Mother Teresa
An Albanian from Skopje who at eighteen entered an Irish order and was sent to teach in Calcutta. For eighteen years she taught geography to girls from well-off families, and in 1946, by her own account, heard “a call within a call” — to go to the poorest. Two years later she walked out of the convent in a white sari with a blue border and opened a school in the open air; in 1950 she registered the congregation of the Missionaries of Charity. A home for the dying, shelters for lepers and abandoned children, then hundreds of houses in more than a hundred countries. The Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. She was reproached for her attitude to pain relief and for money taken from questionable donors; from the diaries published after her death it emerged that for nearly fifty years she lived with a sense of God’s absence and did the work anyway.
She was born in Skopje on 26 August 1910 at 14:25 local time. The hour comes from her own account; she herself counted her birthday not from this date but from 27 August, the day of her baptism.