Boys

“And God heard the voice of the lad; and the angel of God called to Hagar out of heaven, and said unto her, What aileth thee, Hagar? fear not; for God hath heard the voice of the lad where he is.”

— Genesis 21:17, ASV

A Burden for Boys

For its first seventeen years the family at Dohnavur was a family of girls. That was natural. The danger that had first moved Amy Carmichael was the dedication of girls to temples, and the children who came to her were girls who had been, or might have been, caught up in it. The women who cared for them were women. The whole life of the household was shaped around the needs of girls and small children.

But Amy came to believe that boys too were in danger. In the course of her inquiries she learned that boys also were sometimes given to temples or to the travelling dramatic companies associated with temple festivals, and that some of them were exploited in ways that were as damaging as anything that happened to the girls. The subject was even more hidden than that of the girls, and even harder to speak about. But once she knew, she could not forget it.

According to the Fellowship’s own history, the burden came to her about 1912. She began to pray that God would either take it away or show her what to do about it. It was a practical as well as a spiritual question. A household of girls and women could not simply take in boys. It would need men to care for them, separate buildings, a different kind of education, and a great deal more money. And it would need, above all, a clear sign that this was God’s will and not merely her own idea.

Waiting

The answer did not come quickly. For six years Amy prayed, and for six years nothing happened. Those were the years of Walker’s death, her mother’s death and Ponnammal’s long illness, the years of the war, the wall and the lawyer. They were not years in which a new work could easily have been begun. But the burden did not go away, and she went on praying.

Waiting was not something that came naturally to her. She was a woman of action, impatient by temperament, and her instinct when she saw a need was to meet it. But she had learned, over many years, that her instincts were not always God’s timing. In Japan she had acted quickly and come to regret it. At Dohnavur she had learned to wait for children to be brought, rather than going out to take them. Now she waited for six years on a matter she felt to be urgent. It was, in its way, as hard an exercise of faith as anything she did.

The First Boy

In January 1918 a baby boy was brought to Dohnavur. The circumstances, as the Fellowship remembered them, were unexpected; nobody had gone looking for him. Amy took his coming as the answer to six years of prayer. The household took him in, and the boys’ work began.

Others followed. At first they were babies and small children who could be cared for in the nurseries alongside the girls. But as they grew older they needed a life of their own. Amy began to plan a separate compound for the boys, with its own buildings, its own school and its own workers. She was determined that the boys should be brought up as the girls were, as members of a Christian family rather than inmates of an institution, and that they should be prepared for useful lives as Indian men.

Men for the Work

The great need was for men. Amy could not bring up boys with only women to care for them, and she began to pray for men who would join the Fellowship and give their lives to the boys as the accals gave theirs to the girls. It was a hard prayer to answer. Men who came out to India as missionaries were usually ordained clergy or doctors or teachers attached to large institutions, and the kind of work Amy was offering, unpaid, unrecognised, and under the authority of a woman, did not appeal to many.

In time, however, men did come. Some were Indian Christians from the district; some were young men who had grown up at Dohnavur themselves; and in the 1920s a few British men joined the Fellowship. Among them were two brothers, Godfrey and Murray Webb-Peploe, members of a well-known evangelical family. Godfrey took a leading part in the boys’ work, and Murray, who was a doctor, would serve in the Fellowship’s medical work. Both stayed for many years, and Godfrey in particular became one of the pillars of the Fellowship in Amy’s later life.

The arrival of men changed Dohnavur. It was no longer a household of women and children but a community with two compounds, the girls’ and the boys’, and with men and women working side by side under Amy’s leadership. That raised new questions about authority, about the relations between men and women in the work, and about how decisions would be made. Amy remained the undisputed head. She had founded the work, and she ran it. But she had now to lead men as well as women, and some of the men who came were strong characters with their own ideas.

Bringing Up Boys

Amy had firm ideas about how boys should be brought up. She wanted them to be strong, brave and hard-working, and she believed in plenty of outdoor activity, practical work and adventure. She wanted them to learn trades and farming, so that they could support themselves when they grew up, rather than depending on the mission for jobs. She wanted them to be Christians who could stand on their own feet in Indian society, not dependants of a foreign institution.

She also guarded them as closely as she guarded the girls. The danger that had brought them to Dohnavur did not disappear when they arrived, and she was determined that no boy in her care should be exposed to the influences she had fought against. That meant a protected life, inside the compound, with limited contact with the world outside. As with the girls, the protection was real and necessary in the early years. As with the girls, some observers would later wonder whether it went on longer and further than it needed to.

A Brigand

The boys were not the only lost sons whom Amy met in these years. In the early 1920s the countryside around Dohnavur was disturbed by a band of outlaws, led by a man whom Amy would call Raj. By her account he had been driven to the hills by injustice and persecution, and he had become a kind of Robin Hood, feared by the police and the rich and admired by many of the poor. In the course of his years as a fugitive he came into contact with the Fellowship, and Amy came to know him. He listened to the gospel, and she believed that he came to a real faith in Christ.

She urged him to give himself up and face the courts, and for a time there seemed to be hope that he might do so. It did not happen. Raj was killed by the police not long afterwards, and Amy was left to grieve for a man she had come to regard as a brother in Christ, and to face the suspicion of those who thought the mission had been too friendly with a criminal. She told his story in a book published in 1927 under the title Raj, Brigand Chief. The details of his life and death are known chiefly from her account, and they should be read with that in mind. But the story shows something about her that is easy to miss: that her compassion was not limited to small children, and that she was willing to risk her reputation for the sake of a hunted man.

Where He Is

The verse at the head of this chapter comes from the story of Hagar and Ishmael in the wilderness. Driven out of Abraham’s household, with the water gone, Hagar laid her son under a bush and went a little way off, because she could not bear to watch him die. And God heard the voice of the lad. The angel’s words are some of the most tender in Genesis: “fear not; for God hath heard the voice of the lad where he is.”

Where he is: not where he ought to be, or where he might have been, but in the wilderness, under a bush, dying of thirst. God heard him there. Amy Carmichael believed that God heard the cries of children wherever they were, including the boys whom nobody else seemed to notice, and that she had been called to be one of the means by which he answered. It took her six years to see how. But when the first boy came, she believed that God had heard, and that the waiting had not been wasted.

By the end of her life the boys’ side of the family had grown into a large company, and many of those who passed through it grew up to be teachers, farmers, craftsmen, nurses and Christian workers. Some stayed at Dohnavur and worked in the Fellowship; others went out into the wider world. The boys’ work is less famous than the girls’, and it is often left out of popular accounts of Amy Carmichael’s life. But it was, in its way, as remarkable an act of faith, and it was born out of six years of patient prayer.