In the India of 1918, this was a very difficult question to answer. Amy had often prayed about a place for boys. While on trips to Madras she had been saddened to see young boys who were trained in the temples to perform plays about the Hindu gods. Their futures were as dark as those of any of the girls before Amy had adopted them. But raising girls and boys together had never been a possibility. For one thing, the boys would have to be kept entirely separate from the girls most of the time. Indian families kept the males and females completely apart. In fact, most Indian houses were divided into a men’s and a women’s side, and the one group was not allowed to go into the other’s rooms. While Amy found that silly, she was careful not to violate too many local customs. That’s why, for example, the Dohnavur family never ate pork or beef. Both Hindus and Muslims had such strict rules about not eating certain meat that Amy felt it was a battle not worth fighting. For them to all eat meat would only offend nonbelievers.
Having boys in the same compound as girls was a much more complicated issue, however. How could Amy put boys and girls in the same classrooms and the same dining room without offending people? Apart from the housing needs, boys required men to raise them, and there were no men except for Arul Dasan, who was a good Christian and a good worker but not a strong leader. Amy also had been warned that people in surrounding villages would be more hostile to her if she brought boys into the family. After all, every family wanted sons. Sons were much more valued in Hindu society than were daughters. But just as Preena, the first temple girl in the family, had found Amy, so, too, had the first boy been thrust unexpectedly on the family. Amy decided it was God’s way of telling them it was time to start accepting boys into the Dohnavur family, regardless of what outsiders thought.
The next day, January 15, 1918, Amy was walking in the field beside the girls’ nursery, working out the dimensions for a boys’ nursery. As she walked, she prayed that God would give her a sign that it was right to start building such a nursery. She felt she should ask God for the sum of one hundred pounds to start work on the new building.
At dinner that night, Amy shared her plan with the other staff members. The next morning they were all eager to see what might arrive in the mail. Would a check for one hundred pounds be there? It wasn’t, but one of the workers came to Amy and said, “It didn’t come in the mail today, because it arrived yesterday! I received a check yesterday from an inheritance, and it was for that exact amount. God told me to give it to you to begin the boys’ nursery.” With that, work quickly began on the new nursery.
The newly arrived baby boy was named Arul, after Arul Dasan, and he proved to be a happy and healthy little boy. When he got older, he loved to sit on Amy’s knee and have her tell him the story of his “coming” day. “You are my very first son,” Amy would start out, and Arul’s little chest would pump up with pride.
Despite her many responsibilities, Amy always found time to write. She kept a personal journal, which she wrote in each day, and she wrote books to be printed in England. Most of all she enjoyed writing the stories of people she had worked with and loved. She wrote two books, The Life of Walker of Tinnevelly and Ponnammal, Her Story. These books, plus her newsletters, which were sent all over the world, combined to make Amy a household name around the world. But Amy never knew it because she seldom ever traveled farther away from Dohnavur than Madras.
Then in 1919, fifty-two-year-old Amy received a telegram from Lord Pentland, the British governor of Madras. It was “good” news. Amy had been awarded the Kaiser-i-Hind Medal for her services to the people of India. Most people would have been excited to be awarded such a medal, but not Amy; she was horrified. She had no idea so many people knew about her work. Her first reaction was to reject the award. She wondered why she should be rewarded for doing God’s work. She already had more than enough reward in the love of the hundreds of children she had rescued.
In the end, Amy was persuaded to accept the medal as a recognition of the needs of the children of India. However, nothing and nobody could convince her to attend the ceremony in Madras. Amy hated to have her photograph taken or be the center of attention. Besides, Amy had given her life to raising her children, and something had to be very important before she would leave them for a single night. And to her, receiving a medal from the governor of Madras on behalf of the king of England was not important enough.
Within six months of baby Arul’s arrival, a second baby boy arrived, and then a third and a fourth. Arul Dasan and the women struggled to take care of the boys, but it was obvious they needed more men to help with the work. Amy prayed for more male workers, but instead she got more and more baby boys. It wasn’t until eight years later, in 1926, when there were eighty boys aged from newborn to fourteen years old, that Godfrey Webb-Peploe arrived to lead the boys’ work.
Soon after, Godfrey Webb-Peploe’s older brother, Dr. Murray Webb-Peploe, came to visit. He was on his way from India to work with the China Inland Mission. However, China was in the midst of huge political changes, and when Murray Webb-Peploe arrived in Shanghai, he learned that all foreigners had been ordered out of the area he had been sent to. After spending several months in Shanghai, he decided to return to India to help out his brother, and in May 1927, he arrived back at Dohnavur. He offered his services to the family, who gladly accepted them. Amy was sixty years old now, and Murray and Godfrey Webb-Peploe relieved her of much of the day-to-day responsibility for running the Dohnavur family.
Dr. Murray worked out of a tiny grass mat building called suha vasal, meaning the “door of health.” The mud hut was in fact so small and sparsely equipped that it hardly justified a door on it at all! So Dr. Murray and Amy began to pray about building a proper hospital.
The family urgently needed a hospital for several reasons. First, the ever-growing family had constant medical needs. Second, there was no hospital in the area, and a hospital would provide a wonderful way to serve the villages around Dohnavur. Third, a hospital would give “graduates” of the Dohnavur community a place to learn work skills. This was very important. Amy and the “accals” (elder sisters) and “annachies” (elder brothers) were the only family the children had. Even those children who could still trace their families had been disowned by them. In normal Indian society, girls were usually married off by age fourteen, but Amy did not want arranged marriages for her girls, which meant there were a lot of older unmarried girls at Dohnavur. For Indian boys, being in a family in India meant knowing your place in the caste system and therefore what job you would do when you were older. Since the Dohnavur family had nothing to do with the caste system, there was no way for boys to get useful jobs outside the compound. A hospital would solve the problem. There would be many jobs to learn. Some of the young men and women could become pharmacy assistants, laboratory workers, bookkeepers, and nurses, even doctors.
Amy had a high-quality hospital in mind. It would have an operating room, a maternity ward, isolation wards, and a prayer chamber. The outer wall of the hospital would be lined with tiny cubicles with cooking hearths in them. This was necessary because relatives of a sick person in the hospital would come to cook the food for the person. To keep caste, they had to cook the food in privacy, away from the sight of anyone who might be of a lower caste. Amy didn’t agree with the system, but she realized that if she did not provide the cooking cubicles, no one would bring their sick relatives to the hospital.
The hospital plans were expensive. The building was estimated to cost the enormous sum of ten thousand pounds. As usual, Amy would not allow any appeal for money. If God wanted them to build a hospital, she reminded the family, He would provide the money. Plans for the hospital were drawn up, and the family waited and prayed. As they did so, a gift of money came in, but not for a hospital. Instead, it was for a prayer house. An old carpenter in a nearby village had given two months’ income to the Dohnavur family to begin work on such a house. He told Amy it was sad that even the tiniest village in Tamil Nadu had a temple or a shrine to the Hindu gods, while Dohnavur had no prayer house for the living God.
Amy began to wonder whether a house of prayer might be more important than a hospital. As she prayed about the matter one day, she felt God tell her that once a house of prayer was completed, He would provide the money for a hospital. Amy made the announcement to the family at dinner that night. A house of prayer would be built first, followed by the hospital. Straightaway, the money flowed in for the prayer house. Some were large amounts, but most were small donations that quickly added up. Even the smallest children in the family were involved in the project. A group of them got together and wrote Amy a note outlining their efforts to save money. Their promise included, “We won’t waste soap or leave the soap to dissolve in the water and sun. We won’t give out food to the crows and dogs. We won’t spill milk.”
At last, in November 1927, the family finally had a permanent place in which to hold their prayer and church services. As always, Amy arranged the church services in the new building with the children in mind. The services were kept to half an hour. She knew the children couldn’t concentrate for very long, and there was plenty for them to do during a service. The children sat cross-legged in rows, the smallest in the front and the tallest at the back. There was no talking in the building, but the children made plenty of noise when they sang! Amy supplied the smallest children with flags, which they were encouraged to wave in time to the music. The older children were given a drum or maracas to play.
Once the house of prayer was in use, Amy knew the time was right to begin the hospital. Of course, the first thing they had to do was wait for God to provide the money. They didn’t have to wait long. On June 28, 1928, the sum of one thousand pounds arrived in the mail. They were one-tenth of the way there! As with the house of prayer, the rest of the money came in smaller amounts. The children themselves even raised some of the money by selling kerosene cans filled with margosa tree berries for half a rupee each. Margosa tree berries could be crushed to get cooking oil from them.
When the hospital was finally finished, it was put into immediate use. People from miles around came for treatment, and many of them were touched to see Christians willingly serve them. Everyone in the Dohnavur family helped with the hospital in some way or another. Some nights even the littlest children would be given brightly colored lanterns to carry. They would walk around the paths carrying the lanterns, sweetly singing Christian songs as they went. Their soft voices would drift inside the hospital and help restless patients to fall asleep.
Amy continued to work tirelessly. She was amazed at how much the ministry had grown from its small beginnings all those years ago in Pannaivilai. She was also amazed after all those years at how much work still needed to be done.
Chapter 18
Amma
Amy stepped from the car and pulled her sari tight around her shoulders. The wind was beginning to whip up, and as she looked at the sky, she realized they would have to hurry. It was about to get dark. Amy and several of the women from Dohnavur were inspecting the renovations to the new dispensary in Kalakada, a village a few miles from Dohnavur.
It was September 1931, and although money was in short supply, Amy felt a renewed interest in reaching out to the neighboring villages. That is what had brought her to Kalakada. Two women from the Dohnavur family had been hoping for five years to set up a dispensary in the village, and now a house had finally been found. At first no one in the village had wanted to rent to Christians, but Amy and the two women had finally worn down a landlord with a “haunted” house that had been vacant for three years. The man had finally rented the house to Amy. Who else was going to rent his haunted house if he didn’t rent it to Christians? Once a week, Amy would be driven to Kalakada to see how the renovations to the house were progressing. She wanted everything in the dispensary to be just right for the nurses. On this night, the landlord was not at home, and it was some time before he could be found to let the women into the house.
