Amy Carmichael

Amy Carmichael went out to Japan, was invalided home, and went out again to India in 1895, where she stayed fifty-five years without a single furlough. The work found her: a seven-year-old named Preena ran to her having escaped being given to a temple, and Carmichael learned what that meant for such children. She began taking them in, wearing Indian dress and darkening her skin with coffee so she could move at night and ask questions where a European woman could not.

The community that grew up around her at Dohnavur eventually cared for around a thousand children. In 1931 she fell, broke her leg, and spent her last twenty years largely bedridden — which is when most of her thirty-odd books were written. She left instructions that no stone be put over her grave; the children set a birdbath there instead, with one word on it: Amma, mother.