EuropaWorld 8/6/2001 Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa was born Gonxhe Agnes Bojaxhiu on 26 August 1910 in Skopje, Macedonia. She was the youngest of three children born to an Albanian farming family. Gonxhe received her education at a Roman Catholic school and decided at an early age that her vocation lay in the service of God. At the age of 18 she joined the Irish Catholic Order of the Sisters of Loreto, which operated missions in India. Leaving her family in Skopje, Gonxhe began her training in Ireland and took her initial vows as a nun. In December the same year she began her journey to India. She arrived in Calcutta on January 6, 1929 to start the work that was later to earn her international respect and acclaim.

The young Gonxhe began teaching at St. Mary's High School in the desperately poor city of Calcutta - a school she was later to head after mastering the languages of Hindi and Bengali. In 1930 she was given the name Teresa, in honour of St. Teresa of Avila, a Spanish saint of the sixteenth century. She would remain at the school for the next 18 years. However in 1946, while on a long train journey to Darjeeling to be treated for tuberculosis, she received another calling to devote herself to helping the poor and destitute. She received permission to leave the Loreto congregation to begin work in the slums of Calcutta.

Undaunted by a lack of funds, Sister Teresa started an open-air school for homeless children. Her work expanded as she was joined by voluntary helpers, and those offering financial support. In 1950 she founded her own order, the Missionaries of Charity, to provide unconditional service to those whom no-one else was prepared to care for. In 1952 she established a home for the dying destitute - a home that was to care for more than 40,000 people in her lifetime. In 1953 Mother Teresa opened her first orphanage and soon after initiated a project to care for lepers. More than fifty other relief projects in India were to follow and the Order was to extend its work amongst the poorest of the poor in a number of countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

In 1962 Mother Teresa received the Pandra Shri prize for 'extraordinary services'. This was followed in 1971 by the Pope John XXIII Peace Prize and in 1972 by the Nehru Prize for her promotion of international peace and understanding. The monetary awards accompanying these prizes were used to set up mobile health clinics, centres for the malnourished, rehabilitation hospices for lepers, homes for alcoholics and drug addicts, and shelters for the homeless. In 1979 she received the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her work to overcome poverty and distress and, in so doing, remove these threats to peace.

Mother Teresa continued her relentless campaign against suffering well into her eighties, despite being hospitalised several times with heart, lung, kidney and other problems. In 1996 she stepped down as head of her order and was replaced by Sister Nermala. After suffering cardiac arrest on September 5th, 1997, Mother Teresa died in the city that she loved - Calcutta. She was 87 years old. She left behind an order of some 4,000 nuns and novices, 400 priests and brothers and hundreds of thousands of volunteers, all over the world wishing to follow her example of selfless and far-reaching service to humanity.