Birth:- 27th August, 1910 Skopje, Macedonia.
Father's Name:- Nikolle Bojaxhiu.
Mother's Name:- Drana Bojaxhiu.
Death:- 5th September, 1997 Kolkata, India.
Mother Teresa was the great servant of humanity. She was the Albanian Catholic nun(religious woman who dedicate their lives to religious devotion and undertake not to marry.) Her original name was Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxhiu. She was born on 27th August 1910 in Skopje, Macedonia. She was the youngest of the three siblings. Her father was a successful merchant and was involved in Albanian politics. He died in 1919 when she was 8 yrs old. After her father's death, her mother raised her as a Roman Catholic.
Agnes was Fascinated by stories of lives of missionaries and their service in Bengal. And then she was decided that she should commit herself to a religious life when she was 12. At the age of 18th, She left her parental home and joined the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish community of nuns with missions in India. In 1929, after her few months training at the institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Dublin she came to India.
On May 24, 1931, she took her initial vows as a nun. And from 1931 to 48 she taught geography and catechism at St. Mary's School. Meanwhile she saw poverty in Kolkata(Calcutta) and had deep impact on her. Due to this, she left her job and devote herself to working among the poorest poor of Kolkata(Calcutta). She took a short course with the Medical Mission Sisters in Patana and returned to Kolkata(Calcutta). Where she started an open-air school for slum children.
Soon She was joined by Voluntary helpers and received financial support from Church organization and the municipal autherities. While on October 7, 1950 She received permission from Vatican to start her own order.
'The Missionaries of Charity', whose primary task was to love and care for those persons nobody was prepared to look after. The Missionaries of Charity, which starts as a small order with 12 members in Kolkata(Calcutta), but today has more than 4,000 nuns running orphanages, AIDS hospices, charity centres worldwide, and caring for refugees, the blind, disabled, aged, alcoholics, the poor and homeless and victims of floods, epidemics and famine in Asia, Africa, Latin America, North America, Poland, and Australia.
In 1965, by granting a Decree of Praise, Pope Paul VI granted permission to expand her order to other countries. The order's first house outside India was in Venezuela. Now a days, 'the Missionaries of Charity' has spread in more than 100 countries. Because of her selfless work she has received number of awards and distinctions. Those includes Pope John XXIII Peace Prize(1971), Nehru Prize for promotion of international Peace and Understanding(1972), Balzan Price(1978), Nobel Peace Prize(1979) and Bharat Ratna(1980).
Mother Teresa suffered a heart attack in Rome in 1983, and in 1989 got second. After she received an artificial pacemaker. In 1991, her fight with pneumonia while she suffered futher heart problems. Meanwhile she offered to resign her position of head but nuns of the order wanted her to stay. In April 1996, she fell and broke her coller bone, in August she suffered from malaria and failure of the left ventricle. She had heart surgery but it was clear that her health was declining. Mother Teresa stepped down from the head of Missionaries of charity on March 13, 1997 and just 9 days after she died.
