Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa was born on 26 August 1910 as Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in Skopje in Macedonia, Ottoman Empire. She was baptized on 27 August. Mother Teresa was the third child of Albanian grocer Nikola Bojaxhiu and his wife Drane. She had an older sister, Aga, and an older brother, Lazar. Her father died when she was about eight years old. At the age of 17, she responded to her first call of a vocation as a Catholic missionary nun. When she joined the Irish order Sisters of Loreto, she was given the name Sister Teresa after Saint Therese de Lisieux. She became Mother Teresa after making her final vows. Mother Teresa's "call" was caring for the sick and poor. In 1952, she established a hospice where the terminally ill could die with dignity. The group was established by the Church as a Diocesan Congregation of the Calcutta Diocese. It was known as the Missionaries of Charity.

Life Of Mother Teresa
On 10 September 1946, Teresa experienced what she later recalled as "the call within the call" while traveling by train to the Loreto convent in Darjeeling from Calcutta for her rest and recuperation after contracting tuberculosis. She said, "I was to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them. It was an order. To fail would have been to break the faith." She taught in Saint Mary's High School, Kolkata for almost 20 years. It was the turning point of her carrier.

The mother was moved by utter poverty, suffering and misery of a large number of people in India; she decided to dedicate her whole life for the welfare of the poor and took Indian citizenship in 1948. Mother Teresa established the Missionaries of Charity, which was to be the center of all her activities with its branches spread in many parts of the country.Mother Teresa began her work by teaching street children. Then in the year 1950, she started care center for the patients of leprosy.In 1952 Mother Teresa opened the first Home for the Dying in a space made available by the city of Calcutta. With the help of Indian officials, she converted an abandoned Hindu temple into the Kalighat Home for the Dying, a free hospice for the poor. She renamed it Kalighat, the Home of the Pure Heart (Nirmal Hriday).

It was in the year 1965 that the Pope Paul VI brought the Missionaries of Charity under his fold and gave Mother Teresa permission to expand her Order in other countries as well. She visited the Soviet republic of Armenia following the 1988 Spitak earthquake, and met with Nikolai Ryzhkov, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers. By 1996, she was operating 517 missions in more than 100 countries. Over the years, Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity grew from twelve to thousands of sisters serving the "poorest of the poor" in 450 centers around the world. Mother Teresa's efforts and her dedication were recognized all over the world and she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. Although she had reservations, but finally she accepted it on behalf of the "poorest of the poor".

Mother Teresa's health started declining after she suffered a heart attack in Rome in 1983, while visiting Pope John Paul II. After a second attack in 1989, she received an artificial pacemaker. In 1991, she won a battle with pneumonia while in Mexico and also suffered further heart problems.In April 1996, Mother Teresa broke her collarbone in a fall. In August, her health further deteriorated when she suffered from malaria and failure of the left heart ventricle. She underwent a heart surgery but it was clear that her health was not improving. The cruel hands of destiny snatched the angel of love from us She on 5 September 1997.

Although Mother Teresa is not amongst us, her sacrifice and dedication has set a great example for others to follow.Her connect with spirituality gave her the strength and perseverance to place herself completely at the service of others. She was truly the mother of the world in every sense.