Luck High School
Luck, Wisconsin
Teacher: Barbara Peterson
Mother Teresa
By Krista Nyren
For our communities to improve the quality of life we need to act more like Mother Teresa. The story of her life is an example of the effect that one person’s effort can have on so many lives.
We all have our own heroes, people we admire and respect, people who made an impact on our lives, who made us look at the world with a different eye. Mother Teresa has definitely impacted many lives around the world. Although the world is full of good people, great humanitarians that really care, people who donate billions of dollars, people who raise their voice to make a difference, Mother Teresa stands out in the crowd; she is unique. She dedicated every day of her adult life caring for “The sick, the crippled, the mentally ill, the unwanted, the unloved,” and she loved every minute of it because she was loving. She was cleaning, feeding “Jesus in disguise.” Mother Teresa fed them, sheltered them, cleaned their wounds, but what is more important, she made them feel good, loved and wanted. Mother Teresa gave them back their dignity; [the dignity] that poverty had taken away from them. Even if they died, they died with a smile on their faces. Someone loved them; someone cared for them.
Mother Teresa was born August 27, 1910, in Skopje, Macedonia, as Gonxhe Bojaxhiu from Albanian parents Nikolle and Drandafille Bojaxhiu. Her father was a successful and well-known contractor; her mother was a housewife. She was the youngest of three children. Mother Teresa’s family was a devoted catholic family. They prayed every evening and went to church almost every day. It was her family’s generosity—caring for the poor and the less fortunate—that made a great impact on young Mother Teresa’s life. By the age of twelve, she realized that her vocation was aiding the poor. She decided to become a nun. Traveled to Dublin, Ireland, to join the Sisters of Loreto.
After about a year in Ireland, she left to join the Loreto convent in the northeast Indian city of Darjeeling, where she spent seventeen years as a teacher and principal of St. Mary’s High School in Calcutta.
In 1946, her life changed forever. On the 10th of September, she said she received a calling from God “to serve him among the poorest of the poor.” Less than a year later she got permission to leave her order and move to Calcutta’s slums to set up her first school.
On October 7, 1950, the feast of the Holy Rosary was celebrated. Their mission is to care for the hungry, the naked the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people who have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone. With the help of Calcutta officials she converted a portion of the abandoned temple to Kali, the Hindu goddess of death and destruction, into Kalighat Home for the Dying, where even the poorest people would die with dignity.
Soon after she opened Nirmal Hriday (Purple Heart), also a home for the dying, Shanti Nagar (Town of Peace), a leper colony, and later her first orphanage, Mother Teresa and the sisters continued opening houses all over India caring for the poor, washing their wounds, soothing their sores, making them feel wanted. Her order’s work spread across the world after 1965, when Pope Paul VI granted Mother Teresa’s request to globally expand her order. Whether it was Ethiopia feeding the hungry, the ghettos of South Africa, or it was her native country Albania when the communist regime collapsed, Calcutta’s Mother Teresa, “the living saint,” was there.
In 1982, at the height of the siege in Beirut she convinced the parties to stop the war so she could rescue thirty-seven sick children trapped inside. Mother Teresa became a symbol of untiring commitment to the poor and suffering. She was probably the most admired woman of all time, received man rewards and prizes for her outstanding work, and used her reputation traveling all over the world raising money and support for her causes. Mother Teresa’s life-long contribution and dedication to the poor and humanity didn’t go unrecognized.
In 1971 Pope Paul VI honored Mother Teresa by awarding her the first Pope John XXIII Peace Prize. In 1979 Mother Teresa won the Nobel Peace Prize In 1985 President Reagan presented the Medal of Freedom, the highest U.S. civilian award, to her. In 1996 she became only the fourth person in the world to receive an honorary U.S. citizenship. When she received the Nobel Prize, she wore the same trademark, one-dollar sari and convinced the committee to cancel a dinner in her honor, using the money instead to feed four hundred poor children for a year in India.
Today Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity has 570 missions all over the world, comprising 4,000 nuns, a brotherhood of 300 members and over 100,000 day volunteers operating homes for AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis patients; soup kitchens, children’s and family counseling programs, orphanages and schools.
Mother Teresa’s health was deteriorating, partly from her age, partly from the conditions where she was living, partly from her trips all over the world, opening new houses and raising money for the poor. In 1985 she suffered a heart attack while in Rome visiting Pope John Paul II. In 1989, after another almost fatal heart attack, a pacemaker was implanted. In 1991 she suffered pneumonia in Tijuana, Mexico, which led to heart failure. In 1996 she suffered malaria, chest infection and underwent heart surgery. On September 5, 1997, the world learned that Mother Teresa had died at the age of eighty-seven. Even with Mother Teresa gone, her sisters at Missionaries of Charities are still caring for the poor and the sick with the same love and devotion as Mother Teresa did.
If more people were more like Mother Teresa, it would make the world a much better place to live.