Mother Teresa has been characterized as a saint, yet she considered herself merely God's humble instrument. Her work is described as miraculous; but praise leaves her indifferent. "If you have faith, you can move mountains," Christ said in the Gospels. Mother Teresa is living proof of this testimony. Beginning among Calcutta's sick and dying street population, she has extended her mission to Third World bidonvilles and Western slums. Nothing has stopped her. She proceeds with the force of a tank and the grace of an angel. She saw the worst our planet has to offer, yet never loses hope.
Mother Theresa was born in Skopje in what is now Yugoslavia on August 27, 1910. Her original name was Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. Her father, who was of Albanian descent, ran a small farm. At the age of twelve, while attending a Roman Catholic elementary school, she recorded that she knew she had a vocation to help the poor. She decided to train for missionary work, and a few years later made India her choice. At the age of eighteen, she left her parental home in Skopje and joined the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish community of nuns with a mission in Calcutta. After a few months of training in Dublin she was sent to India, where in 1928 she took her initial vow as a nun ("Mother Teresa").
From the beginning she was concerned for the poor, but for two decades, her assigned ministry was in the classroom primarily at the Loreto Convent where she taught geography to schoolgirls. She loved her students and they loved her, and soon they were joining her on weekends as she went into streets to care for the sick and the hungry (Tucker).
Mother Teresa received her call to do the work of God while she was riding on a train on September 10, 1946. "The message was clear," she later recalled. "I was to leave the convent and help the poor, while living among them." Since that day, Mother Teresa has transformed countless lives with her extraordinary humanitarian acts (Ashby 237).