BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We have a dramatic example today of what one dedicated person can do to change the lives of people in need. Fred de Sam Lazaro revisits a story he reported 10 years ago about an Irish Catholic nun who is a school principal in Calcutta, India. Her name is Sister Cyril Mooney.

Sister CYRIL MOONEY (Principal of Loreto Day School, Calcutta, India, whistling): Left, left, left-right-left.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: With her habit, her whistle, she is the sergeant of this morning drill — in many ways the old-fashioned parochial school principal who can strike terror in encounters like this.

Sr. CYRIL (speaking to female student): Are you aware that you tried to cheat?

DE SAM LAZARO: Encounters the student will carry well into adulthood.

Sr. CYRIL: So now say to me, “Yes, Sister, I am very sorry. I did cheat.”

YOUNG FEMALE STUDENT (repeating phrase): Yes, Sister, I am very sorry. I did cheat.

Sr. CYRIL: You did cheat, right? Look at the tears. Are you sorry?

YOUNG FEMALE STUDENT (shakes her head yes)

Sr. CYRIL: OK. It shouldn’t happen again. All right. Once the tears come you know that the contrition is there, you know.

DE SAM LAZARO: And so you think she’s cured basically?

Sr. CYRIL: She won’t do it again. None of them ever do it a second time when they’re caught.

DE SAM LAZARO: Sister Cyril Mooney has transformed the lives of thousands of children in this school and across the city of Calcutta. She grew up in Ireland, where she joined the Loreto Order and went to India in 1956. She got a PhD in zoology and began teaching in the elite English-language Loreto schools begun during colonial days. But she found the quiet, comfortable life discomforting.

Sr. CYRIL: I was appalled by the poverty almost outside our gate. I kept on saying to myself, what are we doing in our great big English medium schools? We are educating an elite for the country very much as you had Victorian society way back at the end of the 19th century. There was the same thing in England, the same thing in Ireland. You had a peasant class that never went to school, they were there to serve, and you had the well-off people to whom they served.

DE SAM LAZARO: So when she took over this school in 1979, this social entrepreneur cut in half the number of traditional fee-paying students, forgoing revenues for things one might find in elite schools like a swimming pool. The uniform hasn’t changed, but today 50 percent of these students — most from the slums — attend for free.

In 1983, Sister Cyril reached beyond the slums to an even lower rung of poverty: street children. Their families live on the sidewalks — rural migrants who must leave their children to fend for themselves as they look for work as laborers. For these kids the metal doors are always open to come in for a meal or a bath. They’re never forced to stay. The children must decide on their own if it’s better here or on the streets, where many have learned to survive.

Sr. CYRIL: I went over to meet someone off the station, and this little one ran up to me with a cup of tea. She told me, “I make my living by picking people’s pockets. But I only pick what I need.” Now what do you do with a child like that? What? Eight years of age. I mean, unless we can do something better why should we take away their survival skills?

DE SAM LAZARO: Survival skills or not street children are vulnerable to being trafficked into the sex trade. So the Loreto Day School has become a night shelter called the Rainbow Program, where about 250 girls study, play, eat, and sleep. The school’s roof terrace has been converted into a dormitory. The next morning the children of judges and doctors mingle with those of rag pickers, their lives intertwined on purpose. Every so-called regular student is required to spend at least two hours a week tutoring a Rainbow child.

Not only have social barriers fallen, Sr. Cyril says, but the students have become advocates for change. They volunteer to teach in rural areas, and they’ve tackled the pervasive use of domestic child labor in middle-class homes.

Sr. CYRIL: It’s against the law to employ a child below the age of 18, but many of these children are passed off as relations up from the village, so nobody can catch the employers. But our children who live next door to them and are the same social standing — parents — as the employers of these, they go and they fight with the employers, and they get out these children to come and play, and they identify them. Now they brought them in for a camp — a medical camp.

DE SAM LAZARO: On this day several bus loads of young domestics were brought in for routine health check-ups.

(to Sr. Cyril): I see children here who look they’re not even 10 years old.

Sr. CYRIL: Oh yes (asking question in Hindi). He’s only seven years old.

DE SAM LAZARO: Sevenyears old and on-call 24/7 to gather water, wash utensils. to wipe floors. A few lucky ones, like Saloni Khatun, are rescued early enough so they have fewer learning handicaps. Saloni is a third-grader, brought here four years ago by a Loreto alumna who noticed she was being abused by her employers.

SALONI KHATUN: One day I was wiping. and they were not in the home. She took me here.

DE SAM LAZARO: She took you from the home?

SALONI: Yes.

DE SAM LAZARO: What were you wiping? The wall?

SALONI: The floor.

DE SAM LAZARO: The floor?

SALONI: Yes.

DE SAM LAZARO: So you were wiping the floor, and this girl came and got you?

SALONI: Yes. She brought me here.

DE SAM LAZARO: What would you like to be when you grow up?

SALONI: Air hostess.

DE SAM LAZARO: Air hostess? What do they do?

SALONI: For helping others.

DE SAM LAZARO: Helping others, whether on an airplane or on the streets, is a common refrain. Teresa Shah, an 11th-grader, was brought here when she was three by her mother, who still lives under a sidewalk tarp. She plans to go to college, then work, and says she’ll share her wages with Loreto and with her family.

TERESA SHAH: After my studies I’ll find a job, then I’ll earn something, and first earnings I want to give it to Sister, because this is the place where everything is for us. So then I’ll look after my parents also, and I’ll see I look after the Rainbows also.

DE SAM LAZARO: Okay, you’ve got big ambitions.

TERESA: Yes.

Sr. CYRIL: Our idea is to push them as far as they can go academically, and then if they can’t go any farther they’ll vet them into one of the vocational trainings and give them a training whereby they can start to work. Now we have big numbers of them already gone out. So my hope is that every child who comes out will have a better future, and I think the next generation will have a very good future.

DE SAM LAZARO: You’ve broken the cycle of poverty.

Sr. CYRIL: Yeah, we’ve broken that cycle.

DE SAM LAZARO: But how to break the cycle of endless need in a city of 15 million and growing? Sr. Cyril’s approach can be found in classes that train so-called barefoot teachers. Most are women with some formal education nominated by their communities to come here for a six-week course. They come from rural areas or Calcutta’s burgeoning slums, where they return to teach.

This community near Calcutta’s eastern bypass road is sandwiched between the railroad tracks and a lake now being filled to make way for a metro station. It is populated mostly by rural migrants desperately seeking work in a city that long ago ran out of room. But this slum now has a school. Teacher Jharna Naskar, trained at Loreto, says it was a top priority for parents here

JHARNA NASKAR (Teacher, through translator ): I have seen these children roaming around here. They were in such bad conditions, dirty conditions. Now they are here, learning some songs, some exercises. Also they’re learning about health and hygiene.

DE SAM LAZARO: Jharna Naskar is one of 7,000 barefoot teachers trained by Sr. Cyril, an achievement that has not gone unnoticed. In 2007, India’s government recognized her with one of the country’s highest civilian honors rarely bestowed on foreigners.

Sr. CYRIL: I ask myself, what are you here for? Are you here to produce agents of human change among your children? Are you here to change the mental set of people? So even if you do it with a small number it spreads. After all, Mahatma Gandhi was only one man. He managed to get the might of the British Empire out of India, which is something quite fantastic. I mean, we can do it if all of us will work together.

DE SAM LAZARO: It began here, but today some 350,000 children across Calcutta are off the streets and sitting in some form of classroom. For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Calcutta, India.

BOB ABERNETHY: It was just two years ago that Mother Teresa died. The work of her worldwide missionary order continues, and so does the work of another missionary nun in Calcutta, a nun who ministers to the poor in a different way. We have a report from Fred de Sam Lazaro.

Streets of Calcutta

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Calcutta’s streets have changed little in the decade since Mother Teresa first brought worldwide attention to them. There’s commotion, destitution, and despair on the sidewalks, where the Missionaries of Charity sisters patrol daily. At the modest headquarters of Mother Teresa’s order, life is quieter these days. The media spotlight is off. Interviews, including one we requested, are shunned. And there seems little concern over whether the organization can survive without its charismatic founder, a woman who never held a fund-raiser, yet raised millions to create a 4,000-member worldwide order. Her continuing work has been enough to bring in the dollars and volunteers, according to Navin Chawla, Mother Teresa’s biographer.

Mr. NAVIN CHAWLA (Biographer): And the strength of Mother Teresa was that she was able to get the yous and mes all over the world by building this enormous chain which has made this work possible. Otherwise, I ask you, how can four sisters or three sisters run an AIDS home in San Francisco? How can they run a soup kitchen in London? How can they feed 700 people every evening at the Vatican? It’s not possible unless people like us come forward to help, and that’s what’s happened everywhere.

LAZARO: And it hasn’t stopped, apparently?

Mr. CHAWLA: And that hasn’t stopped.

Sister Cyril Mooney

LAZARO: Gigantic as Mother Teresa’s work is in Calcutta, hers is a relatively narrow focus, meeting the immediate, urgent needs of the poor.

For Sister Cyril Mooney, attacking the root cause of poverty is just as important. She has been a fixture on Calcutta’s streets for four decades. Like Mother Teresa, she came to be a teacher in schools run by the Loreto Order. Unlike Mother Teresa, who founded her own mission, Sister Cyril stayed with education.

Sister CYRIL MOONEY: Mother Teresa — her work was never finished, because you give a handout to someone, people will come back for another handout. So as I say, her work is necessary in the case of starving, destitute people. Our approach is to educate the child, put the child standing on their feet, give them a good job, and then they’re settled for life.

LAZARO: The Ireland-based Loreto Order that Sister Cyril joined has been well known since British times for top-notch schools attended by children of the upper crust.

Sister CYRIL: So we were inside in our convent, the children came into school, and we taught them. And we had the same sort of conventual as we would have had if we had it in Ireland. So I began to go outside the gates of the convent, out up along the roads and into the highways and byways, and I was appalled at the misery and the poverty that I found.

“Our approach is to educate the child, put the child standing on their feet, give them a good job, and then they’re settled for life.”

LAZARO: So when she became school principal, Sister Cyril threw open the imposing Loreto gates to poor children, tuition-free.

Sister CYRIL: When I arrived here, I have these 700 well-off and 90 poor ones. So then I set about — I sort of, did a sort of a computation, that with the money coming in from the 700, could I increase the number of poor? And I calculated I could support 50 percent on the fees that were being paid at that time vis-à-vis the salary. But of course, we would not have a school with frills. We wouldn’t have all those extras and — like, you know, swimming pool and good … that sort of stuff would be out for us. So I made that choice.

LAZARO: Next, she broke down another social barrier, opening one of Calcutta’s best school campuses to kids who are the poorest of Calcutta’s poor, those who have only the street to call home. These so-called rainbow children are provided a hot lunch, for many, the only predictable routine in their day. They come and go as they please to play or study. Teaching them is part of the students’ routine, the first interaction of any kind across the class line for most of them.

Sister CYRIL: In fact, one night, I had a phone call from a parent who said, “I’ve got this little girl here and it’s already half past 10, and I don’t know where to drop her back to. She’s from the streets.” The father said then, “Can I keep her for the night?” I said, “Yes.” So he kept her, and the next day, she arrived in with the same uniform as the other ones, back into school.

LAZARO: In India’s caste-based, sectarian society, these children aren’t likely to ever marry one another. But among the well-to-do, Sister Cyril says, there’s new sensitivity to the plight of poor people.

For those on Calcutta’s lower rungs, this boarding facility offers food, shelter, and a chance to escape often abusive childhoods.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: I want to show my dad that I can — without you, I can, like, show — be something and show you, like, how you drink every time you drink and you — my daddy hits my mommy, hits me, you know, and I don’t like when daddy always — he tells me, “You’re not good in study, you don’t do anything.” But I will be something and I will show him that I can be.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: I was born in a broken family, actually. My mother was a prostitute. I was taken over by the Loreto nuns, where I was there like an orphan. I stayed with them. I completed my education. My greatest desire is to work for the poor, to serve them, because I’ve been through so much and I really feel like doing something. After God has done so much for me, I really want to be like that.

MOHAMMED BAHREK: Before I came here, I was in the street.

LAZARO: Thirteen-year-old Mohammed Bahrek could well be a poster child for the rainbow program. He wandered in off the streets a few years ago.

Sister CYRIL: He seemed a very, very bright kid. And in two months, he was ready for KG [kindergarten], another two months for one, another two months for two. So within that first year, he completed up to the end of class three.

BAHREK: I would like to be a ship captain when I be a man. I would like to see the ocean and the ships sailing. And I would like to go to the other countries to see how the other countries are.

Sister CYRIL: And you — what’s up with you?

LAZARO: Although Sister Cyril insists her goal is strictly to help families like Bahrek’s out of poverty, foreign missionaries have long been suspected of also trying to gain converts, a criticism leveled even at Mother Teresa.

Mr. CHAWLA: The first time I asked her, I said, “Mother, the real accusations amongst your critics here is that you convert, your organization does.” And she said, “Yes, I do convert. I convert you to be a better Hindu and a — or a better Protestant or a better Jew, better Sikh, and then it’s for you to do what you want with God.”

LAZARO: In Calcutta, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro for RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY.