Taste of LIfe: When famine-afflicted children of Poona received aid from America

His first five years in India were in Bombay, where he and Stevens shared a room. In 1885, he was asked to receive a young lady named Carrie Palmer at Bombay Harbour. Carrie was a new missionary recruit. 

She was born in Boston in 1860 and raised in a religious atmosphere. At an early age, she felt “the call” to India, and when she was twenty-four, she sailed from Boston for India under Dr Collison’s Faith Mission.   

William offered to teach Carrie Marathi. She readily agreed. A year later, they were married and settled in Poona.   

The Rev William Wynn Bruere was in sole charge of the Poona Marathi Church and Circuits. The Marathi congregations had grown in numbers and interests over the years and included many from Pandita Ramabai’s Widows’ Home. A Christian boys’ school and orphanage were maintained at Poona, with about 150 boys. 

When the famine engulfed the Bombay Presidency in 1896, Carrie decided to “get some famine children”. She had no money in hand. She had been advised by her friends not to venture into the famine relief work in the absence of funds. But she had already started her work with the help of her husband. They had almost a hundred children from in and around Poona in January 1897 with no means to support them. The American Marathi Mission was unable to help her. 

George Lambert, an American Mennonite missionary, had established the “Home and Foreign Relief Commission” to collect funds for India’s “suffering millions”. Inspired by the initiative, Carrie wrote to newspapers and magazines in the United States and appealed to help the famine-stricken children of Poona. It cost about $16 per year to support a child. Her efforts were soon widely published in America and Europe. 

Carrie wrote to the Chicago famine-relief committee on July 27, 1897 – “We have received in all over 150 children from the famine districts, including a few famine widows with their children. Most have come without food, clothing or shelter and in sad physical condition.” Of these, twenty children died despite care. “Our desire is to train the children who are saved for the Lord, and we look to Him for their support”, she wrote. Her appeal was accompanied by photographs of famine-affected children. 

According to Carrie, multitudes were perishing, for lack of food and hundreds of orphan children were homeless, dying in the streets. The Northwestern Christian Advocate reported on September 15, 1897, that “the lack of food had been so complete to some of the suffering ones in India that they had ground into a meal the rotten pith of palms and made bread of it; there was little or no nourishment in such substitutes of food, but they at least filled the stomach and brought a temporary sense of relief”. 

The Brueres received children so weakened by long starvation that utmost vigilance was necessary for feeding them. “They would eat all that was given (to) them, and then cry for more, scraping their plates with their bony fingers to get the last bit of food,”, Carrie wrote in “The Christian Advocate”. One little girl was found with a rat that had been recently killed, carefully hidden away in her saree, her intentions being to cook it and eat it. 

An Article titled “India’s Deserted Children” (January 5, 1897) in “A Young Man’s Paper” written by Robert P Wilder described the horrors the famine had inflicted upon children. “Parents sell their children for food, or push them into wells, destroying them so that they may not see them suffer”, it said. “They were terrible to look at, but after a few weeks of feeding they have picked u wonderfully”, he wrote about Carrie’s children. 

Wilder, who was one of the most prominent in organising the Student Volunteer Movement at Northfield in 1886, was in Poona during the famine and had stayed with the Brueres for some time. He sent to “MEN” the appeal to help them. 

Many readers from America and Europe sent monetary help for the famine-afflicted children of Poona. Children were fed with the money sent. They were taught to read and write. Some older boys were taught carpentry and sewing. In Talegaon, a property was erected for a famine girls’ orphanage. The Zenana Bible and Medical Mission Society of London sent three lady workers, with all expenses defrayed, to aid them in the care of famine children. 

Carrie sent notes thanking the readers and donors. 

She thought of this calamity as God’s open door for the church – an “opportunity to gather in many sheaves for Him”. “They can be taught of Jesus, and many will become Christians and the future members of a strong Christian church; these in turn will bring others to Christ”, she wrote in the “Chicago Tribune” in November 1897. 

Conversion was not entirely abandoned during famines and the efforts of missionaries to scrutinise the intentions of children wishing to get baptised were escalated. HG Bissell, a missionary of the American Marathi Mission in Shiroor, wrote in 1878 that missionaries “found it necessary to be very careful in receiving candidates for baptism, testing their motives sometimes by weeks of probation and scrutiny of their conduct”. 

Rev AW Prautch of Baroda, during five months of relief work, baptised no one. His object was to keep non-Christians from accusing the converts of being “rice-Christians” and to offer no inducement to others to pretend conversion for the sake of grains. 

The Brueres baptised most of the children on the “profession of their faith in Christ”.  

Helen C Maybury wrote in her book “For the Souls and Soils in India” that after serving for more than thirteen years in India, William and Carrie, along with their three children, returned to the States in 1899. William kept returning to India, often spending long periods in the country. His son Bowen came to India as a missionary and served in the Methodist Mission in Puntamba. He died in his thirties. 

William died in 1927. The girls at Pandita Ramabai’s Mukti Mission, who revered him, wanted his body to be laid to rest in the Mission, but the family decided that he should be buried in Poona. Carrie never came back to Poona.