to receive formal religious training.Her life’s religious path began at eighteen, when joined Ireland’s Sisters of Loreto for formal religious training. Here she took the name Teresa in honor of the French missionary saint Therese of Liseux, known for her piety, goodness and unflinching courage in the face of early illness and early death.”2 She learned English and was trained in religious life for about a year. On December 1, 1928 she begins her journey to India. In Darjeeling she continues her training for two years, after which she takes her vows.She is immediately sent to Calcutta where she helps care for the sick in a little hospital, while working as a teacher and principal at St. Mary’s, an upper-class girl’s high school. While working at the school and hospital she exposed for the first time to advanced suffering of the Calcutta slums, which are located a close distance to the school. In this way Calcutta is great social and economical paradox; next to the great opulence of palaces there exists the revolting squalor of local shantytowns. From her St Mary’s room, Teresa could see strait down into the heart of the Moti Jheel slums, where entire families lived heaped together in the mud (37). Letters form her mother provides meaning for the suffering she observes in these shantytowns. They remind her of her basic call: to care for the poor. The plight of these poor and her inability to do more for them, troubled her greatly. She spends two years, under the guidance of a spiritual director named father Henry, in prayer and contemplation searching for an answer. The answer she had been seeking finally comes to her on September 10, 1946 during “the most important journey of [her] life.” While on a train ride to Darjeeling, for a spiritual retreat, she receives a second calling from God "to serve Him amongst the poorest of the poor". In her own words she explains, “I was to leav...
