Mother Teresa.

Mother Teresa.

By : Faye Ordonez

Aim : To understand the life and achievements of Mother Teresa.

 Kia Ora! In today’s post I will be talking about Mother Teresa, a woman who created change for a better world and did many great deeds.

Mother Tereasa’s original name is Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. You might be asking why she’s called “Mother Teresa '' when her name is completely different from that. Well to answer your question, When she had joined the Sisters of Loreto order, she was given the name “Sister Teresa” after the name of Saint Thérèse de Lisieux. She became Mother Teresa after she said her final vows.

Mother Teresa is a nun. A common definition of a nun is that most nuns live together and devote their entire lives to serving god. This means that they don’t have the things we usually take for granted. Nuns give up all their possessions and can never get married because they must be focused on serving God and their communities. At the age of 18 Agnes (Mother Teresa) travelled to Ireland to become a nun and join the Sisters Loreto Order.

A convent in Ireland commissioned Sister Teresa to India to work as a missionary. She had wanted to become a teacher so she decided to begin working at St. Mary’s High School for girls.

During her time there she learned Bangali and Hindi to be able to teach/work at that school.

As a teacher, she had hoped to help educate girls so that they wouldn’t have to live in poverty and possibly eliminate poverty one day. 

In my opinion education can help people get rid of poverty because if they can earn more knowledge they can get a lot of different better paying jobs.

On 26th September 1946, Mother Teresa was riding a train. This is when she got the “Call from God”. During the train ride she said that god told her to leave the school and work with the poor, this is what she had said she did. Mother Teresa needed permission to be able to leave the convent and the school because of the vows she had made in the past. So she had to spend 1 year and half more until she finally got permission to leave so that she could fulfil her calling in 1948. She decided to change her clothes to blue and white, which is what she's famously known for.

Later in her life she received a lot of awards and prizes for her amazing achievements and even won the Nobel peace prize. Although she decided to decline the banquet. Why, you ask? This is because she said that she preferred it to be given to the people who need it more. This tells a lot about her as a person, she has shown that she really did care and that she doesn't need to get paid for her deeds she is just happy to help the people. 

From these past statements I can tell that Mother Teresa was a very lovely and caring person.

Another thing that Mother Teresa was a part of was the Missionaries of Charity. When they first started this organisation it only had 12 members but nowadays it reaches over 4,500 members. This organisation runs AIDS nursing homes, and cares for refugees, the blind, disabled, aged, alcoholics, the poor and homeless victims of floods, epidemics and famine.

Unfortunately, Mother Teresa passed away at the age of 87 on the 5th of September, 1997. Many people around the world were devastated because of this news. 

Mother Teresa will be remembered as an amazing person who changed the world in may different aspects, she will be remembered as a hero to many. I believe that her purpose in life was to help all the other people that need help and aren’t getting enough attention from the government. Thank you for reading this research of mine, I hope you learned new things about Mother Teresa that you may not have known about!