Once a month the patients are moved and the furniture aired so that the ward, cleaned daily, can be scrubbed down floor to ceiling. Here the women wait for the nuns to finish the all-day task and replace them in their beds.
Work at Nirmal Hriday is arduous and as unending as the vicissitudes of suffering there. Mark describes her visit: "At 8:30 a.m. the sisters arrive in the ambulance. The women are still asleep. Woman with gangrene arm is dead. Sisters close her eyes, wash her, put her in a cloth shroud and arrange her on a shelf in the morgue. They move the Hindu man to the other side, with the baby from the orphanage who died."
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