Katie Ringler remembers being a child at Paz de Cristo and becoming more involved during the nine years that her mother directed it.

At Ursinus, Katie Ringler helped established weekly meal service for the community's poor, using about 25 students. She studied for four months in Spain, and, in the summer of 2006, she was a health intern in the International Medical Corps in Kenya.

Those programs have helped prepare Ringler for her Mother Teresa adventure to ''fully absorb the spirit and intensity of her life.''

''By following her life, I hope to gain a greater understanding of her own inspirations and what led her to lead the life she did,'' Ringler said.

To begin the complicated logistics of her trip, Katie contacted the Missionaries of Charity office in New York City and was urged to write letters to the sisters and contacts at all the locations on her planned route. She got spotty responses and intends to develop contacts outside the religious order in the cities she will visit.

It will take her first to Skopje, Macedonia (Tempe's Sister City), where the Catholic nun was born in 1910, and then to Ireland where she studied in a convent.

Ringler plans to spend four months in Calcutta, where Mother Teresa arrived as a teen and took her vows as a nun in 1931.

Ringler will live with missionaries at her destinations, including Calcutta.

''I will see how the slum children are cared for,'' she said. Nuns teach them practical skills for finding jobs.

Ringler plans to travel widely in India to see where the nuns expanded their work and ''see how each different location made a lasting impact on Mother Teresa.'' In the second half of her year, she will spend about two months each in Venezuela, Tanzania and Italy, and possibly end in China ''where Mother Teresa always hoped to establish her vision'' and where the sisters are in talks with the government to accomplish that.

Ringler has penciled out her expected costs at $25,000.

Her hope is that she will be able to live among the nuns as much as possible to watch how they embody Mother Teresa's passion to serve.

''I think they see me as a potential volunteer, being able to help out,'' she said.