MISSIONARY MACEDONIA AND INDIAThe poor do not need our compassion or our pity; they need our help. What they give to us is more than what we give to them.
—MOTHER TERESA
Young Agnes knelt in front of the cross. The church was empty, and she was alone. She felt at peace as she gazed up at the statue of Jesus. She often thought about how he dedicated his life to serving the poor and loving the people others called unlovables—the prostitutes, the handicapped, and all the others who were outcast. For his work and his message of equality and forgiveness, he was killed. As she knelt before him, Agnes felt a strong conviction that stayed with her for the rest of her life. She too would help the poor and love the unlovables. From that day forward, twelve-year-old Agnes knew that she would be a nun. This young girl’s simple desire to help the unfortunate would eventually blossom into a global fight against poverty.
Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu was born on August 26, 1910, in Skopje, Macedonia. She was the youngest of three children born to an Albanian couple. Agnes’s father died when she was still a young child, and her mother began making dresses to support the family. Agnes’s mother also did charity work, and she took her daughter along on visits to the elderly, the sick, and the poor. A quiet and thoughtful child, Agnes enjoyed helping people in need. She was also deeply religious and often went alone to her Catholic church to pray.
By the age of twelve, Agnes had received her life’s calling. She joined the Loreto nuns and traveled to Darjeeling, India, when she was only eighteen. After she took her first official vows as a nun and chose her new name, Sister Teresa (the patron saint of missionaries), she was sent to Calcutta to teach at St. Mary’s, a school located in a convent and run by the nuns. Sister Teresa’s work as a humanitarian had begun.
Sister Teresa worked at St. Mary’s for twenty years, eventually becoming the headmistress. But she became increasingly disturbed by the horrible conditions of the people outside the convent walls. Calcutta’s streets were crowded with homeless children, beggars, and lepers, many of them sick and starving. These were the people that Jesus had loved and preached about.
On September 10, 1946, Sister Teresa was on a train going to Darjeeling when she received what she described as another call from God. This “call within my calling” told her that she was to leave the convent and the school and to help the poor while living among them. She could not disobey. She left the convent and went out into the streets of Calcutta.
On the first day of her new “school,” only five students joined Sister Teresa. She used a stick to scrape lessons in the dirt.
Sister Teresa had a special love for children, so she immediately focused on helping the young people in the slums. She began by starting an informal school for them. In addition to basic language and math skills, Sister Teresa taught the children how to keep themselves clean in order to avoid certain diseases.
In 1950 Sister Teresa started her own order of nuns devoted to helping the poor. They were called the Missionaries of Charity. As the order’s leader, she became Mother Teresa. The work was hard and the days were long, but young nuns poured in from around the world to join the new order. The nuns of the Missionaries of Charity woke up at 4:30 AM to attend a worship service and eat breakfast. Then they went out into the city slums, where they worked until lunchtime. After lunch, they said their prayers and took a short rest. Then it was back to work until after dark.
The Missionaries of Charity continued to grow, largely due to the leadership and enthusiasm of Mother Teresa. In 1952 she opened Nirmal Hriday (“Pure Heart”), a home for the dying. Fatally ill patients were brought to the residence so they could die with peace and dignity. Mother Teresa then founded the first of her many orphanages, and she opened clinics for lepers and other people with severe disabilities. Over the years, Mother Teresa’s work spread around the entire world.
During Mother Teresa’s lifetime, the Missionaries of Charity opened facilities in five continents and 95 countries.
Mother Teresa’s devotion to her cause brought her many awards and honors, which she accepted not for herself but on behalf of the poor and poverty-stricken throughout the world. Her awards included the Nobel Peace Prize, India’s Padma Shri award, the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Pope John XXIII Peace Prize, Great Britain’s Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, the Philippines’ Ramon Magsaysay Award for Peace and International Understanding, and the Jewel of India Award.
The last few years of Mother Teresa’s life were marked by lung, kidney, and heart problems, but she continued her missionary work. In 1997 she died at the age of eighty-seven, but the Missionaries of Charity are still working toward her humanitarian vision. Mother Teresa was respected and loved by rich and poor, young and old, in every corner of the globe. Millions of people mourned the passing of this visionary who had a special love for helping children: a modest woman who started her charitable work while still only a child herself.
HOW WILL YOU ROCK THE WORLD?
I plan to rock the world by helping people and by bringing different cultures together. I have spent ten years living overseas. This taught me that there are lots of people all over the world who are different and who need help. We all have differences, but in the end we are all equal. If people understand that, they can help each other and create peace. If people understand that, we can live in a different world.
MOLLY MASTRORILLI 
AGE 13