[1] She was the sister of Father Salesius Lemmens OFM who served the city of Karachi from the mid-1930s until his death from accidental drowning in 1942 on an outing with the handicapped children.
She returned to Karachi and joined the only indigenous religious institute of Sisters in the region, the Franciscan Missionaries of Christ the King.
[1] In 1969 Archbishop Joseph Cordeiro, then the head of the Archdiocese of Karachi, bought a single-story property on Kashmir Road to start an English-medium school.
[1] In 1970, Sister Gertrude again traveled back to Holland and made TV appearances and newspaper appeals for aid for her struggling home.
The home continues to be supported by the Dutch people with approximately half a million euro being collected to finance the project between 2004 and 2008.
[5] In recognition of her work for the homeless, the needy, and the handicapped, she received the Sitara-i-Quaid-i-Azam (Star of the Great Leader) Award on 23 March 1989, from the President of Pakistan, one of the highest honors given to foreign nationals.
[1][5] Sister Gertrude died on 27 October 2000 at age 86, and was buried on 1 November, which was the sixty-fourth anniversary of her first arrival in British India.