In the spring of 1919, an American woman in southern Egypt woke a hundred children in the dark and hid them in an old brick kiln. For three days the bullets fell around them. When it was over, every house along that road had been looted or burned. One house had not been touched.

Her name was Lillian Trasher. She had come out from Florida in 1910, aged twenty two, having broken off her engagement ten days before the wedding because the man would not come with her. She landed in Egypt with less than a hundred dollars. Within days of reaching the town of Assiout, a man came to the mission house asking for someone to sit with a woman who was dying. Lillian went. The woman died in front of her and left a starving baby girl. She was told, quite plainly, that the child would be thrown into the Nile. So she took the baby home, named her Fareida, and was disowned by her own mission board for it. She rented a house for twelve dollars and fifty cents a month, and the orphanage opened in February 1911.

She had one rule, and she kept it for fifty years: never ask a human being for money. Ask God, and write down what arrives. Her letters and the mission papers are full of what arrived. There was the month she could not meet the payroll, two hundred and twenty five dollars she did not have. She prayed, walked out of the gate, and met the postman coming up the road, carrying a letter from a stranger in America with a cheque inside it for a thousand dollars.

Then, in 1919, Egypt rose against the British, and the countryside came apart. Lines were cut. Trains were attacked. Assiout was sealed off, and Lillian had a hundred children and several widows and no protection at all. She gathered them, prayed with them, and took them out to an old brick kiln to lie low. For three days bullets went over their heads.

And a mob came to the orphanage to loot it and to kill the foreign woman. They found it empty. And a neighbour stood in front of it, an Egyptian farmer, a Muslim, who had watched this woman work for eight years. For shame, he told them. These are our own Egyptian children, and she has given her life for them. They went away. The houses on both sides were burned. Hers was not.

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