Mother Teresa Arrives in Calcutta
On this day · 6 January 1929
A young Albanian nun stepped off a ship in 1929, beginning a life that would become one of the century's great stories of service.
On 6 January 1929, an eighteen-year-old nun named Gonxha Agnes Bojaxhiu disembarked in Calcutta after a long voyage from Europe. Born in Skopje to an Albanian family, she had joined the Sisters of Loreto in Ireland and departed for India that December, never imagining the scale of the mission ahead.
For nearly two decades she taught at a Loreto convent school. But the poverty beyond the convent walls pressed on her, and in 1948 she left to live among the destitute. On 7 October 1950 she founded the Missionaries of Charity, an order devoted to “the poorest of the poor.”
She took the bold step into the unknown, founding a community to serve those the world forgot.
Her work in the slums of Calcutta drew global attention, earning her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. Canonized in 2016 as Saint Teresa of Calcutta, she remains a defining symbol of compassion, her decades of service traced back to that single quiet arrival by sea.
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