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Mother Teresa is known all over the world as a small old woman with many folds. She was away a lot on all continents with her blue and white Sari and sandals. Teresa also received the Nobel price of peace. The church and famous persons of the world liked to be near her, to profit from her charisma. Journalists, photographs, reporters and television made her to an international star, to the holy person of the poor, to the angel for ill persons. Mother Teresa meant she is just a pencil stump at God's hand who writes what he wants.
Her childhood
Teresa was born on the 26th of august 1910 in Scope, Macedonia. As a child her name was Agnes and she is the youngest of three children. Her family lived in Albania.
Agnes father was a building contractor and architect, he died very early in 1919. Her mother was a charitable woman who collected clothes and food for the poor and looked after ill persons, alcoholics and orphans.
Agnes attended a public school and was always the best in her class. She also was interested in the church and the choir.
At the age of 18 she wanted to go to the Indian Mission to help people. So she joined to the convent of Loreto. She even went to India before she made her vow. The name Teresa she got absorbed in thought of Teresa of Ávila.
Her works
Mother Teresa's dream fulfilled: First she became a teacher; afterwards she became director of St. Mary's High School in Calcutta. She taught rich young girls at the convent, but outside the walls there were the slums of Calcutta where lived thousand of people in poverty.
At the age of 36 Mother Teresa left the convent. She wanted to help the poor ones of the world. She made very quickly a course for becoming a nurse and an obstetrician. Afterwards she begun the work in slums and she self lived also in poverty.
Teresa asked the authorities for a house for the persons who are mortality ill - and she got the house called: Hirmal Hriday = place of unstained heart.
1949 Teresa opened an open-air-school for street kids. She taught them the Bengali alphabet and hygiene.
With her work she was never alone: Doctors, teachers, nurses and Indian girls helped her. There were also women who wanted to help their whole life. So she founded a new order: Missionaries of charity.
At the foundation the 7th of October 1950 the order counted 12 members. Now there are about 4000 nuns with 400 establishments in 100 countries.
Teresa also founded a house for young orphans called "Shishu Bhavan". She tried hard to find a place for the children through adaptation in good families.
The missionaries of charity founded a soup-kitchen, where the poor people had the possibility to eat at least one meal a day.
A street ambulance was also founded. There worked 3 doctors who supplied more than 2000 people with medicine until today.
First the order from Mother Teresa was only in Calcutta, later they also worked in Rome, London, New York, Hongkong and in many other countries. Especially in the big cities worked the nurses.
Since 1980 all over the world are houses for drug addicts, prostitutes, ill-threatened women, orphan-houses and schools for the poor kids.
Mother Teresa was against abortion - she supported adaptation.
Mother Teresa died on the 5th of September 1997 but her work of life goes on.
The power to love until there is a pain she took from praying.
Mother Teresa was a Mother
Not a theologian
Not a politician
Not a scholar
Not a speaker
Not a writer
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