Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa was born far away in a country called Albania, but she made Kolkata her true home. She wore a simple white cotton sari with a blue border, walked through crowded streets, and spent her entire life caring for people no one else would care for — those who were sick, hungry, dying or alone.

She opened homes for orphans, for the very ill, and for lepers. Her small hands did quiet, huge work.

Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu was born in 1910 in Skopje, in today's North Macedonia. She joined a religious order as a teenager and came to India as a nun, teaching for many years at a school in Kolkata.

In 1946, on a train ride, she felt what she later called a 'call within a call' — to leave the school and serve the poorest of the poor in the city's slums.

In 1950 she founded the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata, a religious order dedicated to caring for people who had been abandoned. Their work included homes for the dying, orphanages, and homes for people suffering from leprosy and HIV.

The order today has centres in more than 130 countries. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and India's Bharat Ratna in 1980.

Pope Francis declared her a saint of the Roman Catholic Church in 2016, and she is now known as Saint Teresa of Calcutta.