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Gertrude Lemmens was born on July14, 1914 in Venray, Netherlands into a Catholic family. When she was a young woman, she got engaged to a university professor.
One day, however, when Gertrude was 25, she decided to visit her brother Salesius, a Franciscan missionary priest who was working in what today is Pakistan. For a month, she accompanied her brother on his rounds of social work in poor communities of Karachi, the largest city in Pakistan and the twelfth-largest city in the world with over twenty-million people.
Gertrude was horrified at what she experienced, not only the poverty, but especially how terrible mentally retarded children and youth were treated. Sometimes, such children were chained like dogs, made to live outside on porches, forbidden to sit on furniture in the houses, and treated as though they were not members of families.
As a result of this mission trip, Gertrude decided to call off her impending wedding and join a religious community that her brother had co-founded, the Franciscan Missionaries of Christ the King (F.M.C.K.) Her brother drowned while swimming in the port of Karachi at the age of 37.
In her new life, Sister Gertrude taught school in the mornings, and in the afternoons, she did social work in the Karachi slums. She also learned the native language of the country, Urdu.
In 1969, the Archbishop of Karachi bought a single-story building to start a school. Sister Gertrude pleaded with him to let her have it to establish a home for the mentally handicapped. He agreed, and Sr. Gertude established the Dar-ul-Sukun (Home of Peace) home. Soon, it was filled with orphans, the elderly and destitute, physically handicapped, disfigured babies, and the mentally handicapped. Because the need was so great, soon Sister Gertrude had to establish new homes such as one for orphan boys called Dugout, one for elderly and destitute people called Peace Haven, and Janiville for children from broken homes.
As a result of her work, companies such as KLM Dutch Royal Airlines began to help financially. In time, Sister Gertrude came to be called the “Mother Teresa of Pakistan” and the “Angel of Karachi.”
Sister Gertrude died on October 27, 2000, at the age of 86, but her work goes on.
