Having read with great interest your articles on the death of Mother Teresa, the “Saint of the Gutters,” I was struck that they overlooked what I consider her greatest accomplishment.
Mother Teresa persuaded the top politicians and/or administrators of Calcutta to install a sewerage system so that the fecal waste of the city would no longer enter a tributary of the Ganges River where people bathed, etc.
It has always seemed more important to me to change the system than to just help those who have been made ill by that system. There are always more people becoming ill than even a group like the Order of Missionaries of Charity can possibly attend to. So it is better to prevent the illness than to try to treat it afterward, and all illnesses are not curable.
The same principle applies to our systems of public aid and health care in the U.S.
