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Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa born as Anjeze GonxheBoj Bojaxhiu also known as Blessed Teresa of Calcutta was a nun and missionary belonging to Albania. She was the founder of the Order of the Missionaries of Charity, a Roman Catholic congregation of women dedicated to helping the poor. The Charity in 2012 consisted of over 4500 sisters active in 133 countries. The charity runs hospices and serve for people with HIV/AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis. They also do family counselling programmes. She lived in Macedonia for eighteen years and then moved to Ireland and then India where she spent most of her life. Born on August 26 1910, in Skopje, the current capital of Macedonia, to Nikola and Dranafile Bojaxhiu, the following day Mother Teresa was baptized as Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. Her parents belonged to Albanian descent and her father was an entrepreneur and worked as a construction contractor and a trader of medicines and other goods. The family was deeply involved in the local church as well as in the city as a vocal proponent of Albanian independence. When Agnes was only eight years old, her father died and no one knows the cause of his death and many have speculated political enemies poisoning him. After her father's death Mother Teresa became very close to her mother who was a pious and compassionate woman and she instilled in Agnes a deep commitment for charity. Mother Teresa attended a convent-run primary school and then a state-run secondary school and as a girl she sang in the local Sacred Heart choir and often was asked to sing solos. According to the biography written by Joan Graff Cluas, Agnes was fascinated by the stories of the lives of missionaries and their services in Bengal from a very young age and by the age of 12 she was convinced to commit her life into a religious life. She took the final resolution on 15th August 1928 while praying at the shrine of the Black Madonna of Vitina-Letnice where she would often go for pilgrimage. At the age of 18, she took this decision and set off to Ireland to join the Sisters of Loreto in Dublin. At that time, she took the name Sister Mary Teresa after Saint Therese of Lisieux. Sister Mary Teresa travelled to Darjeeling, India a year later for the novitiate period and she made her first profession of vows in May 1931. Later she went to Calcutta (now Kolkata) where she was assigned to teach at Saint Mary's school for girls, a school for the girls belonging to the poorest Bengali families. In this period, she learned to speak both Bengali and Hindi and she taught geography and history after dedicating her life for alleviating the girl's poverty through education. As the custom for Loreto nuns, she took her Final Profession of vows to a life of poverty, chastity and obedience and took the title of 'Mother' upon making the final vows on May 24 1937. From that point of time she was known as Mother Teresa. She continued to teach at Saint Mary's school and she became the school principal in 1944. Through her commitment for students education she sought the children to lead a life of devotion to Christ. On September 10th 1946, she experienced a second calling 'the call within a call' while riding in a train from Calcutta to Himalaya when she says that Christ spoke to her and asked her to abandon teaching and work in the slums of Calcutta aiding the city's poorest and sickest people. But since she had taken a vow of obedience, she couldnt leave her convent without official permission and she finally received the permission after a year and a half of lobbying. In August 1948, wearing the blue and white sari that she would wear in public for rest of her life she left the Loreto convent and wandered out in the city and after receiving basic medical training for six months she went in the slums of Calcutta for the first time with one specific goal of aiding the unwanted, uncared and unloved. Mother Teresa began an open air school and established a home for the dying destitute in a dilapidated building that she had convinced the city government to donate her for the cause. Mother Teresa won the canonical recognition award in 1950 for a new congregation of the Missionaries of Charity which she founded with a handful of members. With the increase of donations as well as the rise in the rank of her congregation, her scope for charitable activities expanded vastly and in the 1960s Mother Teresa established a leper colony, an orphanage, nursing home, family clinic and a string of mobile health clinics. In 1971, Mother Teresa opened her first American based house of charity and in the summer of 1982, she secretly went to Beirut, Lebanon where crossed east Beirut belonging to Christians and west Beirut which belonged to Muslims to aid children of both faiths. She returned to New York in 1985 and spoke at the 40th anniversary of the United Nations General Assembly.In February 1965, Pope Paul VI bestowed the Decree of Praise upon the Missionaries of Charity and this prompted Mother Teresa to begin expanding internationally and by the time of her death in 1997, the missionaries of charity numbered more than 4,000 in addition to thousands more lay volunteers with 610 foundations in 123 countries around the world. She received various honours for her tireless and effective charity and was awarded the 'Bharat Ratna' (jewel of India) Indias highest honor bestowed to Indian civilians as well as she received the non-defunct Soviet Union's Gold Medal of the Soviet Peace Committee. In 1979, she received the Nobel Peace Prize for bringing help to suffering humanity. She believed suffering even caused by poverty, illness was a gift of god and she was criticized for this belief. People criticized her that her clinics received millions of dollars in donation and still the conditions weren't good and was disturbed by shortage of medical care, systematic diagnosis and necessary nutrition as well as scarcity of analgesics for those in pain.

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Press Trust of India | September 4, 2016 6:34 PM IST
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Press Trust of India | September 4, 2016 5:55 PM IST
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