Loving the lepes

Loving the Lepers

© 2014.All rights reserved

Author: Lillian DicksonPublished byThe Mustard Seed MissionNo.6-1, Ln. 49, Shuangcheng St., Zhongshan Dist., Taipei City 104, Taiwan (R.O.C.)Tel: 886-2-25974868Fax: 886-2-25975028http://mustard.becreator.tw/locale/en

Cover Design: Showwe Information Co.,Ltd.Tel: 886-2-27963638Fax: 886-2-27961377E-mail: [email protected]

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Foreword

Foreword

By Marilyn Dickson Tank

“The story of the lepers should be told,” Lillian Dickson, my mother, stated firmly, so she wrote it, and filed it away. But she wanted it told.

Here then is the story of a woman who against all odds, tackled the despair of a 1000 people. Here, she tells in her own words how she felt as she tried to alleviate their appalling needs. Walk with Lillian into the “Ward Nearest Heaven’s Door”-weep with her over the death of a leper’s

baby…..feel the strain and degradation of life as a leper. Then rejoice as the first glimmerings of the knowledge of God show in their hearts.

Today there were fewer leper patients in the Colony, Sulfa drugs have allowed many to go home cured. Skin clinics around the Island are treating the light cases so there are few new patients.

Over 600 patients have been baptized. Many of them preceded Lillian to Heaven, to welcome her there. For Lillian lived to see the day break and the Morning Star arise in their hearts.

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Contents

Contents

Foreword ............................................................................................................................................003

Chapter 1...........................................................................................................................................007Chapter 2...........................................................................................................................................013Chapter 3...........................................................................................................................................021Chapter 4...........................................................................................................................................027Chapter 5...........................................................................................................................................033Chapter 6...........................................................................................................................................039Chapter 7...........................................................................................................................................045Chapter 8...........................................................................................................................................051Chapter 9...........................................................................................................................................057Chapter 10 ........................................................................................................................................063Chapter 11 ........................................................................................................................................069Chapter 12 ........................................................................................................................................075Chapter 13 ........................................................................................................................................081Chapter 14 ........................................................................................................................................085


Chapter 1

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Chapter 1

After the end of World War II we returned to Formosa and found ourselves busier than ever. On every side the doors to do Christian work were opened, people, frightened and saddened by the

years of war, were anxious to hear the Gospel.“The harvest! The harvest! The harvest is here!” we thought exultingly and tried to be here, there

and everywhere at once. Open air work brought astonishing results and sometimes we had open air meetings every night of the week although different churches sponsored them.

Open air Sunday Schools were singularly successful too. An empty lot, an open courtyard, even a not-too-travelled street, wherever there were many children, we would start out with music and call them together for a Bible story and songs.

Our hearts were overflowing with happiness with this work, so it was with a dour face I saw a pastor approaching my door whose request I knew was far from my accustomed paths.

He was Pastor Chhoa from the Government Leprosarium, a place I had never gone. I had gone to the Christian Leprosarium, a much smaller place, but not to his place.

He did not smile when he greeted me. He stated his request as a command. “You must come to the Leprosarium,” he said. He spoke as a man overburdened and desperate.

“I’m too busy to come,” I told him. “I have many meetings every day and every night. I couldn’t possibly do any more.”

“You must come,” he repeated stubbornly paying no attention at all to my excuses. “You must come.”

When he went away I still felt very unhappy. Each time he came it was the same. So finally I asked another missionary wife who had a car, “Would you go with me once a month to the Leprosarium?”

She had the car, we both had accordions. “Let’s buy some cookies and sweets to take with us,” I suggested. “We will call them together with the accordion music, and then have songs and a Bible story with the flannelgraph, and then give them sweets.”

We went and found that the only place they could meet was in a big shabby public hall. We went out on the paths playing the accordions and some of the Christian leper patients and the pastor accompanied us and announced the meeting.

It is hard not to faint when you first see them coming, some without hands, some without eyes, minus noses, swollen faces, some blotched and discolored, some came crawling, some came with crutches. We managed to carry though our meeting as planned.

When it came time to give out sweets, I decided to go down among them and give them out personally. I thought “If I were a leper, the thing that would hurt me most would be that people would withdraw from me and not want to come near.”

So I went among them, my heart quaking but determined and as I passed out the sweets I saw with horror that I still had not thought things through. How do you give sweets to a man who has no


hands? He has no way to grasp them.The next time we came I brought squares of paper to put the sweets on, but even that was

awkward. Now we always use paper bags and we prepare them before time.Among the patients, there was one man who always tried to help us. When we came with the

accordions he would take out his old, old trombone to make music too. It seemed to me that he had only one tune he could play and that was “Down at the Cross Where the Savior died”.

One day when we came he did not bring out his instrument. “Where is your trombone?” I asked him. He did not look at me as he answered,- he looked at his hands.

Still looking down he answered, “I can’t play it any more,- my fingers are gone,” he said.Tears blinded my eyes at his sad tone. I went home depressed thinking of his tragedy. Then I

remembered the song he knew and played so well. Knowing him I was sure that he had played it all through for the last time before he put his trombone away forever. The last line of the song came vividly to my mind “Glory to His Name!”

There was comfort in the thought. “Many men at home with money and position may have a less glorious end than he did,” I thought, “ with his last touch he still praised the Lord.”

We had a regular time each month for going to the Leprosarium; but one day I had a strong compulsion that I must go, although it was not the regular time and the other missionary wife could not go with me. You can explain these strong compulsions as you will, but I believe “It is the Lord!” I call it the angle’s touch on my shoulder giving me a little push in the direction I should go.

Anyway, I arrived at the Leprosarium a little bewildered as to why I was there, but still determined to have a meeting as usual, and then perhaps God would tell me why.

I was met with stern faces among the patients who were leaders.“Have your meeting early, Mrs. Dickson,” they told me tersely. “For we have another meeting

coming up at five o’clock.”“What is this ‘other meeting? ’” I asked, for I felt trouble almost tangibly in the air.“It is a ‘Protest’ meeting.” The answer was grim.“What are you protesting about?” I asked.“Lack of food, lack of clothes, lack of medicines, lack of doctors, nurses, lack of everything,” - they

responded bitterly.They were in no mood to discuss anything calmly. We had our meeting and then I called three of

the outstanding leaders to come with me. We went apart over a little hill out of sight of the others.“Call this Protest meeting off,” I urged them. “It will do you no good. You will never get what you

are asking for through the Government route.” (This was just after the war when all Government offices were fluid and unstable and we happened to have a very corrupt man as Supt. of the Leprosarium.)

“If you have your meeting there will be people killed perhaps. They are apt to put barbed wire

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entanglements around the Colony and soldiers with bayonets. They will say “It is too dangerous for foreigners and I may not be able to reach you for years. You will not get what you are asking for that way.”

“If you call it off, then I promise you that I will bring you all that you have asked for through the Christian route.”

They looked sulky and unwilling, but in the end they agreed. That meeting was never held. To my amusement now they mark history from that day.

I went home that evening scared but determined. Now I knew why God had sent me. There was a task for me to do for Him.

When I had made my promise to the leaders in the Colony so recklessly I had counted on a missionary doctor whom I thought might help. She was Dr. Signe Berg, a woman doctor, who was helping in the Mission hospital. Her husband, also a doctor, had been one of the first missionaries killed by the Communists in China. She was a devoted and warmhearted Christian.

“Will you go with me?” I asked her when I had finished my report. We had heard that under the corrupt Supt. things were so bad that despair and hopelessness reigned. Three suicides a week were common. The patients could not leave the Colony and report to anyone outside of the conditions. Their only hope was to make an uprising and arouse the public attention.

Suicides were hushed up and the bodies quickly cremated.Dr. Berg agreed to go and the next morning I spent all the money I had in this world for medicines

and we filled two large baskets. Then we started out in a taxi to the Colony. I remember we had prayer together on the way asking God’s help.

When we reached the Colony we paused for a moment. Two women with two baskets of drugs trying to ward off a rebellion,-where should we start in?

“Let’s go to the ‘ward nearest Heaven’s door’,” I suggested for that was where the most advanced cases were.

In this ward the doctor found much to do. Every patient needed care, needed drugs, needed attention. I interpreted for her, for these were all Taiwanese.

Even though many were helpless on their beds there were others who could move around. Great happy excitement prevailed because we had come and had medicines. Some had never seen a doctor or a nurse as the corrupt administration paid no attention to the patients.

Though people swirled around me as I tried to help the doctor with each one, still I became aware that out in the hall tall quiet men were watching us intently.

Finally I was called out. It was the leaders I had met with the day before. All the hot temper of the day before had disappeared. They were cool, quiet and factual.

“It is physically impossible for you and the doctor to go from bed to bed and see each patient


when we have 650 patients,” they said matter-of-factly. “We will organize a Clinic and everybody that is able can come to the Clinic and get the drugs they need. We will find out ahead of time how many patients lying on their beds need the doctor, and after the clinic each day we will lead the doctor to them. That will save time.”

A wave of thanksgiving swept over me as I heard them. Always it takes the men with brains to straighten out a complex situation, and make it streamlined and efficient.

So it was that every morning when we arrived with our baskets of drugs, the Clinic was set up. There was a sort of public hall that the Buddhists used for meetings, and we were allowed to use this place. It looked very dirty for a clinic, so we arranged to have it scrubbed and clean.

However, they did not really scrub as we do, but just splashed water across the floor. So the next time I came I brought hot water, soap, scouring power and scrub brushes, and I scrubbed the floor. It had not been done for 20 years I believe, since the Colony was first started.

Never again did I have to scrub the floor there, for the patients seeing that I wanted it done thoroughly, learned to do it as we do, and always we came to a freshly scrubbed place for our Clinic for the day.

We had no need to worry, - the slightest suggestion for improvement we made was taken into consideration by the leaders and soon carried out. At first we came every day, then later every other day, and often our clinic lasted from 8:30 in the morning until four in the afternoon.

We commenced with a short time of worship for the drugs were bought with God’s money and they must know Him in order to thank Him.

Long lines of patients came and usually there were three of us to give out the drugs. Being a mother I had the light cases, -headaches,- A.P.C.; stomachache,- soda; ointment for wounds; all the minor illnesses that a mother might care for in a home. Leper patients have other ills besides leprosy. They have headaches as we do and all the minor discomforts, and the drugs made the difference between comfort and discomfort to them.

Usually they slipped into the chair in front of us to tell us what they needed when their turn came, but now and then a patient would wait patiently her turn, and then when she was there, she would say shyly, “I did not come to ask for anything. I just came to tell you ‘thank you’”.

Chapter 2

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Chapter 2

On that day of stormy turmoil when they had proposed their Protest Meeting, I had promised “All you have asked for, we will provide through the Christian route.”

All the patients were undernourished, because the corrupt Superintendent and staff had conspired in some way to keep some of the food money. Practically every patient was below par. We secured milk powder and hired two men to arise early and make hot milk; pails and pails of hot milk. So just at dawn as they awakened, a huge pail of hot milk would be brought into the ward, and every patient could have a big bowlful to drink.

Besides the hot milk, we had cod liver oil pills and multi-vitamin tablets to give them with their milk. Some of these we bought and some were given to us. Because Chinese people are not accustomed to milk, it was necessary to make it sweet at first, and our sugar bill was high. But in a few months time this special effort made real progress in the general health of the Colony.

Before this time, many patients had committed suicide because they were hungry and depressed and discouraged.

They had lost hope of any improvement. Now they had “hope” and worked eagerly together with us to improve the conditions in the Colony.

Not only was their food allowance seriously insufficient, but each patient was supposed to do his or her own cooking. If you have no hands, only stumps, it is very awkward to try and remove a hot saucepan from the fire. Some patients had little sensitivity and would get badly burned before they realized it.

Cooking for themselves was terror and distress.We decided to set up a kitchen. “Where was your kitchen in the days of the Japanese?” I asked

them, for this Colony had been begun by the Japanese.They brought me to a large building now mostly partitioned off by flimsy bamboo screens into

cubicles for individual patients. However, one large room was intact and it had the Chinese stoves for cooking.

Did you ever plan a kitchen to prepare food and cook for 650 people? Nothing in my previous experience had prepared me for this, but dire necessity made my brain work on it.

“There is no choice;We cannot say, “This will I do, or that.”A hand is stretched to us from out the dark,Which grasping without question, we are ledWhere there is work THAT WE MUST DO FOR GOD.” -Lowell


Among the patients there were men of education and ability, and even though disfigured by the disease, their minds were bright and intelligent. As I walked through the Colony, always a group of the patients were with me. Never did I give directions,- I offered suggestions and then the group would discuss it and improve on my suggestions until we had really a workable plan.

In one corner of the large kitchen we made a storeroom, simple but impenetrable. In this Colony where all were hungry, one could expect thieves and perhaps condone them. Nevertheless, this was to hold food for all the patients.

How about cooks? Out of 650 patients about two-thirds were not bedfast, and soon they discovered several who had once been cooks. There were others as helpers, cleaners, etc. I remember one time after our kitchen was a reality dizzily counting up that I had eighteen cooks!

We had to supplement their food rations and that took much arithmetic. How thankful I was for that unofficial committee of leaders who worked it out so that all had enough to eat and still nothing was wasted.

When Jesus fed the five thousand that was just for one meal, but now there were 650 to eat three times a day and every day! It was the Lord still feeding them. I had practically no money at all when I started this venture for God, but every day the money came as once manna came from Heaven, just enough for every need, and none left over.

It was a large family to take care of. “When mother sits down to eat, 650 leper patients sit down at our table too,” I told my family.

“Lack of clothes”-that had been one of their protests too. “Who are the poorest among the patients? Who needs clothes the worst?” I asked. Then we had no “used clothes” from America and everything I brought to them had to be bought.

Each time I went to the Colony I would be given a list. “Eight men’s shirts and eleven pairs of trousers,” or something on that order. “Size?” Why, any size, if you are buying for 650 no matter what size you buy it will fit somebody. Everybody needed clothes.

The government once a year gave them a cloth allowance. But the corrupt Superintendent would buy bolts and bolts of the shoddiest material possible, a dirty gray so thin and flimsy that it could scarcely be called cloth. There was no warmth to it, and it would survive few launderings.

In our endeavor to keep them warm, we stripped our own house of clothes and encouraged our friends to do likewise. “If I can’t find some of my clothes now,” I heard my husband grumbling, “I know where they are. They are all out at the Leprosarium.”

All the clothes we could bring were not enough. One day while I was there at the Clinic, I realized that great commotion and excitement were taking place outside. Some of the patients came running to me.

“The Catholics have brought us clothes,” they said. “Ten pounds for each person.” Their eyes were startled and unbelieving. They had never seen so many clothes, and if before they had received one

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garment a year, they had been grateful.Another organization brought blankets to the patients, old blankets and often not very warm, but

at least it was that much gain. We thanked God for the blankets too, His love reaching the humblest through many routes.

Although new courage and hope had swept through the Colony when they realized that from the outside help was coming in the way of better food, more adequate clothing and bedding, and drugs for their aches and pains, still I realized that the battle for morale was far from over.

Still there were suicides. Not as many perhaps, but often I would get a telephone call, often late at night, “Come and bring a doctor with you,- someone has tried to kill himself.” And with a doctor we would go dashing out to the Colony about 40 minutes away in our little worn-out jeep, trying to save another life.

Sometimes we were able to save their lives, and sometimes we were too late. One day we found that it was a young man who had taken an overdose of drugs in order to destroy himself. He had been a soldier from the Mainland, and somewhere in the South Seas had contracted leprosy.

“Why did you do it?” I asked him, for he was still conscious. “Because I had this dreadful disease and there is no cure, because I am in this terrible place and there is no way to leave it, and because no one cares,” was his reply. (That was before the drug, sulfone, was brought here, and so there was no “cure”.)

Another day there had been three suicides in one day. I stopped at the side of Iu Sian-si, a patient in the “ward nearest Heaven’s door”. He had been a school teacher, a head teacher. He used to play the piano. Now his hands were gone and his feet and his face disfigured and deformed. But his mind was still bright and intelligent.

“Iu Sian-si, why do they do it?” I asked him desperately while tears ran down my face. It is hard for an ordinary American woman to look on violent death.

“I’ll tell you why,” he responded quickly. “We are in this place, and we have no touch with the outside world. We have no newspapers, no magazines, no radio, no educational movies, nothing new to think about. Having nothing else to think about, men think about their bodies and then they become discouraged and destroy themselves.”

That was a reasonable diagnosis. I set about remedying all these things. No newspapers! That was easy.

No magazines,-we ordered several. I looked over the Colony and found an excellent building used now for a storeroom, that would make a good library building. So we dickered with the Superintendent.

“We will build a storeroom for you if you will let us have that building as a library for the patients,” we told him and he agreed. By this time he was afraid of the patients, and did not even go among them for fear of violence. He was very thankful if we could do things for them that would make them more


satisfied and peaceful.So we set up a library, and the International Women’s Club furnished it not only with tables and

benches and book-cases, but they gave many magazines with pictures for the patients.No radio! That was comparatively easy too. But I had another plan for raising the morale of

the patients. So many deaths in such a small community threw an atmosphere of gloom over all. I remembered the merry-go-rounds when I was a girl, and the gay lilting music that cheered everybody.

Someone had given me an old victrola, and I bought a loud-speaker horn. “Could you hitch the horn to the victorla so that several times a day we could broadcast gay music?” I asked the electrician. “We can do more than that,” he said. “We can fix it so that every ward has an outlet and even those patients who are lying in their beds all the time can hear it.”

My plan had been only to “shift gears” from the unutterable sadness of multiple deaths and suicides to happier moods by the factor of music.

But the electrician not only did that, but he attached it all to a radio, so that news of the world and the radio music could be broadcast too.

That meant that we had to have a music room, and someone in charge of the radio and victrola. It had cost far more than I had anticipated, but somehow God sent the extra money, and I realized it was a precious boon to our shut-ins.

No educational movies,- that was one thing more our school teacher patient had said. I went to the American Information Service, and from their library of movie films we were able to borrow one a week.

Being a missionary and a mother, I realized that the patients needed more than anything else a church where they could have freedom to worship God in dignity and peace.

They were already holding worship services but they had to meet in the Buddhist meeting place as there was no other place. One day they asked me for a curtain to “curtain off the gods.”

“We don’t like to have those gods in front of us when we are praying to the true Father in Heaven,” they told me. So I measured the front of the room and bought the cloth and made the curtain. In my account book there is an honest entry, “Cloth for curtain to shut out the Buddhist gods.”

But this was not good enough. I knew God wanted these humble people struggling against great discouragement and the temptation to end life, to have a church. So we decided to build even though we had no money at all in hand.

How the gifts for the church trickled in was another miracle of His love. We did not wait to collect the money,- we started and built as the money came, and although we were scared at times at our daring God never failed. Not only did we build the church, but we made cement paths all over the Colony leading to the church.

“Almost all the patients have had feet,” one patient told me softly one day as we walked along

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together. I realized that this was so, for even we who were whole grew weary walking on the stony paths as we went from house to house visiting the patients.

A man walking awkwardly with bamboo crutches which he clutched with imperfect hands, and perhaps his fingers gone, could fall on the stony paths, and sometimes be badly hurt. Those cement paths were very necessary so walking with the leaders all over the Colony we decided where they should go.

When we were called at night to go to the Colony we found that the paths were in black darkness. So again we made the rounds of the Colony at night deciding where electric lights could be installed, so our patients could walk safely at night.

As the church rose there was great excitement and hope among the Christian patients. But one day when I stopped by Iu Sian-si’s (the former schoolteacher) bed, he said in bitter regret, “I will never see that new Church and never have a chance to take part in its services.”

Startled and saddened, I went home and gathered my young people around me. “I need something like a low cart with chairs in it that will go on the cement walks and can be pushed by men,” I told them. “It will be to take those who cannot walk to the church.”

They had the carts made, and when the Church was opened, all those who wished to come and could not walk went in the carts up to the church pushed by those who still had hands and feet.

It was a sacred holy day when the church was dedicated. It had so clearly come straight from God’s Hand that no one could doubt the miracle.

“At last we’ve built it! God’s house!We’ve dreamed about it, and the dream’s Come true;And now it stands all beautiful and new,And we, who’ve sacrificed and watched it growAre close to tears. We love it so.” -Margaret Chaplin Anderson

What we had been striving to give them was the worth of the individual so they would not easily throw their lives away. Now they had a place where they could worship God with dignity. Now when a man died we could have a service in the church to “give him back to the Lord”.

One day when I went I heard a Christian had died.“Did you have the funeral service in the church?” I asked eagerly.“No,” they answered sadly. “But why?” I persisted.Then they told me. Right after the war if a patient died, he was not even put in a box. He was tied


up like a dog and cremated. The patients protested, and finally they were given a flimsy box with wide cracks like a crate.

“It isn’t good enough to put in the church,” they said sadly. I went home again and called my young people together.

“This time I want a big box like a big coffin,” I told them. “We can have it carved and beautiful on the outside, and inside it can be lined with tin so it will be washable. We will have to have it on wheels, little low wheels, so that it can be pushed to the church. Then each time we will put the poor box into the beautiful big coffin box and wheel it up to the Church.”

The plan worked. Someone had given me a piece of beautiful silk, heavy and rich and bright yellow. It looked like glory incarnate. So we used it as a cover for the coffin and with flowers and a cross we had funerals that had dignity and beauty.

To the Chinese a funeral is very important. So delighted were the patients with its “dignity in death” that many signed up ahead of time to be sure and have their turn in the coffin. Even those who were not Christians signed too.

Like children they turned to the Savior in great numbers, and the Church became the center of all their interest and activities.

Chapter 3

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“ To the end, LordLet me stand!While they pressOn every hand,Wounded, bleeding,Dying too;Hold my hand, Lord;Keep me true!”

-then

“ There comes a presence very mild and sweet;White are the sandals of His noiseless feet,It is the Comforter Whom Jesus sent—”

Every day we were at the Leprosarium we felt we were still in the “crisis era” and there was much to do. There were always supplies of some kind to be bought, errands to be attended to, for when you minister to hundreds of patients they have hundreds of needs.

One of the most pertinent needs however was still loving personal attention to each patient. Regularly I would visit those who were on their beds and unable to walk. Always we would have prayer with them because usually they could not come to church.

One day I stopped at the bedside of Iu Sian-si, the former school teacher, and had prayer with him. Usually he was bright and cheerful despite the state of his health, but this time he seemed sad.

“I guess I’ll have to tell you,” he said abruptly as if the words were forced from him. “Every night now I am contemplating suicide. I know it is the devil, but the temptation is very strong. Last year I tried, I slashed my wrists, but somehow I lived.”

“Oh, Iu Sian-si, what is the matter?” I said trembling for he was one of my best advisers in all the work among the lepers.

“My bed,” he said, “The boards are broken, and I cannot fix it. I have reported it many times to the hospital, but they do not send anyone to repair it. And now the rats come and bite me at night.”

Horrified I listened. This man had been a head teacher for years. He used to play the piano. Now he had reached the final indignity,-he could not protect himself against the rats. He had no hands and no feet. I looked at his bed. It was only bare boards, full of slivers and wide cracks and now the boards had broken.

Speedily, I hurried away in our little cockeyed jeep to the city and got thick tatami mats to cover the boards.


We had the bed mended, and then the clean thick mats put over it. He was so grateful. It was not only the fact of the mended bed,-it was the fact that somebody cared.

Thinking of those bare boards of the bed and of the other patients I realized they all needed beds. When you are sick and spend much time in bed, then that bed is very important to you.

The leper patients are willing to be isolated in order to protect people in the outside world from exposure to this disease. Then I felt, other people, in gratitude should at least give each one a decent place to sleep and decent food to eat.

All the money that came to me I had to spend for food for the patients, drugs for their Clinic, vitamins, and clothes. How could one manage to buy so many beds for the leper patients?

Just at this time Dr. Henrietta Mears and Miss Esther Ellinghusen came to Formosa. We took them to the Leprosarium and to the “Ward nearest Heaven’s door” and told them of our recent crisis about “beds.” They left a gift to buy the Japanese mats as beds for all the others in that ward.

How about the others? They all needed decent beds. I shivered still at the thought of how narrowly we averted suicide with the school teacher. “But God-” had a plan. A pastor had come from America and had stayed a few weeks at our home. On leaving, he said to me, “If you ever have a project that you think would interest my young people, let me know.”

Desperately I framed a cable to this man: “Would your young people be interested this year in each one giving a leper a bed as a Christmas gift to the Savior. Bed costs one dollar. Have 650 patients.”

It was a plan born of God for the young people responded, and before Christmas there was great rejoicing all over the Leper Colony for each one had a new bed, a comfortable bed.

God sent help in another way too, for Sister Alma Drucks came, a deaconess of the Lutheran Church, with nurses’ training and she gave full time to the Leprosarium. At first, there was no place for her to live, so she lived in the little vestry of the Church of the Lepers. She tried to cook there too, so that she was available day and night to the leper patients.

The faithful, loving, every-day care of Sister Alma paid off in great dividends in the health of the patients. One day I paused by the bed of the Christian head teacher; “Look,” he said. “My wounds are all healed.”

Then he said, ”When I go home to Heaven, I will tell the Father that you came.”He meant that Christian compassion came, the compassion that reached all the way from America

to this dark place with medicine, beds, some comforts, and loving care. He meant Christian friends in America for we come to them with nothing in our hands, and only as it is sent to us to give to them, do we have it to pass on.

As the months passed, many could say “My wounds are all healed.” We still had to supplement their food allowance so that they would have enough to eat, for that is a great factor in making them get well.

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One day as Sister Alma and I walked through the Colony a patient greeted me. He was sitting under a tree outside. He had spent two years in bed and had pain so unending and despair so deep that he had tried suicide. Now he was better and could sit in the sun each day.

“He sits on a stone and tries to put his back against a tree somehow because it aches so,” Sister Alma said. “He has no chair.”

Startled, I realized that too was a need. A rattan chair costs about a dollar, and yet there were only about a dozen among the whole 650 patients.

The patients had beds tightly fitted in, usually several people in a room. They could sit on the edge of their bed, or else go outside and sit on the ground.

Where, oh, where, was there dignity in this? And we were trying to establish the worth of the individual! They had some benches but not enough, and for those who were really ill, and many of them were, they needed a chair with a back.

“Produce your cause” says our Bible, “and bring forth your strong reasons.”(Isaiah 41:21)This we did in our monthly report letter to our letter-world in America, as we spoke for the poor

leper patients who could not speak for themselves.And the money came, bit by bit, but eventually every patient in the Leprosarium had his own

personal chair, a chair with a back, a gift from God sent to them from those who loved the Lord.The first twenty chairs were given to the most advanced cases. They exclaimed over and over, “How

comfortable! And cool! The air comes through them! And not hard like the stones and benches!”The ones who gave the chairs could not hear these exclamations of pleased surprise and gratitude

and delight, but perhaps somehow they knew.In Formosa very often a heavy cart on the road is still drawn by a man, sweating and straining,

taking the place of a horse. Sometimes when we see that the load is too heavy, we get behind and push and help.

The man doesn’t see us, but he feels his load is lighter. When someone in America helps the leper patients, they don’t see the donor, but they feel their hearts are lighter and happier because somebody helped.

One day I happened to be there about noontime. They had brought out their bowls for food, and the bowls were old tin basins, battered and bent, almost flattened by dents.

Again we sent out a plea to the friends of the letter world. “A bowl for a leper”-would they think it too minor a need to bother about? Would people get tired of my asking for so much? God had given us so much too,-I was almost ashamed to ask for more. But no one else would ask for them and so we asked.


“—He gave the leper to eat and drink:‘Twas a mouldy crust of coarse brown bread,‘Twas water out of a wooden bowl,---Yet with fine wheaten bread was the leper fedAnd ‘twas red wine he drank with his thirstysoul;----And a voice that was calmer than silence said, “Lo, it is I, be not afraid!-The Holy Supper is kept, indeed,In what so we share with another’s need:Not what we give, but what we share,---For the gift without the giver is bare;Who gives himself with his alms feedsthree,--Himself, his hungering neighbour, and Me.” -Lowell

Enough money came in for the rice bowls for the leper patients, and with great joy I made that dream come true. We were able to purchase two bowls for each patient, and one had a cover on it which is afterwards used as a dish, so it makes a complete set for each one.

We bought good bowls, decent bowls, bowls with roses on them, bright and comforting to the eyes and a symbol that they are not forgotten, that out in the great world were those who paused and remembered them and in love “gave a leper a bowl.” It was given “as unto Him”. More precious than anything in the world to us is the happiness of those who have to sit in the shadows of suffering.

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“Make thy petition deep,It is thy God who speaks with loveO’erflowing,Thy God who claims the rapture of bestowing,Thy God who whispers, all thy weaknessknowing,‘wouldst thou in full reap?Make thy petition deep.’”

One day I happened to see in a newspaper an item about a movie being shown in a church by the Pocket Testament League which included pictures of our leper patients in the Leprosarium. My mind went back to Andrew Lu who is their representative in Formosa. He is unselfish about coming to the Leprosarium when I invite him. Many people go once out of curiosity, and then never again. But he goes to bring comfort to them.

One time when I asked him, it was the Chinese New Year’s Eve. This is a time of great significance in Chinese life when all go to their paternal homestead for a time of family reunion and feasting, something like our Thanksgiving Day. I am sure that Andrew Lu had many invitations that night, but he refused all of them and came with me.

In the Church of the Lepers we looked out over a sea of faces unconsciously revealing that they were deeply sad. Young men came from the Mainland of China to Taiwan as soldiers and then were discovered to be lepers, and were thrown in the Colony. What thoughts did they have looking back to other years of happy reunions, what anguished speculations about their loved ones and families now behind the Bamboo Curtain? Even native Taiwanese who were lepers on this evening felt ostracized and outcast.

I whispered to Andrew, “They are all thinking of their homes tonight. That is why they are so sad. See if you can make them smile.”

He picked up his accordion, studying their faces, thinking deeply, and then he began to play the music and sing. His voice is melodious and charming, and the challenge of the task had inspired him to do his best. He was singing softly, happily, talking to them, praying, quoting Scripture, playing again. In ten minutes the sadness had disappeared as if it had been running water, and all over the room there was happy anticipation and alert interest, their homes and heartaches for the moment forgotten.

Andrew Lu has something far better than material things to give to the Lepers. He can give them courage and spiritual happiness and the “Light of the knowledge of the Glory of God” all in one sacred evening.


During the years I have taken many outside visitors to the Leprosarium. I watch their faces wistfully to see if they will feel compassion for these broken, misshapen bodies, the compassion that Jesus felt and showed.

Some do, but others seem to regard them only as curious sights, such as they might see in a zoo. The lepers know they are deformed, and they wince away from hard stares, and try to hurry along the paths out of sight. Some visitors come and, moved with compassion, promise to send them help and then go away and forget.

But some remember, and as they can, send back help for years for those who stumble along the path so haltingly that leads at last “unto that perfect day.” But, like Andrew Lu, some have to give of things not tangible, but yet invaluable.

One day when I was burdened and sad thinking of all the things needed for my leper patients in order to make them more comfortable and decent, somebody told me of an American business man who was visiting mission fields and was now on the Island. “I am sure he would help them,” my friend said, “If only he could see them—”. I had to hire a taxi to take him out to the Colony, but I did, hoping that he would be interested.

In the Church of the Lepers he addressed them. “Let me tell you something about prayer and God,” he said. “Supposing I was doing a job of painting, and I asked Mrs. Dickson to help me. Would she then be in charge of the painting?” He answered his own question, “No. I would still be in charge of the painting. In the same way God lets us help Him in His work, but he is still in charge of the work.”

A burden seemed to fall from my shoulders as I realized what he was saying. Why of course, God was still in charge, and He would send in His time what the leper patients really needed.

Although we had solved some of their physical problems, still each patient had his own personal worries. One day when I went to the Colony in every room I visited I had prayer and in every room I found problems.

In the first room was a woman patient recently brought in . She was 72 years old. “Tell me,” she pleaded with me, “Is there any hope for me?” There was anxiety as keen as a cutting edge in her voice.

“Of course there is,” I reassured her. “In just the next room an old grandmother of 75 became cured and went home.”

Nearby another woman patient who had no hands or feet added her word of comfort.“You have hands and feet,” she told her. “When you get cured and go out, no one will ever know

that you have been a leper.”In the next room there was another new woman patient just brought in from the Pescadore

Islands. She was 79 years old and could not walk or stand and she was blind. “My eyes cannot see—” she kept repeating, interpolating her own monologue with what was evidently her greatest grief. When we asked her if she had ever heard of Christ and the way to Heaven she said, “How can I know the way

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if no one shows it to me?” It is the cry of millions who still sit in darkness.A man patient who sat in a chair because both legs had been amputated and whose hands are

helpless burst out with his story of distress when I came near him. “My brother-in-law has been taken to be a soldier, and now there is no man to support my mother and sister. I should be the one to do it, but here I am useless.”

He added, “I told my mother ‘Come to the Leprosarium to live and I will share my rice with you.’” They were about to lose their home too, because the rent had not been paid. We sent the pastor to pay the rent and every month we will take the place of the crippled son and “share our rice with them” by sending an allowance until the soldier returns.

Then two young women approached me. One was a leper patient and the other was a newcomer. “She is from our village,” explained the girl I knew. “The Leprosarium is filled and there is no place for her, although she has only a light case of leprosy and can be cured perhaps easily.”

“Please plead with the doctors to admit her and give her the medicine.”“But until they do, where will she live?” I asked.“She can live with me,” she answered. “My brother and I eat together. We can easily eat less and

thus have enough for one more.”I loved her for her sweet unselfishness, and thought if all the world said this, “We can easily eat less

and thus have enough for one more”- how different things would be!One night we went to the Leprosarium late to take some drugs to some patients who were

seriously ill. Dr. Bjarne Gislefoss was with me. He had been at the Clinic all day, but he knew some other drugs were needed so we brought them out at night.

After we had seen several patients and were hurrying back to the jeep for it was very dark and rainy and cold and the cement paths had not yet been finished, a few patients came to meet us.

“There is one more patient that we would like the doctor to see,” they said.We looked at each other. It was already ten o’clock and cold and dark, and our instinct was to go

home quickly.“We had better go,” said Bjarne and so they led the way.In a darkened house with only the light of candles and a flashlight Bjarne inspected the patient.He had been stabbed by a knife in the back. “How many days ago did this happen?” Bjarne asked

them gravely. It had happened a few days before. Using the English language which they did not understand, Bjarne told me, “He has been stabbed

in the back and it has punctured his lung. He will die.”“Oh, no, this cannot be,” I thought. We had set the stage for happiness, we had done everything to

make the Colony liveable. Christmas would soon be here, and I wanted all the patients very happy and carefree, and now this had happened.


We took the jeep ride home silently. I was thinking, “If he has been stabbed, and if he does die, then that will be murder. That will mean disgrace, sensation, patients violently excited and upset, someone in the leper’s prison, that will mean that months of patient morale-building work will be undone in a day or week.”

Restless and unhappy about it all we kept on with the work of each day, but always back in my mind was the thought of the man who had been murdered and the murderer.

Preparing for Christmas in the Children’s Homes and other places, I avoid the Colony for a few days, and when I did go, I did not dare to ask the outcome.

Finally I could stand the suspense no longer. It was only a few days until Christmas, and all of the unhealthy excitement had not taken place as far as I could see. I asked one of the patients who had led us there that dark night.

“Did the man die?”“Oh, don’t you know,” she exclaimed. “The man who stabbed him came to him and confessed his

sin and the man who was dying forgave him.” Having forgiven his enemy, the dying man went home to Heaven. And because the man had been forgiven no other patient would accuse him. So it was settled in our little world which is the Leprosy Colony!

Chapter 5

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One day while I was walking through the leprosarium visiting with the patients in their little homes, noting what was needed to make the place more beautiful and their lives more

comfortable, a woman patient came to me carrying her baby in her arms.“Save my baby, save my baby!” she pleaded holding out the wee baby girl to me while tears

streamed down her face.My heart turned over as I contemplated this new need. Up until now I had been aware of the

disparity of tiny flower faces of wee babies and children among the deformed faces of the leper patients.Now I suddenly realized, “These children should not be here at all. They would inevitably get

the disease living in the midst of these advanced cases, and be doomed to a lifetime of pain and disfigurement.”

But where could we put a leper’s child? No orphanage would take it in. No private home would board a child from this place.

I had to turn away from the mother telling her that I would try to think how to do it, but I went home deep in thought and terribly depressed. How, oh how, could I save these flower-like babies?

Another day my helper, Everylasting Life, and I were in the “Ward nearest Heaven’s door” as we called the ward for advanced cases. We were pasting large pictures of the Life of Christ taken from Sunday School picture rolls onto the walls in order to make the ward less drear.

Suddenly a voice behind me spoke with urgency, an urgency of anxiety carried over-long. “Sun Bok-su niu, we have twin babies. My wife and I cannot take care of them. She has no hands, and my hands have no strength. We can’t feed them, bathe them, dress them or hold them.”

This was a case that could not be retreated from nor could it be deferred. We took the twin baby boys back to the Mission Compound. They were so tiny that everybody thought they could not live.

But a missionary nurse was willing to give them personal care for that first week, and that gave us time to pray desperately to God to tell us where to put them.

Besides the twins I had another tiny baby at my home. I had found her at an orphanage very very ill. This missionary doctor with me looked at her gravely and said, “This baby will not be alive by morning unless we take her to the Hospital.”

“I will be glad to pay for her there,” I told him, “But you know the hospital is full, and they will not take in more.”

“Let me telephone to them, and demand that a bed be made ready,” he said. So he did and the baby girl in the hospital not only lived but grew well and bonny.

Before it was time for her to be discharged, a letter came from the orphanage.“That baby girl is the child of a leper patient,” the letter said. “We don’t want that kind here. If she

does get well, you cannot bring her back.”What could we do with the wee baby girl? No orphanage would take her. Where could she go? I


took her to my own home. Now with the twins I had three children of leper parents.“Where are you going to put them?” people kept asking me. I could not answer them, for I did not

know. Our home was a Mission home, so I would not be allowed to turn it into an orphanage.“Where are you going to put them?” the question rang in my ears day and night. I grew afraid to

meet people for always they would ask me.Then one night about nine O’clock an American man came to see me. I did not know him, and

even hearing his name, it did not mean anything to me. Americans were very few in Formosa even then, so we were polite and kind and tried to answer his questions about our work.

“Out of the full heart the mouth speaketh,” and before long I had told him of the three babies I sheltered, and how I was being pushed to remove them from the Mission Compound. Where could I put them? If I took them back among the lepers, they would surely get the disease.

After a while the man went away, and a week or so later I received a cable from him. “Sending twenty-five hundred dollars. Start your Baby Home,” said the cable, and it was as if Heaven had opened its doors and I heard all the angels singing.

Such blinding happiness, such shining realization that the Father cared, such tender realization that the Savior was with us “always!”

So we started a “Baby’s Home” called “An-lok Home” which means “The Home of Peace and Happiness” and one by one we brought the babies away from the Leprosarium and placed them in this Babies’ Home.

The American man was Rev. William F. Roberts of the Far East Broadcasting Company, and after he had seen my dilemma, he came home to America and broadcast a plea for someone to help.

Leprosy is not hereditary but if we did not take the babies at birth there was danger of their contracting the disease. In another Home, called the Observation Home, we took other little children, who had been exposed in the Leprosarium. These would need more watchful care to see that the disease did not develop.

At first, some mothers were unwilling to give up their babies, and sometimes they would wrestle with their emotions for a couple of weeks before they were willing to let the child come to us.

We too felt guilty taking the children. After all, the mother had nothing in life that ordinary mothers have to comfort and cheer them. Only in taking care of her child could she find happiness and comfort, doing the sweet homely duties that all other mothers do. But in the end, their eyes filled with tears and faces distorted with emotion, they would bring their babies to me.

“We will bring them back every little while for you to see,” I tried to reassure them. However, they would turn away too overcome to speak.

From the first little “An-lok Babies’ Home”, a Compound with four brick homes for these children has grown up. At one time, we had eighty-seven babies and little children. The care of these children

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was often heartache, and it was often joy.It was another bond between the patients and the Savior for they learned to pray for their children

and to thank Him for having prepared a safe place to shelter them.One day at the Leprosarium, one of the patients fell into step with me as we walked along. She had

entered the Leprosarium after I came to do my housekeeping work there. She was a slight very pretty young girl who had been a school teacher on the Mainland. She seemed more refined and educated than many of the others.

This day she told me more of her story. She had come with her husband from the Mainland fleeing from the Communists. After her arrival in Taiwan, she had given birth to a baby girl. At that time a dark blotch appeared on her thigh and the doctor diagnosed leprosy. Her baby was taken from her, her husband discarded her, and she was thrown hastily into the Government Leprosarium.

“I do not even know where my baby is,” she said chokingly as the tears ran down her face. Surely it was the “Angel at my shoulder” that gave me sudden insight. After a few questions, I found that what I guessed was indeed true, wonderfully true.

“Why I have your baby at my home,” I told her, and we could scarcely speak for the wonder of it.The baby I had found in the orphanage dying and that the doctor had made room for her in the

Hospital, the baby girl that was so bonny, was now at my home, safe under Christian care.This is the mother who later testified, “I am glad that I became a leper because I found Christ,” she

said. She had no regrets. Because she was intelligent, she took her sulfones regularly, and did indeed become cured, and her baby girl was restored to her, part of the Father’s plan.

At first, I was almost afraid to take the children back for the parents to see. I feared that they would forget and touch their children. “You do not need to be afraid of that,” one of the patients told me. “The parents love them too much to touch them!”

Every few months we take the children of the leper parents back to the Leprosarium for the parents to see but not touch. This is always a heart-rending experience. The children look beautiful and bonny, but our hearts are torn with pity for the parents often deformed by the disease, their faces blotched, their bodies crippled and distorted.

In the Church of the Lepers, we have the children on the platform and each one in turn is held up for the parents to see. The children are too young to understand that these are their parents. They gaze wonderingly down to the sea of upturned faces where mothers and fathers have unconsciously strained absorbed expressions of yearning love.

One little girl about six years old, when she saw her father coming down the church aisle smiling at her, burst into tears.

To see someone who is beloved and to know that you cannot touch him again or be cuddled in his arms,-that was too much for a little girl to bear!


The father went away to the other end of the platform where his face could be shielded, but I could see the father was crying too. Are there people in this world who do not meet with heartbreak? I always seem to be deep into it, suffering with them, until I can hardly stand it. The little girl recovered later and could talk to her father, so perhaps they were comforted.

Among twenty-six new patients brought in from the Pescadore Islands one time, there had been a young mother and her five-months old baby. The baby had been given to me to carry away to the safe shelter of the Observation Home. She was a beautiful baby girl, and the mother loved her dearly.

The first time I brought the children back after she came, the mother could barely stand not being able to touch her. “Have her picture taken soon, very soon, today if you can,” the mother begged us.

“The photographer is here,” I told her. I know she will sleep with the baby’s picture on her pillow, and that pillow will be wet with tears.

All people out in the world who have had the privilege of loving their own children will realize with deep compassion the pain of the parents who must have a love so great that they will sacrifice the right to touch their children!

Chapter 6

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One day as I entered the Church of the Lepers I saw on the platform in the seats guests occupy a Chinese sailor. He was tall, strong, robust, with that clean faraway look in his eyes that men have

who follow the sea.After the service he came to me and said, “I brought my wife in yesterday as a patient with leprosy.

Will you take care of my children?”“How old are they?” I questioned.“Seven, five, four, and a baby five months old,” he answered.They were in the far south of the Island, but he said he would go immediately and bring them to

the Colony for the leprosy examination.“Have you ever heard of God the Father?” I asked for he had a fine manly look of courage as if he

could be a wonderful follower of the Lord.“No, I have never heard of Him,” he answered, and we asked that a Bible be given to him to read

on his long train trip home.After he had gone the others told me how he came bringing his wife. She was so weak and thin

that he had to carry her in his arms into the 4th ward to the bed assigned to her. He did not know God, but I know that God knew him, and in loving tenderness prepared comfort for this man in deep misfortune.

He came two days later with his children, carrying the wee baby as a giant might carry a cherub. To our great relief they were all free of leprosy, so the father went with us taking them to the safe shelter of our Observation Home.

The wide green lawn and red brick bungalow snuggled beneath waving bamboo trees makes an attractive picture and the other children came spilling forth to welcome the newcomers. But after we left, three little frightened and homesick children ran crying down the road looking for their father, their mother, for something familiar in a world grown suddenly so strange.

They were found and brought back, but all night they cried and the next few days would not be comforted. Now they are happy and accustomed to the Children’s Home, and when I tell them that their mother will soon be well, they answer with trembly little smiles as if they hardly dared to dream of such happiness.

But what about the father in the far south facing the sea again,-what were his thoughts I wonder?“We will take good care of your wife and give her everything she needs,” I told him in parting. “The

doctor says she can get well and then you will have your family together again.”In less than a year the mother fully recovered and the tall sailor husband came to gather up his

family again. They thanked us, but more important the whole family joined a church in the south, and they are still thanking their Father in Heaven for His help in their time of need.

One day in the Church of the Lepers we had a Thanksgiving service, a special service, because


thirteen young men from the Army who had been afflicted with leprosy, were now entirely cured and were being released to go back to the army.

One young soldier spoke for the group. He said, “I came here, a man without hope. I am going back with Christ as my Savior, with the knowledge of the Gospel and God’s promises, and with my body well again. My heart is so full of thankfulness that I cannot speak.”

His eyes were bright with tears. I know that many Christians far away remember the leper patients in their prayers, so we want them to know that the Father wonderfully answers. The new sulfone drug makes the patients “negative” and ever so many are being released.

In the Leprosarium there was a little old woman our oldest Christian, who had been there for at least twenty years. She had the face of a patient saint, sweet, humble and waiting. One day as I entered the Ward she greeted me with great joy.

“I’m cured! I’m cured! The doctors tell me I can go home! They are writing to my daughter to come and get me!” She was so happy that she almost hugged me, then she remembered the rule of ‘not to touch’ and turned away still excited with happiness.

She waited for many days, but her daughter did not come. “I wonder if she got the letter,” she would say to me sometimes. The disease had taken her hands away entirely and she had only stumps of wrists. Her feet were partly gone too, so that she walked slowly and awkwardly. The new drug, the sulfone, could cure her of leprosy, but it could not give back her hands.

I realized before she did what had happened. Her daughter did not want her to come home, for if she did, then the whole community would know that the crippled mother had been a leper, and the family would be ostracized.

She avoided meeting me for a while, perhaps for fear I might ask “Is there any news from home?” One day, however, she came to meet me, and said bravely a sentence probably thought out carefully in the long reaches of a sleepless night. “I think my daughter has not come because she has been evacuated from the city and never received the letter. The government has told people to evacuate for fear of bombing, and she is probably far away in the country. That is the reason she has not come.”

“Dear soul,” I thought, “Trying so bravely to defend her daughter and even to manufacture comfort for her own heart, and knowing all the while she has only Heaven to look forward to now.”

I finally decided to send someone to the South to search for the daughter and plead with her, for I could not stand the stricken look on that sweet patient face. However, the night before my messenger was to leave, the old woman’s son appeared and told her, “Don’t worry, mother. I will come for you. I have just sold my home and am renting a new place. Then I will come and take you.

It was as if the sun had burst through dark overhanging clouds and transformed the world! I knew it was in answer to the prayers for her. Sister Alma, the Lutheran missionary nurse, who gives full time to the Leprosarium told me, “There are two old blind lepers who want to be prepared for baptism. I am

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going to ask this oldest woman patient to go and sit beside them and tell them of the love of God.”With a happy heart she can do it now, “with the comfort wherewith we are comforted!”Two little children were given to me to take care of in one of our Homes for the children of leper

patients. Their mother had contracted leprosy, and their father was a soldier in the army. For almost two years we had the children, and then the mother was pronounced “negative” and able to go home.

She went first to her own home, and then sent a message to us. It was something that hurt even to put into words, and yet bravely she was facing it.

“My children have forgotten me,” she wrote. “Could I come and live in the Christian Herald Home for Women (for women patients cured of leprosy to live in for a year if they wish while they get orientated back into society again) and be near the children until they get to know me again?”

Of course, we welcomed her, and little by little she won their confidence and love again, and soon the whole family was reunited, the dark tragedy of the past forgotten.


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With my mind still simmering full of thoughts of how to keep our patients content and diverted from the idea of self-destruction, I resolved to try the one source of mercy that I knew in New

York City. We had come home for a short furlough, and I could use my own money to make this detour to New York.

Dr. Daniel Poling had come to Formosa in regard to the Christian Herald Home for Children which he wanted established there. I had met him then, and now I remembered that he had the look of a man with a great heart of love and sympathy for the helpless.

So I sought him out and presented my case of the leper patients committing suicide. The busy person doesn’t commit suicide I believe. If you try to visualize your self with this disease and how you would face it, I believe your conclusion too would be, “Keep busy.”

“As the hands toil, so is the spirit raised Above the troubled motions of the mind.-”

We asked Dr. Poling if the Christian Herald could provide an Occupational Therapy Room for the Leprosarium.

“No,-I’m not going into leprosy work,” replied Dr. Poling, and I knew he was speaking as much to himself as to me. I was the answer of a man already overborne with more “works of mercy” than he could carry.

“I am not asking for any money you have now,” I answered. “It is only this,-if you should ever receive money designated for lepers, will you remember that we have a great need?” This he promised gladly. I left saddened, but still not defeated. God has many ways of answering the needs of helpless people. We do not know which way He will choose, but can only go as He seems to guide.

It was not long after that I received a letter from him asking to return to New York, and then I learned that shortly after my visit there they had received a legacy for lepers!

Then it was we saw God’s Hand in it all for only He could have arranged it this way. We knew nothing of the legacy, and had considered that our trip to New York had been fruitless.

When I came back to Taiwan and told the patients that we were to have a large Occupational Therapy Room, they were as “those that dream.” You have seen “stars of happiness” in little children’s eyes when some beautiful unexpected gift is suddenly placed in their hands, and it has made you happy too just to see their happiness.

You should have seen the stars of happiness in the eyes of the patients. It was happiness almost unbelieveable.

I remember once before when something happy happened, the patients told me, “Tonight no one will need to eat supper and they will not even think of it, because they are so happy.”


Probably that night all over the Leprosarium the patients talked far into the night of the love of the Father who had sent them this wonderful gift through the Christian Herald.

In their dormitories they are so crowded with beds in every corner, that there is scarcely enough room to sit down. They had no space like a living room in which to relax and talk to others, in which to work at any handwork. This Occupational Therapy Room would be their sitting room for the women to sew and embroider, their workroom for the men patients to carve and do carpentry.

It is now one of the happiest places in the Leprosarium. The articles they produce are disinfected and then sold to the outside world.

At Christmas time they have their Christmas party in the Occupational Therapy Room, their birthday party for the Savior. Any social event is held there, and guests are invited from outside. It gives the patients a spacious background in which to have their social events. It gives them dignity to have a decent place in which to receive guests.

Now we had a Library for the patients, a Music Room that broadcast music to all the wards and the radio was connected to it too, we had the Occupational Therapy Room for it was soon built, and we had the Church.

We had given them better food, additional vitamins, a Clinic three times a week, the missionary nurse, Sister Alma, to care for their wounds with clean bandages and ointments. They all had new beds, chairs and bowls.

One day one of the patients approached me. “We should have forty-four new tatami beds,” he said. “Forth-four new patients have been brought in.” I went to see them.

Hastily constructed soldier barracks had been thrown up behind some shrubbery and trees. “These were built first in five days,” one of the men told me. “Then the roof fell in so they had to do it over again.”

The forty-four patients had been soldiers, and then were discovered to have leprosy. How one’s heart yearns for them, for they are young, with life before them, but now their families are on the Mainland, and they are here alone in a strange land, imprisoned with a dread disease.

We bought the beds (they cost $l each) but then I went to see American Aid.“When are you coming to help?” I asked when I found the man in charge.“We are not charity,” he told me tersely. “We are here to help this place economically and

politically.”Rebuffed I left, and tried to think of some other way we could obtain better dormitory space for

the leper patients. “But God-”-had His own plan. Shortly afterward the man I had talked to was replaced by new staff from America. The new doctor in charge came to see me.

Usually my home is like the vortex of a typhoon with people coming and going, and the telephone ringing. I could not hope to talk to any one guest for more than five minutes without being interrupted

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by someone else.But as soon as this new doctor came through the door a cloudburst came and it rained steadily for

an hour. I have never seen such a rain in Taiwan. I had one full hour to “produce my cause.”After telling him of the corrupt Superintendent, the pilfering of the food allowance, and other

dishonesties, and how we had tried to minister to the patients so that we could lift their morale and let them live decently, I had time to add the one thought that might move him and his organization.

“This is really a war of ideology,” I told him. “The Communists say they are better in their treatment of the common people than we are. We of the Free World say we are better. From missionaries and others I have heard that the Communists always kill the leper patients. We of the Free World neglect them so that the patients kill themselves. This is propaganda that the Communists would love to have, and I won’t give it to them, because I am for the Free World. But neither will I let the Free World rest.”

The next day he came out to the Leprosarium, and in a matter of days he was convinced that he could help us. Seven big dormitories were built, and our patients were now in safe structures, decent buildings, a part of the civilized world again.

But that was not all. The corrupt Superintendent was dismissed by the government and a Christian doctor, a very capable man, put in his place. At once he re-organized his staff of doctors and nurses, technicians. The American Aid trusted this man and gave him every kind of help.

At the Government Leprosarium there are now over a thousand patients. We had a Spring Tea Party for the women patients. Otherwise they have no social good times at all. The women of the church are called “King’s Daughters” and they are very capable.

But I went early with much bright colored crepe paper and flowers to make the tables pretty in the spacious Occupational Therapy Room given by Christian Herald.

We had ordered especially nice cakes and candies. We had ironed beautifully dresses from America, secondhand but not noticeably so. Each dress had been folded carefully and wrapped in colored tissue paper and tied with ribbons. This is very important. We present each guest with a beautifully wrapped parcel as a gift. It is not because she has need. This was a Spring Tea Party and Christian American women here from the Armed Forces and others came to share happiness with them.

After worship and special singing, they had their refreshments and then the gifts were passed out. Such happiness in opening a parcel, comparing of dresses, trying them on, happy, lighthearted laughter and fellowship. My thoughts flew back to just a few years ago when these same patients were committing suicide having nothing left to live for.

Now they have nice clothes, adequate food, a beautiful church, the big spacious Occupational Therapy Room as their sitting room in which to work and talk together, and many guests and happy


times. All this happiness has come “Down from the Father-”So many times we have seen this happen, the miracle of God’s love, transforming hopeless

situations into happiness beyond words, peace and contentment and grateful recognition that it has come from the Father.

“I said, “The desert is so wide!”—-Then “I heard the flow of hiddenSprings;Before me palms rose green and fair,The birds were singing; all the airDid shine and stir with angels’ wings!”

“For with God nothing shall be impossible!”

Chapter 8

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Chapter 8

It was on Mother’s Day (such a Mother’s day!) when I entered the Church of the Lepers and looked down on the sea of faces and knew instantly that something serious had happened. The faces before

me were set and pale and tense, so tense that it seemed to vibrate through the air. They went through all the motions of worship, but I could see hate and feel hate between them.

After the service they gathered around me and I heard reports from a hundred people all at once it seemed to me. There are two groups in the church, people recently arrived from the Mainland of China and the native Taiwanese. There had been an incident, deplorable, but not as irrevocable as they had magnified it to be. The patients are hypersensitive, and no story loses in the telling.

We were horrified at what it had done to our church. After all, a church is not a building, but the love that binds people together to love one another and worship God. That evening I noted again sorrowfully the two groups watch each other with overt hate and deep suspicion.

Once when I was in the mountains of Taiwan we worked in a village of aborigines that was hostile to all outsiders. The year before the chief of this village had been insulted by another village and like a flame of fire all the men in each village yearned to fight it out. “A thousand men stood with their hands on their knives facing each other,” someone told me, “But representatives from the government arrived and made peace.” Our Church of the Lepers seemed almost at that point judging from their expressions.

In Occidental countries one can tolerate a rebuke given straight-forwardly, but not in this land with its centuries of Oriental politeness. A rebuke has to be given obliquely so as to “save the face” of everybody concerned. Because we have Christ, Emmanuel, “God with us”, a plan was given, and we asked everybody to come to the church for four o’clock on Monday.

We prayed earnestly that night that no one would be murdered for they are high-strung and unpredictable. We have had murder there more than once. The next day the church was filled with people curious to know what would be said. I would have felt more peaceful in a den of lions, but something had to be done.

I reminded them that when Dr. Glenn Clark, my former college teacher, had been there, he had asked that we form a prayer group of about seventy to work like “fanner bees” in the world, fanning the badwill out, and the goodwill in. He said that many world leaders did not have time to pray much, but here apart from the world the patients had the most important and valuable thing in the world, which was “time to pray.” They could render invaluable service to all mankind if they would become “Prayer Warriors.”

God’s conditions for answered prayers were very simple. One was “If I regard sin in my heart, the Lord will not hear me.” No hate in your heart towards anyone was a condition for answered prayer.

It took all of three weeks of heart-searching, but in the end we had our seventy prayer warriors, and there was peace in the Church of the Lepers. I felt, however, as if I had crossed a very stormy


Galilee in order to reach that shore of peace.We had prayer notebooks for them and wee badges with a cross, and the first day of each month

I gave them subjects to pray about from the great outer world. After each answered prayer, they wrote the words in Chinese which mean, “Thank you, Lord.”

This crisis safely past, another developed in another direction. At our An-Lok Babies’ Home for the untainted babies born of leper parents but taken away at birth, there was usually great happiness as the little ones became more and more adorable. One time we had twenty babies there and they used to chortle with delight over the various kinds of mischief they could devise.

But as the hot weather swopped down upon us, they were taken with fevers, and one little life was swept away in a few hours, and the next day another. We were all distracted with grief and worry.

Do you know how hard it is to go out to the Leprosarium and call the parents and then tell them their baby is dead? We seem to die a thousand deaths while we do it, for we feel so responsible – to have taken their baby from them, and then to have it die. I would die myself rather than tell them, but always I must go first to break the news.

The next day, the little blind baby born of leper parents, who had been happy and robust all day, suddenly had fever and died. My feet dragged as I climbed the hill to the Church of the Lepers to tell his parents the sad news. Other parents clustered around me, their faces blanched, stark fear in their eyes.

“How about my child?” they would ask yearning and wistful beyond all believing.“They are in God’s Hand,” was all I could tell them. “We do not know what causes the fever. You

must pray.”Although we had a nurse in charge of the Babies’ Home, still we went every night to check the

babies just for sure. “Are any getting fever?” we would ask. “Are you sure there will be no tragedy in the night?”

Gradually the babies recovered, and we had peace in the An-Lok Babies’ Home and peace in the hearts of the parents again.

Other questions in regard to the Leprosarium soon claimed our attention. Although many of the leper patients had ways of earning money to help supplement their meager food allowance, that did not include all. Some had chickens, some worked in a co-operative brick factory, some in the Occupational Therapy Room. However, we heard that there were some patients who did not have enough to eat.

Through the Christians in the Church we made an investigation. They found that it was now the entirely helpless ones, the blind, the maimed, the crippled, those ill on their beds, these were the ones who suffered. So we supplemented the food again, for perhaps fifty of them. We felt we needed to stay close beside them to see that no one suffered hunger or great need.

The women’s organization of the Church is called King’s Daughters. They are very kind to the

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helpless patients. Every week they go to the “Ward nearest Heaven’s Door” and wash the hair of those who have no hands. Once a week they do their mending too, and houseclean around their beds.

All who pray for the leper patients in the great Government Leprosarium will be delighted to hear how God answered prayer. A young Norwegian doctor and his wife arrived and a missionary nurse from Norway.

They came to the Leprosarium and after seeing it said simply, “there is much work for us to do here.” A residence there was prepared for them, and they will live there and work while studying the Chinese language.

They all had the bright, open, sweet-faced look of angles, that “other-world” look, or “here-for-a-while” look that so many people from the North have. While they stayed at my home I thought with deep satisfaction, “The Bible says we might entertain angels ‘unaware’, but this time I am entertaining angels and I am aware!” That will make six missionaries stationed at or near the Leprosarium which will insure loving Christian care to our patients.

But even as things looked brighter, one day I received a telephone call from the Leprosarium that someone had tried to kill himself. We dashed out with the needed medicine and found the man tossing in agonizing pain and out of his head.

“Why did he do it?” I asked and they told me. He had borrowed about $35 (in terms of U.S. money) to buy four pigs, hoping to raise them and make a little money. The pigs died.

He had no way to repay the money, for he was an ex-soldier from the Mainland of China with all his relatives on the other side. You can imagine the horror with which the young man realized this fact, and the despair and desolation in his heart which must have prefaced this deed.

If could have had our Christian Herald Occupational Therapy Room ready before he started this venture, perhaps he could have made articles for sale and earned money that way. But the authorities had asked me to wait and not build until they decided where it could be built. Out of courtesy I had waited.

I prayed for him in that little room crowded full of soldier patients also watching him. We prayed that God would forgive him and give him another chance, but I thought desperately in my heart, “We are the ones who need God’s forgiveness, we, who allowed a situation to exist where a young lad saw no way out of black despair except death—for thirty-five dollars!”

At last the day arrived when the Christian Herald Home for Women was ready. It is situated on the Compound where the children of leper parents are, and it is for mothers to stay in for six months or a year after their cure before going home. Sometimes they need a place like this to reassure themselves as well as their families that the disease will not re-occur.

One day two more children with leprosy were brought in to the Leprosarium. They were turned away because the place was filled to overflowing. They were told, “There is no place for you to sleep


here, and no food for you to eat.”Imagine the children wondering, “Then where shall we go?” They could not go home, and this

place would not take them in. But our dear Lord had already provided a place. We have the Gospel Light Children’s Cottage (given by the Gospel Light Press) right on the Leprosarium grounds.

We quickly gave the patients who are carpenters money to make new beds. We will pay for their food. No child shall be turned away. They are welcome, fed, clothed, and have a clean, new bed in a nice cottage, all in the Name of Christ.

No matter what worries the week has brought, there is always the blessed relief of Sunday and heartsease in the Church of the Lepers. After the last prayer they sing together the threefold Amen, and I listen and wonder, “Does the sound rise as high as heaven? Does the Father hear and plan sweet comfort for their after-years?” Even in the “Amen” there is pleading that wrings one’s heart.

Chapter 9

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Three times a week regularly we go to the big Government Leprosarium where there are now 1,000 patients, and we go more often if there are special needs. If we stay there too long, we get

drenched in their troubles. They have so few to tell them to, so they spill them out to us. They call me “mother” and that is the ancient vocation of mothers,-to hear about problems and to try and solve them!

Their problems are sometimes simple and sometimes very complex. “There are nine ex-soldiers afflicted with leprosy now in prison for five years for defying the authorities in the days when we did not have good administration,-can we take food to them?”

“More children with leprosy have been brought in. We can make beds for them in the Gospel Light Cottage, but there is no food for them. Will you pay for their food?”

“A man got a new leg. Will you pay for the leg?” (This is for a wooden leg made in the Christian Herald Occupational Therapy Room and it is for a patient whose leg had been amputated.)

Actually, because they have suffered much, the patients are warm-hearted, generous, wistful, and kind, and we cannot help loving them dearly. The Leprosarium has become “home” to us, for the patients have been one with us in making all the improvements, and one with us in thanking the Father from Whom all the help has come. There are many baptized Christians now and more deciding and we know that it is the Holy Spirit opening their hearts.

However, for patients who suffer all the time not only in body but from loneliness of heart because their families have forgotten them, the need of friendly help is deep, and desperate at times. All who name His Name should feel compassion for them. Because they are far from you, for the nonce, our hands must be your hands, our feet your feet, our voice your voice telling them of the Father’s love, for we are here, we speak their language, and our hearts are close to those who need the Savior!

The hot summer weather was very hard for our babies in An-Lok to endure. We watched the little frail baby lives anxiously, but we lost no more than the two I told about. I think an angel guards each little bed or how could they stay alive in this heat and with hot dusty winds blowing? There is much sickness elsewhere among the people, and even polio is on the Island.

Do you remember where it says, “God hath sent His angel,”-well, this time “God hath sent His chariot to help us,” for we received a new Ford Ranch Wagon for the Lord’s work as the gift of Dr. Bob Pierce of World Vision. This was to replace the most vagabond little old jeep you ever saw which did not belong to us, but which we had been using by grace for the past year.

It was old, its pedigree must have been a mile long, and it was the open type, the kind military men use over rough territory. During the years it had become lopsided. It reminded one of a dog with one ear cocked up and the other down as it came careening along the road. Always you felt you were slipping sidewise as you rode in it.

It needed a “Fasten Your Seat Belt” sign in the front seat far more than any airplane. On rainy days


we would get soaked thoroughly many times during the day, and we had merry times trying to dodge the rain which came in on every side, and the front and back and through the roof while we also sat in a pool of water.

But even so it was a mercy car and it saved many lives by dashing out to the Leprosarium day and night with needed drugs or the doctor when people were almost dying. I had never expected to have a decent car in my lifetime for even my personal money is a mobile unit that goes right back into the work that is so urgent on every side.

However, Dr. Bob Pierce’s great heart decided the work needed a car, and he saw that it was provided, and our hearts overflow with gratitude.

Even the first week we had the car it brought much happiness. One day we took the wee babies from the An-Lok Babies’ Home out to the Leprosarium so that their parents could see them and thus be reassured that their little ones were well. It was a sight to see the car with all the babies in it.

Another day we took the Observation Home children out for their parents to see. These little folk are older, from 2 years old to 8 years old, and they laughed aloud with delight as we sped along in the new car. I have never seen such unalloyed happiness.

Poor little folk! When we reached the Church of the Lepers and they stood on the platform and saw the strange faces below some were timid and hid their faces. Some looked long and earnestly at a mother’s face which was now a dim memory but too tender to be forgotten entirely.

Another time the Chinese New Year came along. It is without doubt the most important holiday of the year here. It is the time that I dread, for we used to have several suicides at the Leprosarium then. It is home- coming time for the Chinese, and every one goes back to his own home.

In order to combat this danger we deliberately planned some festivity for them, a New Year’s party in the Christian Herald Occupational Therapy Room. They had a service of worship first, and the soldiers’ choir, (far from committing suicide!) sang “Jesus is all the World to me!” Most of these if not all have met the Lord right here in the Leprosarium.

While the patients were assembling for this New Year’s party I was playing the accordion just to create a background of music and gayety. But I noticed that the patients who were mothers kept slipping up to the front to look at pictures on the wall. Then I saw that these pictures were of their children taken at Christmas time. They were making these wistful little pilgrimages just to reassure themselves that they had children, and that the children were well and happy.

New Year’s is the family time, when all families draw together, but these mothers, even though their hearts were filled with longing, could not call their children home. Even a mother hen can call her chicks to nestle under her wings. Yet we must protect their children from the ravages of the disease they would surely get if left in the Leprosarium. When I see their hearts ache, my heart aches with them.

One weekend while back in the mountains I rode on a truck on a oneway road skirting the edge

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of a precipice. It had been raining for weeks, and the road was the world’s worst. In some places great portions of the road were beginning to slip away.

I looked down over the precipice and I couldn’t see the bottom because it was so far below. Then I looked up, and the mountains high above us were the most beautiful in the world, shrouded in mist and laced with water-falls.

In our work here if we look at the hard places or at the depths below, we get scared and say “I can’t do it!” So we resolutely only look at the beautiful part, the glory of being able to have the privilege to work for Him and with Him, and that keeps our hearts singing all the while!


Chapter 10

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Chapter 10

Our An-Lok Babies’ Home was purchased several years ago. Then the ground on which it stands was a rice field. I remember how I stood in the ricefield and wondered if I dared to buy the land.

I thought to myself, “You do not dare not to dare!” for there was no other place in all Formosa where the babies born of leper parents could find protection from the disease, and loving Christian care.

That was about 8 years ago. It was situated outside the city with no house in sight and with beautiful blue mountains in the distance. But, now, after millions have come to our shores for refuge, after the deluge of American military and economic aid with their families, we are in the center of a tightly built up residential district.

No beautiful mountains are now in view, no breeze to dry the 300 or more diapers a day, no clean grass for the babies to tumble on and learn to walk. We decided to move the Babies’ Home outside the town to the place where we have the An-Lok Annex, the runabout children, and long green lawns for the children to play on.

A rich man offered to buy it and found that he dealt with someone who cared more about the babies’ health than clever terms.

“We have to build at once,” I told him straightly. “I can tuck the babies in one cottage (26 babies) for a little while, but I need the full price at once so I can build.”

Then I told him recklessly, “Tell me when you have the money all ready and we will move out in 24 hours and give you the house!”

So now we have to be ready, like a fire truck, to dash off at a moment’s notice, picking up 26 babies and all their paraphernalia! I know, from experience, that these emergencies often occur when practically no one is around to help. I will probably end up carrying out three babies on each arm, and wondering why God didn’t give me three arms, and couldn’t I possibly carry something in my mouth!

“I would have you without carefulness,” the Savior lovingly said long ago. We use this as a blanket of blessed forgetfulness and love to draw over one at night, so we can sleep without worrying about the morrow.

In the Church of the Lepers there was a patient who waited after every service to talk to me. His request was always the same. His wife had divorced him and married another, and nobody wanted to take care of his two children. Would we take them into our Children’s Home for the children of the patients?

The children were brought to us, two beautiful children, a little girl and boy. At the Leprosarium the father wept when he saw them thinking of his broken home and how helpless he was to restore it. I know he must have prayed to the Father to send his children safely to this Home where they would be under Christian care, and the Father answered his prayer.

“The other children died. There are not so many now. Only this little boy is left, so white, so thin. His father is a leper. We know you can’t take care of everybody, but could you take him in ?” It was


Sister Alma speaking to me.But imagine,-this thin, little white-faced boy standing at our gate hoping to be more acceptable

because his brothers and sisters had already died! Of course, we took him in, but we had to put him in the hospital first for he was not well either.

Once there were four little children whose father was a leper patient. The mother brought the children to the Leprosarium and abandoned them there. We took them into our Home for these children.

A few days later when I went there the woman in charge said, “ We can’t do anything with the oldest boy. He keeps running away down the road wanting to find his mother and father. Sometimes he gathers the other three little ones together and tries to take them all away.”

“You will get killed by a truck on the road,” the nursemaids warned him.“It might be just as well,” answered the little boy with bitterness far beyond his years.Who can measure the ache in a child’s heart? Finally the mother was found and she took the little

boy with her. We are caring for the others until the father is cured of leprosy.The littlest leper patient in the Government Leprosarium is a wee boy who looks about five years

old. He comes to church wearing a choir robe and sits with the Children’s Choir. One day during the church service I saw him looking around at the other patients while big tears rolled down his cheeks unheeded. His expression was so sad it broke my heart.

I could not bear to see the tears, no child heart should ever be so sad. And yet, he was seeing the other patients, some crippled, some blind, some deformed, some with a gray pallor as of death already settled on their faces. His little face was turned toward them in utter desolation.

But later, another Sunday, the church was the same, the patients the same, but the littlest boy was singing with the rest. Somewhere along the way the Savior had met him and comforted his heart. This is a miracle of the Savior’s love that we see many times.

“The harvest is great,” the Savior mourned, “The laborers so few!”In the Church of the Lepers one morning I was presented with a bill. It was for the funeral of a

little boy. It had been held in the Occupational Therapy Room, not in the Church.With exquisite thoughtfulness the patients had not told me during the week when it happened.

They did not want to cloud my mind with sadness so that I could not do my other work.This little boy once had leprosy and was brought to the Leprosarium. We put him in the Gospel

Light Cottage and there he lived happily and become well. Then we took him to our Observation Home where he could continue to take the sulfone drug and we could be sure the disease did not return.

He was there for several months, very happy but unruly and hard to control. We have only women as nursemaids, and a Taiwanese boy does not listen to a woman’s voice very long. When he was eleven

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and the disease had not returned, we allowed his mother to take him home.We heard later that at home in the public school he was taunted. “Your father is a leper!” the

children would call out. His father was still a patient in the Leprosarium. However, the little boy’s heart must have been bitter, for at eleven years old he committed suicide.

Think how desperately unhappy the little lad must have been! In spite of all that is said of the prejudice being abolished, it still holds here even to a child ostracized because of his father.

Today I am wondering how much I will have to pay for a baby boy. I am not buying the boy. The father was a leprosy patient in the Leprosarium and came to me and said, “I have been paying an old woman to take care of my baby boy. His mother ran away when she found I had leprosy. Now for several months I have not been able to pay. Will you take my boy?” I told him to give us the address and we would go and find him.

He gave the address to one of my helpers, and then suddenly the father died. We went to find the wee lad. An old woman, horribly dirty, screamed at us.

“He died, the father died, and he didn’t give me the money for the boy’s care. Now, instead of three months you must give me seven months’ board!”

But it will not be because of threats that we pay the bill and take him to our Children’s Home. It is because the wee boy is so defenseless having no one in the world to protect him. It is because too I believe his father prayed in the Church of the Lepers to the Heavenly Father he had just heard about, “Father,-my boy, O please take care of him.”

One Terrible time still stands out in memory when we had tragedy at An-Lok, death in our Babies’ Home. It happened so suddenly that it seemed a nightmare in memory. It seemed that every few hours I had to go stumbling back to the Leprosarium to face stricken parents with a dead baby in my arms. In the end I wished I could die too, the sorrow was more than I could bear.

I have lost two little babies of my own in the past, but that grief was my own grief, and more bearable than this, this pain that I could not bear in the parents’ stead. I could stand being hurt, but it was harder to have to hurt them by telling them, by showing them, their baby dead.

After the funeral of one little one in the Church of the Lepers, the mother of another whose baby was in the hospital dangerously ill came to me and said shyly, “My husband and I want to tell you something. We know our baby is ill, and we have prepared our hearts for the worst. If the baby dies, don’t you grieve about it. We can stand it. Just don’t grieve.”

Their unselfishness fell on my bruised spirit like healing oil, such a contrast to the crass selfishness one so often finds in the world.

Another time when illness invaded the Compound where the children were, we had fear in our hearts because encephalitis was around.

We went to the Leprosarium and told the elders of the Church of the Lepers, “Have a special


prayer meeting every morning at six o’clock and pray for the Lord’s protection of these children. Have all the parents come whether they are Christian or not.” So they did this, and God heard the prayers of these helpless humble people, and the children all recovered.

At the Observation Home for children of leper parents who have been exposed to leprosy but have shown no signs of having the disease, I found a little girl, A-kim, with blotches on her face.

“The doctor thinks you should check this,” said the trained nurse in charge. A-kim went with me happily and at the Leprosarium she stood brave and still while they took skin

tests. “She should stay here for a while,” said the doctor gravely.Thank God we have the Gospel Light Cottage and the King’s Daughter Home for the children

with leprosy. We have fine clean cottages for them, isolated from the advanced cases. We made all the arrangements for her to stay. As long as she could hold my hand she felt safe, but after I left, she broke down and cried.

Sister Alma who gives full-time to the Leprosarium will be there every day to comfort her and oversee her.

A-kim had been almost a year old before the parents gave her to me to carry away to safety. Evidently they had waited too long, so now we must begin our course of treatment. She will soon recover with the new sulfone drug.

Then we can take her away again to our pleasant sunny brick bungalows, long green lawns to play on, laughing children under blue skies, kindergarten every day, singing, evening worship in the twilight, thanking the Father for this place, for His daily care, food and clothing, and Christian nurse.

Some day she will come back. The place is prepared and ready, just as Heaven is prepared for us.

Chapter 11

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Chapter 11

Life never fails to astonish us with new developments. When I went to the Church of the Lepers one time on Sunday Sister Alma met me with a solemn face.“Someone has broken into the vestry of the church and stolen part of our Communion set and the

tablecloth,” she told me.Now who would want these things I wondered. Surely he wasn’t a very practical thief to choose

articles that so few could use. The Communion set had been silver-plated, the only pretty thing in the whole Government Leprosarium of nearly one thousand patients.

When I bought it other people had advised, “Get aluminum or wood or anything for leper patients,” as if because they were humble they should have the poorest.

But I thought, “A white tablecloth and a silver-plated set and plenty of flowers and a candlelight service will be nice. In the candlelight they cannot see one another’s disfigured faces, and they will feel that the whole Communion worship service has been beautiful as well as meaningful.” And now it was stolen!

“Let’s pray for the thief,” I told Sister Alma. “Besides he did not take it all. We have half of it left.”When I went home a Taiwanese Christian girl who had dinner with us said, “If the policeman

comes with the thief, will you be able to tell him as in Les Miserables the Bishop told Jean Valjean, But I meant to give it all to you. Here is the other half.”

“I don’t know,” I told her honestly. “Just now I feel a little like holding onto the part we have left!”At the Church of the Lepers during the time of worship an offering was always taken even though

the patients have very little money. Have you ever seen those without hands or feet give an offering to the Lord? It is awkwardly done for sometimes the two stumps of arms together must clutch the bill and drop it into the offering box.

It is an answer to God’s Word to them that He loves them, an answer which says, “We love Thee too.”

World Vision, Inc. has paid for much in connection with the Church of the Lepers and the Leprosarium. Dr. Bob Pierce also supplied the would-be band in the Church with musical instruments because they asked for better instruments so wistfully.

However, recently World Vision sent out some more musical instruments that had been given them for the patients. I did not tell the patients when I first received the news, for the waiting time might seem long to them. But at last they arrived. The next Sunday was pouring rain as the third typhoon of summer advanced, so I did not take the instruments to them for fear they would get wet enroute.

But on the path to the Church I met a patient who plays in the band. “Some musical instruments have come for you,” I told him unable to hold the good news longer.

He entered the church demurely, and I did not see him whisper, but I know he passed the word


along for I saw delighted smiles spring from one face to another like sunlight flashing on the waves. Happiness, sent to them from across the sea, had reached its shore of destination!

I don’t know how it is in America, but with us in Formosa just before Easter is a very busy time. I had “Angels in the living room! And women forever peering into tombs!”

There is one leper patient at the Leprosarium who can paint in oil, and he makes pictures billboard size. He did several before Easter. They were brought to my living room first, and then we gave them to the different churches. They were beautiful and colorful, and one wondered how such a humble little man could produce such beauty.

On Easter Sunday the worship service in the Church of the Lepers is a thrilling event. Easter lilies grow wild here so we have a great many lilies. The Church is filled with people for we have many Christians now, and more are always baptized on that day.

Because I have the vivid memory of only a few years ago when days of suicide and misery predominated in the Leprosarium, now it seems like Heaven aforetime to see the church full of Christians, with Easter lilies everywhere, and music and singing, and radiant happiness vibrant in the air! As soon as a person becomes a Christian his or her whole outlook Changes completely. Nowhere can this be seen more plainly than in our Leper Colony.

The baptisms are held in the evening of Easter Day and we also have Communion then. I bought a long loaf of bread and another half loaf, and took these to Sister Alma, the missionary nurse.

“Will this be enough?” I asked her finding it difficult to estimate. Sister Alma looked at the bread doubtfully.

“You know there are hundreds to take Communion-”she said.Hundreds! Where only a few years ago there had been nothing but bitter despair, desperation and

death! Now there are about four hundred baptized Christians among the thousand patients although many are too crippled to come to church.This is the work of the Holy Spirit, not of man, but of God.

It is a miracle that makes us catch our breath with wonder and our eyes mist with happiness and gratitude. Always greater than the miracle is the glad realization that “It was the Lord” Who did it, and He is with us among these humble suffering folk.

For the Communion we have candlelight for it is kind to tortured, deformed and pain-traced faces. In the candlelight they look only as eager, happy, peaceful faces as if those who had had burdens too great to bear had now found Rest and Peace and Happy Confidence for this life and the life to come.

“Until I drink it new with you in Heaven-” “Until the Lord comes-” these definite limitations of time and suffering are dear to our patients. Always those who know they need a savior value Him most.

At this Easter Morning Service in the Church of the Lepers Sister Alma gave me two more babies, children of leper parents, to take away to the safe shelter of our An-Lok Babies’ Home. God only gave me two arms,-I guess that is why there weren’t three babies!

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We still have a little more than seventy babies and children of the patients. Some patients get well, and reclaim their children and go to their homes. Some are taken by relatives, who seeing the children are bonny and beautiful, cease to worry about leprosy!

The patients were exuberantly happy this Easter Day. There were the new baptisms and all rejoiced about that. It was Easter with the promise of life after death, and they were to partake of the Lord’s Supper that evening.

We have three choirs now in the Church of the Lepers, and recently they have made up a brass band which is so essential to celebration in Oriental life.

The brass band practiced diligently. They had had such a happy Easter Day that after the last amen of the evening service, the band struck up again as if too happy to contain itself. They had evidently played all the hymns they knew, so to my surprise I heard exultantly floating out the windows of the church the strains of “Swanee River” and “My Old Kentucky Home.” as the congregation slowly wended its homeward way.

“Why be too solemn?” the music seemed to say, “After all, aren’t we some of the happiest people in the world?”

And they are. I know that kind of happiness for often I am too happy to sleep. It is the happiness that comes when you work for the Lord, a life that holds adventure, mystery, drama, high endeavor, warm Christian friendships, and the whole world of people to care for, all kinds of people, a life that is rich in meaning and aglow with anticipation. We who work on the harvest field here are so happy,-we wonder why more harvesters do not come!

At Christmas time the patients have a wonderful time. On Christmas Eve they have a Candlelight Service in the Church, and then in the night the Christians go caroling around the whole Colony.

On Christmas morning there is worship in the Church of the Lepers which has been beautifully decorated with green boughs and trees. Then in the afternoon they have the Christmas Party celebration the birthday of the King.

There are more than a thousand patients now and my young people prepare the red cellophane bags of sweets for each one. These are big bags of sweets, with enough cookies and candies to last some time. It is a remendous task, and we use the “production line” method and work fast. Even so it is a big task for everybody gets sweets, the blind, the leper patients, the children of leper parents, and all the orphans and children in the Children’s Homes.

At the Leprosarium they beautifully trim the three that we send them. Because the Christian Herald Occupational Therapy Room is so spacious, we usually get three trees and have them wire them together so that it looks like one great tree.

The whole room is decorated, and this is not an easy task when so many are not physically able to help. Excitement surges through the air, for they do not have many social events, and this is the greatest


of the year.I know what would be tragic. The patients are like people in prison. They cannot go outside the

Leprosarium, and they long for visitors to come and see them. “I was in prison and ye visited me not”, said Christ so long ago evidently sensing the lonesomeness of one who is not free.

Their great fear and sorrow is that they might be overlooked by a busy, self-important world that has small time for lepers. Perhaps in the time of Christ there were those who said to Him, “Don’t waste your time with them, Lord, the maimed, the blind, the lepers, the beggars, the children on the streets!” But I also remember He took time and gave gentle consideration to each one’s needs.

Sometimes I can get missionaries and other church people to come on Christmas Day to this party, but sometimes they are too busy with their own groups.

One time when I was desperate in my effort to find guests I called a Christian Center for American military men. “See if you can get some American sailors to come,” I begged the one in charge.

He did, and the sailors came manfully to our rescue. As they came into the room I could feel excitement surge through the crowd of patients, and happiness and contentment. They were not forgotten by the outside world. They had guests for their “Birthday Party for the King of Kings!”

“When war started again,” Sister Alma told me one Sunday morning at the Church of the Lepers, “The patients started an early morning prayer meeting at six o’clock every morning. They are praying for the world, praying for peace.”

Some may scorn them as humble and incapacitated and of no use to society, but we are proud of their spiritual discernment and alertness. They carry the welfare of the world on their hearts, and they know enough to go with this burden to the Heavenly Father.

Chapter 12

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The other day when I came back to the office at noon, I found a woman, past middle age and very thin and weary-looking, asleep in a chair. She was a leper patient that we used to bring the

precious sulfone drug to when we had our Bamboo Clinic at Sin-tek. Then the crowds there increased until we had 700 patients in three hours. It became too unruly and unwieldy, so we closed that Clinic and started in another place. But she remembered us, and now her last weary steps brought her to us.

“She is a leper and she is now an advanced case and should be in the Government Leprosarium,” the Mission Hospital Doctor telephoned to us. So we took her there and saw that she was comfortable and happy.

Who would have guessed that little finger of kindness and help of long ago, the Bamboo Clinic, should give her hope when all else failed!

When we write to friends in the outside world, that fine Anglo-Saxon reserve we are supposed to have goes slithering off into the sea. When one is located on a South Sea Island, uncomfortably close to Communists where any twenty-four hours might see the end of life, we haven’t time to be reserved. Of necessity we take all into the core of our heart and tell you exactly what we think, what we see, what we do. That makes you one with us even as is the Lord.

The other day I saw a mother, carrying a heavy pail, too heavy for her, and with a baby strapped on her back. I thought to myself, “All over the world there are mothers ‘who work too hard.’” Our world is so small now that instead of seeing differences, we see similarities.

Because the world is small, because you care about others or you would not read this, because danger and war are frighteningly near, we can be “one” in praying to the Father as never before. Even if it is for homely things, taking care of sick bewildered aborigines, of homeless children, of leper patients and their children, trying to solve their problems, I know He cares and wants to hear our prayers.

“---Thy God can do much more Than thou canst ask, Launch out on the Divine,Draw from His love-filled store!”

One evening in the ward of the Leprosarium “Nearest Heaven’s Door” (the most advanced cases) some of the patients said, “We know why you do not come now as often as before. We know you have much other work. Tell us about it.”

So I told them a little, but when I told them that we had fifty wee children and babies of people in prison that brought forth exclamations. Their thought were all for others, not for themselves.

We have had this Ward repainted and all new mats put in recently. Then I asked Sister Alma about the coffin.


“It seems to me that it will need refurbishing and repairing by now,” I told her relying on my radar that told me so.

“We hardly ever have a funeral now,” Sister Alma replied. “The patients are so much better off than they used to be.”

However, the coffin (a beautiful carved chest tin-lined in which their poor wooden box can be placed) was completely repaired and refurbished.

“It was just finished and then a Christian died,” Sister Alma reported and I knew that they all felt that this was God’s timing.

Another answer to prayer is that the Home for Cured Men patients is now being built. For this Home much prayer had been offered. Now many patients are becoming “negative” but the drug which makes them negative cannot give back their hands, their feet, their eyes. If they tried to reenter society, they would be shunned by others who will not believe that they are cured.

We went through a grave time of a “second crisis” when this problem presented itself. The Leprosarium declared that cured patients should leave so that the Hospital would have room to receive new patients who needed care. The patients, who were negative, but too crippled and deformed to make their way in the world again, were verging on the idea of suicide. Where else could they go?

Again we presented this problem to Dr. Bob Pierce of World Vision, Inc. and again he answered out of his great heart of love. Now we have a Home for Women and another Home for Men who are cured but have no place to go, built by World Vision. There is no more talk of suicide and we can breathe again.

Still we meet problems in trying to care for this great Leprosarium. Last summer a typhoon hurtled down on the Colony and left and electric wires a tangled mess. The whole institution was without lights.

When I went on Sunday I could see gloom inches deep spread across each patient’s face. Morale is terribly important in this place.

We contacted the officials in charge. “How long before you will have the electricity repaired?” we asked.

“At least a month,” they responded carelessly. “We have put this repair bill in with the other repair bills to the Government, but they are overloaded with such bills now.”

A month! A month of total darkness for our poor patients! How about those with imperfect hands clutching bamboo crutches and making progress slowly because of no feet or only stumps? How about those with no hands to hold a candle? My heart sank lest despondency over helplessness should bear them down again.

In the dark a patient trying to go “just a little” way might stumble down steps and it might be a long way,-as long as from life to death. We called our electrician and went ahead in faith and told him to

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repair it all quickly with several to help him.We knew that Jesus would want it done, for it was the loving Father Who first said, “Let there be

light!”The next Sunday happiness, contentment, and cheer greeted us as we entered the church. Other

repairs could come later, and they would not mind, but oh, they were so grateful for light to walk safely. The Church of the Lepers is too small. While about half of those baptized are on their beds and

cannot attend, still every fine Sunday you see several sitting on stools outside the door. How long would people in America continue to go to church if they had to sit on a stool outside the door?

You can’t see from there and you can’t hear either. Somehow, sometime we are hoping God will give us a chance to make the church larger so “Whoever will may come” to church.

The cement path that went uphill to the Church was not glass-smooth but rough. We were about to question the contractor when someone said, “This path was made rough on purpose. Many patients must climb this hill awkwardly using bamboo crutches which they clutch uncertainly with crippled hands. If the paths were too smooth they would fall. They are made a little rough out of kindness to them.”

We wondered, “Does the Lord make our paths sometimes rough out of kindness to us, lest if it is too smooth we get careless and fall?” For we can never get on top of all our problem. It is sort of like swimming. You get over one wave and feel like shouting with happy abandon that it has been surmounted, and then you see another one forming in front of you! The way is never too smooth!!

Sometimes in a home a mother puts all her children to bed, and then in the darkness she hears one crying or perhaps two of them. She goes softly to their bedside and comforts them until they fall asleep. I know that many people think that night is reaching out its long arms towards this Island, that each time we write the curtains are drawn a little nearer. But if we hear people crying in distress in the darkness of before night, let us comfort them as a mother might, for Christ’s sake, until they fall asleep.

There was an old blind leper patient in the Leprosarium, and though he would let me pray for him, he was a Buddhist and stubborn in his beliefs. Finally everyone in that room had accepted Christ except him. One day I told him, “But in Heaven we will miss you, for the rest will all be there.”

He must have brooded over this, for one day he came and asked to be baptized. Since then he has been a devout believer and never misses church although he must be taken there is one of the little carts.

One day not long ago as I left his room he told me, “And if I get to Heaven first, I will wait for you.”All who help will have friends in Heaven from this side of the world, and some day you will know

them personally. Inside Heaven’s gate, they will “wait for you.”


Chapter 13

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The Man didn’t die, he is still living. When I left the Leprosy Colony yesterday afternoon they told me that he might be murdered in the night. Because of that no one wanted to take care of him or

have him in their homes. They were afraid that if murder did take place, their names would be involved or perhaps their lives threatened too. Anyway, he was pushed back onto a far veranda, a lonely place, and only one man left as a sleepy guard.

The Man was a soldier, a leper patient, a Christian, and fifteen soldiers, also leper patients who were Buddhists, had jumped on him and beaten him into unconsciousness, As far as we could make out it was an unprovoked attack, but at this stage of the affair it did not matter much why it had happened.

One had to go on from where one found the problem. The doctors in the Leprosarium all said there was no hope, and I looked down at the unconscious figure with a heart that was heavy with dread. But we had injections given and brought out the missionary doctor and prayed and at last, late at night, after a full day of unconsciousness, his eyelids flickered and we knew hope. We had him carried on a stretcher to the Library where Christians could care for him all the night through.

The next day I found him back on the lonely veranda. “We are afraid,” the other patients whispered “We hear they may come again to kill him.” If I stayed the second night through watching over him, his enemies might not dare to come because I was a foreigner, but being ruthless and desperate they might, and if I were injured that would be an international incident and foreigners would never be allowed in the Leprosarium again to bring help to the needy.

So I could only pray, “Please God, take care of him. Put Thine angels round about him so no harm can reach him,”-I could only pray and go home to a restless, sleepless night.

But this morning he was still living. Not only so, he could recognize us and smile a little. I had to tell him something. It was hard to do it, but I knew I had to do it quickly before this role of tragedy rolled too far along.

“You must forgive those who have beaten you,” I told him, “You know you are a Christian.” “I know,” he said although his voice was low with weakness, “I already have,” and he smiled as if

to reassure me that all was right with him. My heart knew such joy that it seemed in a moment as if all other troubles were mere minutiae compared to this singing joy of knowing that this new Christian had Christian perception of God’s gentle law of Love.

Sixteen leper patients, members of our Church of lepers, graduated today from a Navigator’s Bible Study Course they had taken by correspondence. Always when this happens, we have a little graduation ceremony along with our morning worship in the Church, and they are presented with their diplomas framed, a framed picture of Christ, and a couple of books, Pilgrim’s Progress, Daily Light or something like that.

This man who had been beaten was one of the class supposed to receive diplomas today. We carried his to him together with the other awards and he was very pleased. But when he said he had


forgiven his enemies I thought, “ He has had another graduation today, one written in the annals of God,” for while you are still suffering from your wounds, it must be hard to forgive.

Last week I had a tragedy too, one that was hard to bear. A young man, a leper patient, a father of one of he children we shelter, committed suicide. His wife was one of my best friends. She has a pure thoughtful face that always reminds me of a Madonna. On Tuesday I was at the Colony, but a newborn babe was placed in my arms to be carried away to safety to our Babies’ Home. Because I was busy with the baby I did not go around to the homes, for the missionary doctor and Sister Alma were making rounds.

On Thursday when we went again to hold our big Clinic, the young wife sent for me. “He called and called for you. We waited and you did not come. He took the medicine (an overdose of the specific drug give by the Leprosarium for leprosy, an overdose taken deliberately in order to die) and if you had only come we think he would have got better.”

My eyes were blind with tears and I was enveloped with that sense of baffling frustration that comes when I have not been able to meet some need. If I only have more bodies! Carrying the baby away I could not make rounds, yet those words, “If you had only come,---we waited for you. He called and called.”

When I came and prayed with him, he was still conscious, but he died, and the young wife, her eyes dark with pain and her face white and sad, goes through the motions of living mechanically, her heart, I know, and ache in her breast.

To be the servant of this multitude of leper patients is a tremendous drain on one’s emotions. Sometimes I can hardly stand it, the pitiful things I see and sense, the heartending tragedies, the courage of those who walk bravely through their night, One day while I was there and felt overwhelmed I though to myself, “ Will God forgive me, do you suppose, if I go home and cry tonight? I just can’t stand things I’ve seen and heard.”

But, do you know, that night it was twelve o’clock before I reached my bedroom, and I was too tired to take time out to cry,-I fell fast asleep. And the next day so many new problems came along that I almost forgot what had seemed so tragic the day before!

We have twenty babies of leper parents now safe in the Father’s care in the Babies’ Home. They are bonny and sweet and “grow in wisdom and stature” according to God’s law of growth. The most pitiful is the wee little one born blind. He seems so helpless and alone. His father, a leper patient, is a carpenter, and often asks me wistfully about the baby’s eyes. “Is there any hope at all?” he questions eagerly yet sadly.

Chapter 14

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One would think that patients consigned to the Leprosy Colony would have done with the little things of life, with the little concerns of love, hate, passions, frettings and uncertainties, the

animosities, the yearnings that make up the lives of those in the outer world. But this is not so. Since I last wrote to you I have had two violent deaths in the Colony, deaths actuated by passion, perhaps made stronger in that a leper’s nerves seem attuned to more sensitive wave-lengths than we ordinary folk have who walk in stodgy deliberate ways.

One was a woman, a leper patient. When I found her, she was already at the door of death and as I moved closer to her bedside to pray for her, I noticed on her arms dark bruises which were not the familiar leper blotches. Her husband stood near caressing her hands, but from her attitude I knew that this was melodrama and things were not as simple as they appeared. She was not a Christian, but she wanted me to pray.

How does our Father look on these poor souls who take their own lives, and then at the last moment want forgiveness I wonder? For she had committed suicide with her own hand, but it was after a quarrel with her husband, and the dark bruises I saw were the result of blows. He did not kill her with his blows, but make her so unhappy that she took her own life,--was that murder then? After her death he was accused of murder and then acquitted, and thus ended another chapter in the Colony.

Another death was a young lad in love with a pretty young girl who showed no sighs of disfigurement. She would have none of him, and so in despondency and perhaps in revenge he took his life. His death was so terrible that it haunted me for days. I am not used to violent death.

One Saturday morning before breakfast the telephone rang and I was called to Colony. There had been two attempts at suicide. I came home shaken and unnerved. “I can’t stand it,” I thought to myself. “I will break too if this keeps on.”

But our loving Father had arranged a respite in which I could recover poise again. My husband was leaving on furlough after eight long years on the Mission Field. I couldn’t go with him because I have much work for the lepers which is just in mid-stream, repairs to be completed, improvements made, a Bibies Annex to be built for the lepers’ babies, etc. But I thought I could go party way. I went with him to Hong Kong to “see him off.”

It was pouring rain in Hong Kong when he took the plane for Siam, but I knew that above the clouds there would be clear skies as the plane headed toward the sunny south. Perhaps above my clouds of trouble there are clear skies too I thought as I turned back to the task of shopping for everyone while in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong is an English city in spite of the teeming population of Chinese there. In the shops you see everywhere glints of English life, life punctuated with dignity and beauty. In English dress materials you see reflected memories of their flower gardens, a blue larkspur bed, a variegated bouquet, etc. If you look at them lingeringly thinking of the people who planned the patterns, you can forget for


a little while the months just passed. I was away just a week, and then came back to problems multiplied by my absence. The leper

patient in charge of our music room had inadvertently turned the raid onto a forbidden station, and had been arrested and put in prison. The medicines left in the Colony for emergencies had all been stolen in a midnight raid. A tempest had flared up about other little things too pretty to be enumerated. The lepers call me their “mother.” As long as I am in their midst things move along comparatively peacefully, but with just one week away all this had happened.

I went to the Colony immediately on my return, and found them half ashamed, half frightened, but still hot with a sense of their little rights and wrongs. I was greeted warmly, but still there was a jealousy as to whom would have a chance to tell me “just what happened and how it happened” for all the world like children who have quarrelled while mother was away.

We reverted to the old, old strategy of diverting their interest. “Let us have a Candlelight Service in the Church of the Lepers on Good Friday Evening,” I suggested. “The choir can stay in the library at the back of the church until we have the prelude, and then come forth singing and carrying their candles.”

This had never been done before and in the excitement of planning for it and practicing so that it would be done well many of their troubles were forgotten.

I refused to listen to the week’s tale of woe, of all that had happened in my absence. “We will forget it all and never speak of it again, just as if it was a bad dream,” I told them, and so life again was pursued on a more or less “even tenor” of way.

Our school for the children with leprosy had 27 young students. We held it in the back of the church auditorium, and we have a Christian school teacher, also a leper patient, as the teacher. The school had a very happy beginning and continues so. Many of our young people do not have perfect hands, and some have no fingers. But our teacher is understanding and gentle, and we do all we can to make it interesting and profitable.

With great delight I heard the teacher say that he had graduated from an Agricultural School, and so he took his students on exploratory trips into the nearby hills to examine grasses and plants. He urged them to keep rabbits as a hobby, and to plant gardens. I foresee a happy fruitful time with such a teacher and his students. It is far better than letting the young people sit around idle or else learn gambling and bad habits.

On the night of the Candlelight Service in the Church of the Lepers a missionary gave the evening address. “Jesus had two names,” he said, “The angel said, ‘Thou shalt call His Name Jesus for He shall save His People from their sins.’” Towards the end of this beautiful message he said, “But Jesus had another name,--Emmanuel, God with us. He is with us today.” The thought stabbed into my heavy heart with hope as a light breaking, “God with us”, -I had forgotten this in my troubles. Now I know I do not

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work and walk along among the lepers. The Flower Garden of the Lepers has become a reality. It is beautifully laid out and carefully

tended, a product of loving consideration and care. The Library is almost finished, and books and magazines are being collected. Over a hundred and forty people have their meals cooked for them, so all who are blind or physically incapacitated do not need to cook for themselves at all. We have a Clinic twice and sometimes three times a week for them in order to give them vitamins and to care for their aches and pains.

But most of all we are trying to bring them all home to Heaven, and to give them peace and comfort in their hearts while they are here. If it were not for the hope of Heaven it would be hard to face them, suffering and cast out, but with the gift of forgiveness form God and the promise of Heaven, we go to them with happy hearts.

“ I know a Mender of broken hearts, And of lives that are all undone!He takes them all, as they come to Him And He loves them, every one.”

We have had the great joy of having Rev. Winfield Rueke, the Child Evangelism Director of New York City with us this month. Child Evangelism is what I like best to do,-I got into my leper work by accident. And tonight someone told me reprovingly, “you ought to be in the mountains working among the aborigines. Jesus didn’t spend all His time among the lepers.” What is one to do when you have only one body?


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Loving the lepes