In 1946, a Catholic nun named Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, teaching comfortably at a convent school in Calcutta, experienced what she would later describe as a clear call to leave the convent and live among the city's poorest residents — not to visit them occasionally, but to actually live at their level.
She stepped out of the convent in 1948 with no funding, no organization, and only basic medical training she'd picked up quickly, and began treating the sick and dying on the streets of the city's poorest neighborhoods, in places even local hospitals often refused to go.
She founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950, starting homes for the dying, the sick, orphaned children, and those with leprosy — groups that, at the time, were often left completely unsupported by the state or society. She insisted her sisters live simply, close to the poverty they served, never above it.
By the time of her death in 1997, the Missionaries of Charity had grown to operate in over a hundred countries. Whatever one's view of her larger legacy, the fact remains: she chose, repeatedly, to walk toward the people everyone else was trained to walk past.