The Land Beyond . . . in His Footsteps

Esther arrived in the orphanage soon after we started working there. She had club feet, spina bifeda and such blank eyes. But the one thing that struck us more than anything else was that the workers had tied up her hands with string. “Why have you done this?” we asked. “Because she’s eating her fingers” was the reply. Children who were starving would very often eat their own faeces and then even their own fingers or feet. God put such a burden on our hearts for Esther, and not just us, but everyone who came with us into the baby unit. She just lay there. Each time we would arrive, summer or winter, she would be soaking wet. One of the methods employed in feeding these babies was boiling up the milk, pouring it into bottles that had very large teats on them, and then propping the bottles up on the bedding. The result was often that the babies were scalded, or were so hungry that they would take in the boiling milk so fast that their lungs would fill up with liquid, or that the liquid would overflow onto their ragged clothing and they would lie soaking wet in boiling summer or freezing winter, with resultant pneumonia and death. The survival rate for the babies was very low. But we all felt that we must do something in particular for Esther. We tried paying the infant nurse to feed her. We begged them to look after her. We started to pray earnestly, desperately, asking God to keep her alive. And God answered that prayer in a remarkable way.