that thumb into my mouth, I’d remember and I’d dance away, eyes shining. The reward was going to be so much better than this temporary pain. The story goes that even at night as my mom peeked in at my dark hair, tousled on the pillow, she would see my thumb right beside my cheek, but it never went in my mouth.

Day 30 came, and I got the doctor set. My mom relays the story to me with a certain look in her eyes, a look I now know since becoming a mom. It’s a look of incredulous admiration and wonder. Even at four years old, I showed a stubbornness that has served me well through the years. Interestingly, I had no intention of ever using that doctor set to be a pretend doctor. From the beginning, I wanted it so I could be a nurse. I would bandage the wounds of my dolls, take their temperatures, and listen to their hearts with a red plastic stethoscope. My imagination soared as I listened to symptoms, consoled sad and sick dolls, and made them better. It was a wonderful world of excessively bandaged dolls who resembled mummies and stared at me, glassyeyed, with undying devotion.

Perhaps this is why, when asked about my vocation as a public health nurse, I’ve looked at people, paused, and then responded, “I’m not sure if I chose nursing, or if nursing chose me.” All I know is that as I grew out of the play stage of dolls, I wanted the dolls to turn to real people. I wanted to be a nurse. I wanted to sit with people in their illness, walk them through their pain. The dolls proved to be perfect patients for my growing passion.

My desire strengthened as I volunteered at a women’s and children’s hospital in my last two years of high school, learning how to weigh and measure moms and babies and give immunizations to children. It was no surprise to anyone when I was accepted into a nursing program in the United States and moved forward in this career that had so clearly chosen me.

One of the reasons I wanted to be a nurse was that I knew one thing well—in my future I would not be living in America. My nursing background would give me the perfect vocation to use in places around the world.

At first that worked well. But after birthing five kids on three continents, and working as a nurse in the same three, I found myself in the United States, struggling to make sense of how my crosscultural background and my love of the nursing profession fit with my current reality of living in a small town in Massachusetts.

I was miserable. The noble goals of sitting with patients and bearing witness to their pain was amazing while I was living overseas, but in my passport country I was lost and confused.

The vocation I had held to for so long, that had served me so well, now felt stifling. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t seem to connect with others in my office or with my patients. I would make mistakes based on the cultural norms and health systems of the countries I had lived in previously, instead of realizing that the United States was a different place with different rules.

Did my background even matter? It didn’t seem to, and it felt far more like a burden and obstacle than a gift. I was restless. I knew that clinical nursing was only half the picture of what I wanted to be doing. In between tears of longing for what I’d left, I felt waves of discontent. Why did I experience such a strong sense of disconnect with a profession that had served me well in the past? As long as I was overseas, I could see place and my vocation within that place as somehow sacred. It mattered. When I was in the United States, that all changed.

Suddenly the place I was located in felt like a mistake, a hindrance to effectively living and working the way I longed to.

It was during that time I made a job change and discovered public health. Gone were the individual patients and the bedside nursing; instead as I moved into public health, I was able to use my clinical skills as well as my creativity in working with communities to develop public health. I learned more about the big picture of health and why it matters. It allowed me to focus on underserved communities that lack resources and public health education. This included immigrant and refugee communities and other communities of color. I began to understand more about working with people who have the greatest need and where, with the least amount of money, you can make the biggest impact. As I learned more about the diverse communities throughout Massachusetts, I realized I had a natural connection with these communities based on my cross-cultural background.

My years spent overseas and the earned fact of both my formative and adult experiences uniquely equipped me to work with these communities. Developing a Muslim Women’s Health Program around breast and cervical health had me entering local mosques and working with Muslim leaders to serve these communities. My past in Pakistan and Egypt, along with the more recent trips I had taken working in humanitarian aid in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq, had equipped me well for navigating this work. I engaged in both formal work and deep friendships in the foreign-born Muslim communities around Massachusetts.

From there, I steadily found my niche in a space where I began educating community health workers and patient navigators that came from all over the world, finally settling in Massachusetts. I watched as bilingual and multilingual men and women suddenly found they could work as health leaders in their own communities and affect change. They, like me, struggled to find a place where those skills mattered. They, too, were looking for work that mattered, work that used cross-cultural backgrounds.

One of the reasons I wanted to be a nurse was that I knew one thing well—in my future I would not be living in America. My nursing background would give me the perfect vocation to use in places around the world.

My Calcutta was working with others who had left places they loved, places they longed for; it was connecting with communities and being a small part of making these communities healthier.

Despite this, there were times when I felt deep discontent in the gifts that were so clearly within my grasp. I envied those whose jobs took them overseas regularly, more so those who got to live overseas all the time.

It was during one of my moments of restless discontent that I discovered the book Finding Calcutta: What Mother Teresa Taught me About Meaningful Work and Service. The author, Mary Poplin, writes about the many who wanted to come to work with Mother Teresa when she was alive. They, too, were desperate to find meaningful work. Instead of welcoming all of them, Mother Teresa said this:

“Stay where you are. Find your own Calcutta. Find the sick, the suffering, and the lonely right there where you are—in your own homes and in your own families, in your workplaces and in your schools. You can find Calcutta all over the world, if you have the eyes to see. Everywhere, wherever you go, you find people who are unwanted, unloved, uncared for, just rejected by society—completely forgotten, completely left alone.”

In the midst of reading that quote, I had the startling realization that I had found my Calcutta. My Calcutta was working with others who had left places they loved, places they longed for; it was connecting with communities and being a small part of making these communities healthier; it was sitting with my Muslim friends and talking about their struggles living out their faith in a foreign context; it was welcoming those who found Massachusetts cold and foreign. My heart was so filled with restless longing and focused on those places far away I couldn’t see that Calcutta was right in front of me. I still tend toward forgetting and heading toward my default of restless longing. But the stubbornness of my childhood that had me determined to get that doctor set continues today as I work to find ways through public health to connect with others who are disconnected in their current reality, as I work to live effectively in my Calcutta.

Marilyn R. Gardner is a public health nurse and writer who has lived and worked in four countries and birthed five babies on three continents. She currently lives in Boston, just a 15-minute drive from the international airport. She is the author of Worlds Apart: A Third Culture Kid’s Journey and Between Worlds: Essays on Culture and Belonging available wherever books are sold. You can find her writing at Communicating Across Boundaries and the A Life Overseas Blog.