DRIVING BACK TO MY PARENTS' apartment in my powder-blue Ford Taurus, I felt oddly elated. Backcountry ranger—too lonely. Reporter—dismal. Photographer—the oracle says no. Having failed at every quasi-practical dream, there was nothing left to do but save the world.

Working 75 hours a week as a Starbucks barista and a framing carpenter, I managed to squirrel away $6,000 in six months.

I headed back to Kathmandu and was promptly turned away by one NGO after another—Red Cross, Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees—before heading to a place where I knew I could do some good: Mother Teresa's missions.

I arrived in Calcutta in April of 1998. Mother Teresa had died seven months earlier, but her spirit was very much alive, with posters reading WE'LL MISS YOU, MOTHER covering the city. Some three dozen volunteers and I signed in to the logbook at the central "Motherhouse" on a cool 90-degree morning and then selected our posts.

I opted for the oldest and most famous of the five missions, Kalighat, which is devoted to helping the homeless pass away with dignity. It's housed, I discovered that first day, in a horseshoe-shaped barracks hidden behind noisy roadside stalls selling sweets and plastic toys. Inside the right wing were some 30 women lying on low cots. Left, 30 men. The central foyer housed a concrete kitchen and washroom and a bunch of Norwegians, Australians, Spaniards, Canadians, Japanese, and me—all shuffling around looking for something to do.

Stern nuns in coarse white saris directed us to don aprons and begin the daily routine: bringing the men bananas and cereal for breakfast, helping nurses change bandages, and scrubbing patients' frail bodies in the showers at the back.

After the second day, an 18-year-old volunteer from New Zealand didn't return. I found him lying in his hotel room in the dark, emotionally fried, listening to Ben Harper on headphones, having booked a return flight home.

For me, intimate as it was, the work was almost tediously impersonal. The patients didn't speak English or Nepali; I didn't speak Bengali. Mostly we sat together, not always comfortably. After one of the men appeared to scowl at me, I began to question the sincerity of my motives.

Then, roughly three weeks on, two volunteers stretchered in an emaciated man who was found lying in the ditch in a nearby slum. I shampooed his oily salt-and-pepper hair three times, but the water still ran brown. His hips protruded like whale bones. As I brushed his leathery feet, a yellow toenail simply fell off.

He died later that night. Learning this, I broke down, realized I couldn't hack it—whatever "it" was—and escaped with my shame.