#Unconditional love mother teresa quotes full#

In 2016 Saimir Strati, an Albanian artist on Monday unveiled a portrait of Mother Teresa using staples, in a call for European countries to stop raising fences to shut their borders to refugees. The 10-square-meter mosaic portrait of Mother Teresa, built with 1.5 million wire staples, is at the National Museum of Kosovo in the capital, Pristina. Mother Teresa’s concern for the refugees is also contagious. I was asking myself, what do they feel when they do this. On 14 August 1982 after assisting to evacuate 37 handicapped children from a mental hospital in the Sabra refugee camp in Lebanon she said, “I have never been in a war before, but I have seen famine and death. Mother Teresa abhorred war and violence and how these destroyed the lives of ordinary people. They care for the refugees and the displaced, with a particular focus on the destitute, the dying, the orphans, the widows and the other excluded. They are continue their work with total dedication in Syria and in Iraq, in Congo and Somalia, in Myanmar and Bangladesh and in several other trouble spots of the world today. The refugees and the displaced were always an integral part of the vision and mission of Mother Teresa.ĭuring the time of Mother Teresa and even now, her sisters are present in countries torn by war and violence. It was not without reason that every Missionary of Charity takes a special fourth vow of “free and whole-hearted service to the poorest of the poor”. Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity focused solely on the dispossessed of the earth: those who lived in slums and in the peripheries of our societies the excluded, the unloved and the rejected the refugees and the displaced those who were turned away and despised by a society that was slowly becoming more cruel, more inhuman – which had become immune to see people dying on the streets. The refugees knew one thing: this frail woman clad in a white blue-bordered sari cared for them, understood their suffering and stood by them she was truly a ‘Mother’!

#Unconditional love mother teresa quotes full#

In the midst of the squalor of the Calcutta bastis, Mother Teresa reached out to those who had nowhere to go, intently listening to their woes, with a heart full of love. With the help of international agencies and other generous donors, the Sisters would provide the refuges with food, clothing and medication.

Mother and her ‘Missionaries of Charity’ spared no efforts in reaching out to them.

An estimated ten million people from erstwhile East Pakistan fled to India the majority of them took refuge in the three neighbouring Indian states of West Bengal, Tripura and Assam. It was the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971 that provided a momentum to Mother Teresa’s work among the refugees. In the early years, several of the young girls who joined the Missionaries of Charity were from the erstwhile East Bengal (today Bangladesh). Mother Teresa and her first companions were deeply affected by the situation of these refugees – and they reached out to them in every possible way: caring for them with great compassion besides providing whatever humanitarian assistance possible. Mother Teresa and her fledgling Congregation was literally thrown into the days of partition and the bloody aftermath when thousands of refugees from what would become East Pakistan poured into West Bengal.

A little after she received her “inspiration”, the “call within a call” on 10 September 1946 to start a new Congregation, the freedom struggle in India was gaining momentum in India. In particular, she was a ‘Mother’ to refugees and the displaced.