Mother Teresa was born August 27, 1910 in Macedonia and died September 5, 1997. At the age of 12 she felt called to be a missionary and took her vow as a nun in 1931. From that year until 1948 she taught high school, but her glimpse of suffering and poverty caused her to seek permission to work with the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta, India, which was granted. She started an open-air school for slum children without funds, and later gained both volunteers and funding. She formed her own order, “The Missionaries of Charity,” to love and care for persons nobody else would look after. Her order spread all over the world, helping victims of floods, droughts, epidemics, famines and also refugees, and in general assisted the hungry, naked, homeless, crippled, blind, and lepers. She assisted the hungry in Ethiopia, radiation victims in Chernobyl, and earthquake victims in Armenia. She won the Nobel Prize in 1979. During her lifetime and after her death she was consistently found by Gallup to be the single most widely admired person, and in 1999 she was rated the "most admired person of the twentieth century." She wrote, "I see God in every human being. When I wash to leper’s wounds, I feel I am nursing the Lord himself. Is it not a beautiful experience?" Asked what people can do to promote world peace, she replied simply, "Go home and love your family."
I am indebted to the Nobel Prize site, http://nobelprize.org/peace/laureates/1979/teresa.html for the writing of this biography.
For additional Mother Teresa quotation, see Peace Quotes elsewhere on this website.
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