formed Albanian army as a Second Lieutenant. When Lazar received the
news of his younger sister’s decision to become a nun, he wrote to her ask-
ing whether she was sure about her decision. Gonxha replied, “You think
you are important because you are an officer serving a king with two mil-
lion subjects. But I am serving the King of the whole world.”^5
All too soon, the time came for Gonxha to leave. She was to travel first
to Paris, where the Mother Superior of the Loreto Sisters was to interview
her to determine whether Gonxha was acceptable to the order. On Au-
gust 15, 1928, the Feast of the Assumption, Gonxha traveled for the last
time to the shrine of the Madonna of Letnice. Later, she attended a con-
cert by the Sodality group, which was given partly to honor her, and had
her photograph taken. That evening, guests came to the Bojaxhiu home
to wish her farewell. Many of her friends and family brought gifts; one of
those she most treasured was a gold fountain pen that a cousin gave to her.
The next day, Gonxha went to the Skopje railway station. Her mother
and sister traveled with her as far as Zagreb; friends gathered to wish the
Bojaxhiu women a safe journey. Gonxha cried and waved her handker-
chief from the train window in farewell. The threesome made the most of
their time in Zagreb. Finally, on October 8, Gonxha, accompanied by an-
other young woman, Betika Kanjc, who also hoped to join the Loreto Sis-
ters, boarded the train to Paris. As Gonxha made her way to the train, her
mother and sister returned to Skopje. Waving goodbye, Gonxha bid
farewell to her mother, whom she never saw again.
NOTES
- Eileen Egan, Such a Vision of the Street: Mother Teresa—The Spirit and the
Work(New York: Image Books, 1986), p. 9. - Kathryn Spink, Mother Teresa(San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1997),
pp. 6–7. - Spink, Mother Teresa,p. 6.
- Navin Chawla, Mother Teresa: The Authorized Biography(Rockport, Mass.:
Element, 1992), p. 3. - Spink, Mother Teresa,p. 11.
SKOPJE 11