Juan Diego embraces statue of Mother Teresa

DRAPER — It was a moment she describes as "ultimate truth" the day Mother Teresa looked into the eyes of a photographer in Atlanta and heard her say she should "come and see" the work she was doing with the poorest of the poor in India.

Linda Schaefer was at the airport on assignment with the Atlanta Archdiocese in 1995, looking to photograph the world's most famous nun as she greeted political and religious leaders there. As she framed Mother Teresa in her lens, she was stunned to see the tiny woman looking directly at her.

As Schaefer watched, the woman who would later become beatified in the Catholic Church walked across the tarmac, grabbed her hands and looked deep into her eyes. "She had these X-ray eyes, like she knew you," Schaefer remembered on Monday, recounting her story for students at Juan Diego Catholic High School, where they saw a statue of the famous nun unveiled for placement on their campus.

Schaefer, a photojournalist and former editor for CNN, went to Calcutta shortly thereafter to document Mother Teresa's work, only to be told the mission needed a volunteer, rather than a photographer. Stunned but determined, she swallowed her pride and went to work as a volunteer in an orphanage run by the nun's Missionaries of Charity there.

After time spent learning "from a 19-year-old Dartmouth student how to become a mother" to the orphans, she returned to Mother Teresa to ask permission to photograph her work. Asked to write a formal proposal, she submitted it. "She looked at it as if it was garbage, then answered a resounding 'No!'

"What do you all do when your mother tells you no? I started to cry," she said. The little nun reached out, pulled her close and "started stroking my head like I was a child, saying, 'It's OK, it's OK."'

She asked Schaefer to pray that night and promised her she would do the same, and the next morning, she was granted permission to photograph the sisters' world-famous work to help the dying, the destitute, the lepers and the orphans, plucked from the city's notorious slums. Her photos, combined with journal entries she kept of her experiences volunteering, are now available as a book, "Come and See: A Photojournalist's Journey in the World of Mother Teresa."

"Little did anyone know we would be the last group of volunteers to work there before Mother Teresa died," she said of her experience leaving Calcutta in January 1996. She's at work on a second book examining Mother Teresa's life and motivation after interviewing confidantes and Sisters of the Missionaries of Charity.

Looking back, Schaefer said there was "absolutely no doubt that's what I was supposed to do," after her encounter with the nun at the airport in 1995.

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