Detailed introduction of Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa was born into a wealthy family in Macedonia in 1910. At the age of 12, she had the desire to become a nun. At the age of 18, she went to India to train as a nun. At the age of 27, she took lifelong vows and was promoted to the abbess. At the age of 38, she began her career serving the destitute, the dying, abandoned babies, and lepers in the slums of Calcutta. In her mind, the poor need dignity more than the rich, and the poor are supreme in the hierarchy of value. At the age of 40, he established the "Missionary Sisters of Charity". She has won many international awards, including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. In 1997, the diminutive, beloved nun passed away peacefully.

Slum School

In 1948, 38-year-old Mother Teresa left the Loreto Convent in Ireland and came to Calcutta, India. The first thing she did was to take off the blue robe worn by Sister Loreto and wear a white cotton sari commonly worn by ordinary Indian women.

Mother Teresa started her work in the slum behind the station. The place is full of shabby cabins and dirty, ragged children. One day, a Bengali-speaking child asked Mother Teresa for something. The child only had one leg, and the broken limb was still bleeding. When Mother Teresa was about to get some medicine to bandage him, the child said he wanted something to eat and pretended to eat as he did so. At this time, she only had five rupees on her, so she said to the child apologetically: "I am a poor nun, I can only bandage your wounds." When she was about to apply medicine for him, the child suddenly grabbed the medicine and shouted, " Give this to me," and ran towards the slums on crutches. Mother Teresa, who wanted to know what was going on, followed the child and ran into a small shack. It was pitch dark inside, and you could vaguely see a woman lying on the wooden board. Next to her, there was a baby and a girl about five years old. , the three people were skinny, their eyes were dull, and they were very weak. She talked to them in Bengali and learned that the child was called Babu, that he was eight years old, that the woman was his mother and had tuberculosis, and that the other two children in the shack were his younger siblings. Mother Teresa could only give them the vitamin pills she brought. The woman was very grateful and saluted her with her palms together and said: "There is an old woman who is sick here. Please take a look." She." Mother Teresa was greatly shocked when she heard this: Why do poor people have such kind hearts? Even though you are sick, you still care about others!

That day, Mother Teresa visited many families in succession, and the one-legged Babu and some children followed her curiously. Barb also asked Mother Teresa to come back the next day.

The experiences during the day made it difficult for Mother Teresa to sleep. Not only did these poor children have no food or clothing, they could not even write their own names or count the simplest numbers. What will you do when you grow up? The only way to fundamentally save these children is to let them master knowledge! Thus, the idea of ??setting up an open-air school in the slums matured in Mother Teresa's mind.

The next day, in an open space under a big tree, Mother Teresa announced that that was the classroom, the ground was the blackboard, and those who wanted to study could sit down. After her patient persuasion, Babu sat down first, followed by the four children. Mother Teresa's interesting lectures gradually attracted them, and other children also slowly approached the big tree. When Mother Teresa came to the big tree again the next day, she found that a tent had been set up with rags, wooden boards and other materials, and there were many more children sitting in it than yesterday. Barbu told her, "Everyone helped to build this shed. I invited all my friends to come to class."

In this simple "classroom", Mother Teresa not only taught the children In addition to some simple reading, reading and writing, we also teach them hygiene knowledge, such as brushing teeth, washing face, taking a bath, etc. She also personally took the children to the well and taught them how to bathe one by one. The women in the slums saw this in their eyes and took it to heart. Soon, they also followed Theresa's example and bathed their children.

Mother Teresa’s open-air school in the slums spread quickly. A week later, more than 100 children came to attend the class, and later it increased to more than 500.

Calcutta is a city where poor people gather in India. Due to poverty, there were so many abandoned babies and the scene was so miserable that it was really rare in the world. After setting up a school for the poor, Teresa, together with other nuns, undertook the work of adopting abandoned babies who were skinny, disease-ridden, and congenitally disabled.

The nuns not only adopted babies abandoned at the gate of the monastery, but also took back abandoned babies seen in other places. Some poor people even sent over children they could not afford. The number of abandoned babies being adopted is increasing, and the impact is growing. As a result, there are frequent shortages of funds to purchase medicines, milk powder and food. But the strange thing is that whenever such a shortage occurs, someone will definitely send money, food, medicine, clothes, etc. to help them tide over the difficulties.

Hospices

Beyond India, Mother Teresa and her colleagues became widely known after reports of their services to the dying . In the eyes of most people, there is nothing special about feeding malnourished children and delivering rice to the poor; but in a country where the population is exploding to the point of despair, for some people who are about to be sacrificed to death , it is an incredible thing for people who only have a few hours or days to live to build a home. Because nowhere else in the world will you find the kind of spirit that Mother Teresa displayed in this work—the unconditional respect for any unfortunate soul.

Reporter Michael Zomes once introduced Mother Teresa’s first hospice in Calcutta. He said: One day, a dying person was lying on the road outside Gambier Hospital. . Mother Teresa tried to take him to the hospital, but when she ran back from the pharmacy with the medicine, the man was dead and lying on the ground unnoticed. Theresa was angry and said: "They treat cats and dogs better than their brothers of the same kind. If they were their beloved pets, they would never let them die like this!"

Things like this happened to Mother Teresa all the time. One day, she found an old woman lying on the road, as if dead, with ants crawling on her feet wrapped in rags, a hole in her head as if she had been bitten by a mouse, and blood crawling around the wound. Full of flies and maggots. Teresa measured the old woman's breathing and pulse and found that the old woman seemed to still be breathing, so she quickly sent the old woman to a nearby hospital. When the hospital learned that she was a homeless old man, she refused to accept her, but Mother Teresa was firm: "The hospital is not responsible for whether the old woman can be saved, but it is necessary for the hospital to find ways to treat her!" Because of Sister Risa's righteous words, the hospital treated the dying old woman.

Mother Teresa decided to improve this situation through her own efforts. Because there is more than one dead body on the streets. Collecting corpses on the streets of Calcutta every morning is like collecting garbage. The poor people in the Pearl Sea slums once pooled their money to build a waiting room for the dying. It was just a simple room with two beds, but it had a poetic name - "Pure Heart" Home". But the death house soon closed due to strong opposition from nearby residents, who feared the rotten stench of death.

Mother Teresa came to the Calcutta City Health Department. An enthusiastic official from the health department received her and took her to the famous Kali Temple in Calcutta. The temple promised to lend it to believers for free for worship. A place for them to rest at the end.

After finding this place to rest for poor patients, the nuns settled more than twenty of the poorest and most miserable people in just one day.

One day, a few meters away from the garbage dump, Mother Teresa discovered a ghost-like skeleton. It was almost a jagged skeleton wrapped in paper-like human skin. But he was still alive, and the maggots had begun to eat away at his skin.

Mother Teresa moved the old man into a covered hall, fed him, cleaned his miserable, feces-covered body, and removed maggots from his wounds.

"How can you bear my stink?" the weak man gasped softly.

"Compared to the pain on your body, this is nothing." She replied softly.

The old man muttered confidently: "You are not from here. People here will not do what you do." When he was dying, he tried to make himself smile: "You should be praised. "

"No," she responded with a smile: "You are the one who should be praised, don't praise me."

There was also an old man on the day he moved in. He passed away in the evening. Before he died, he held Mother Teresa's hand and whispered in Bengali: "I lived like a dog all my life, and now I die like a human. Thank you."

It was this unspectacular nun who allowed countless people who had been abandoned by secular society to receive compensation with dignity in the last few hours of their lives.

Leprosy Rehabilitation Center

Leprosy is also called candle disease among the people, because after the disease, some parts of the human body will become like candles melted by fire. Fester and eventually die. Around the middle of the 20th century, the disease was rampant in India. According to estimates at the time, there were about five million leprosy patients in India, with as many as 80,000 in Calcutta alone.

The whole society is full of fear of leprosy: patients are abandoned by their families, living on the streets, hiding in the wilderness, or trapped in caves; and some healthy people will rush to see leprosy patients. They would even throw stones at them if they tried to avoid them; when the police saw lepers, they would even hold them at gunpoint and ask them to be thrown into a concentration camp...

One day, an official from the city government's health department found Mother Teresa. , hoping that her Sisters of Charity could help care for those sick with leprosy on the streets, and that the government could provide a suitable place to gather the patients. The young nuns felt embarrassed because the convent already had a lot of work. In addition to slum schools, children's homes, and hospices, it was now too difficult to add a leprosy rehabilitation center. However, Mother Teresa readily agreed to the official, because for her, selfless charity was God, and she thought more about the poor lepers.

In 1969, the first leprosy rehabilitation center founded by the Missionaries of Charity was established in a place called Didaga on the outskirts of Calcutta. This is a hut located on an abandoned piece of land close to the railway embankment. It is built using sacks, bamboo poles, iron sheets, tiles, etc. as building materials and rich imagination. The roof of the hut is partially covered with On wooden pilings in open drainage channels.

Teresa and the nuns began to look for leprosy patients who had been kicked out of their homes by relatives, friends and family members. They often walked into the stinking shabby houses and drove away the maggots crawling from the wounds of the leprosy patients. and the flies licking at the wounds, injecting them with medicine, bandaging their wounds, and soothing their hurt hearts.

On the day when the Tidaga Leprosy Rehabilitation Center opened services, Mother Teresa specially touched the body and hands of each leprosy patient to show her care for each patient. She kindly said to everyone: "Please cheer up, God has never abandoned you, let us all work hard together." Those women with rotten fingers, old people who lost their legs, children with rotten ears... all of a sudden I feel a warm current passing through my body, which increases my confidence in overcoming the pain.

However, for every leprosy patient, the medical miracle cannot simultaneously scrape off the "leprosy" tattoo on their forehead. After being cured and discharged, the patients are still treated by the society. Discrimination, no one wants to hire them.

Therefore, in order to continue to stay in the protected hospital, the patients did not hesitate to tear the scab wounds...

Faced with various practical problems that arise when leprosy survivors return to society, the Missionary Sisters of Charity These rehabilitation centers founded by the Association began to arrange vocational training for recovered patients - allowing some patients to engage in simple tasks such as spinning bandages for themselves and making their own medicine bags; some people also worked as carpenters in leprosy rehabilitation centers. They work in factories, shoemaking factories, brick kilns and small farms, using their own labor to meet their basic needs; or they cultivate their own rice and wheat fields to make themselves self-sufficient. Mother Teresa also got an old printing press and let the patients use it to print some leaflets and newspapers, so as to return to life and make some money. In order to allow the patients to live the same life as normal people, Mother Teresa always arranges for them to attend midnight mass every Christmas, organizes them to perform plays, assists the nuns in distributing Christmas gifts, and participates in lunch concerts. etc.

In short, leprosy patients who are admitted to the rehabilitation center can enjoy the fun of normal people in every aspect and live a normal life. They regain the dignity of normal people.

Excerpted from "A Life of Charity" compiled by Qu Yajun and others, Zhuhai Publishing House, January 2002 edition

Mother Teresa's words:

We often fail to do great things ,

But we can do small things with great love.

-----Mother Teresa