Mirror Mirror Series: Moira Kelly

It’s not every day you come across someone who strives to make a difference in the world, ‘Just like Mother Teresa’. To be honest I doubt there are many people who remember who Mother Teresa was and her selfless acts and achievements. So, a name I would like people to brand into their memories is Moira Kelly.

She was born in Melbourne on January 31st in 1964. At age 8, saw a documentary about Mother Teresa and decided then and there she wanted to get involved with humanitarian work. As with every journey she began small, jumping the fence to help feed the special needs kids in the special school next door to her own primary school.

She left school after completing grade 10 and in the years following, she trained to become a teaching assistant, a lay missionary, and a probation officer. With that knowledge under her belt and years of experience she moved to Western Australia to help with the Aboriginal Mission.

Unbeknownst to her parents, Moira sold her car when she returned to Melbourne, just so she could afford to travel to Calcutta in India to work alongside Mother Teresa in her mission for the full six weeks until her visa ran out. She returned to India in 1987 and a year later was awarded the Australian Bicentenary Young Woman of the Year for her work in community services and the Advance Australia Ambassador.

Since then Moira has done humanitarian work in the Bronx, Bosnia and Herzegovina and has started many aid programs, including Nobody’s Children and Children First. She opened a farm in conjunction with Children First called the Open Door Rotary Farm, where the children who are brought to Australia for medical treatment are homed and cared for.

Her awards are numerous and well and truly earned with hard work, blood, sweat and tears. To get an idea of just how she struggles to make the world better, you can look for A Compassionate Rage, a 2001 documentary film by Film Australia and Alan Lindsay following Kelly for 18 months on her missions overseas as she tries to organise medical treatment for sick and injured children.

Four of the children Moira has been able to help have been making headlines in the last few years, and it is debatable as to who makes us smile more. Trishna and Krishna are the conjoined twins from Bangladesh, who were successfully separated by the incredible surgeons at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital. Emmanuel Kelly you may have seen on the last season of X Factor, singing Imagine and making us all do the ugly cry with his angelic voice. Ahmed Mustafa is a quadruple amputee who will be representing Australia in the 2012 London Paralympics as part of our stellar swim team. The boys have come a long way from their humble beginnings in Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Baghdad.

Moira Kelly is certainly living a large life and her kindness will hopefully inspire generations to come.

http://www.childrenfirstfoundation.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moira_Kelly_(humanitarian)