Veteran missionary Joan Williams is making an emotional last visit to her beloved India where she is revered for her decades of work supporting orphans and poor people.
Joan, 86, from Tavistock, has also helped give thousands of hospitalised or homeless people care, hope and a new future during a lifetime of service in the UK and abroad with the Salvation Army.
She worked for the army in Burma, Pakistan and India and in Wales and other parts of the country while on a ‘living wage’ providing social work and nursing support and spreading the word of God.
Since retiring she has been continuing her good works carrying out visits to her India where she is well known for her interventions in government and other authorities on behalf of the needy.
On her latest visit, this December, she will hand over proceeds of her former Salvation Army book sales, directly to providers of post-16 education, which is not available to everyone in India.
Joan, who was born into a Salvation Army family and married an army member, said: ‘I admit this will be an emotional last trip for me, that’s why I’m taking my son and daughter, they will help support me. I had to stop at some time and my mobility is not as good now.’
She will be visiting an Indian girl she treated as a daughter, called Rupali, a baby when her parents were killed at home by their stove exploding. Rupali came to Joan aged 16: ‘She wanted to become a nurse, but she wasn’t very good at exams which held her back. I took her under my wing and she joined me in many of the mission hospitals to learn. It worked and she is now doing very well in a large kidney hospital in Calcutta. I’m so proud of her.’
Joan’s husband Railton, who she met while working, died aged 52 after a car accident in Sri Lanka. She then worked as a matron at a girl’s home where she met Rupali: ‘It was very good for my recovery from grief and I look on that work as God’s way of healing me.’
Joan also brought orphan Zoa from India to Tavistock to help him with his English.
He later became a secretary to a Delhi minister: ‘An amazing achievement for someone with no known family history to get such a high-up job. He was told because he was a Christian, he could be trusted not to take bribes – a problem in Indian public life. It’s a huge vote of confidence in the work of the Salvation Army.’
She was brought up in Liverpool in an army family: ‘I was taught early on that my duty was to God and the people round me. I felt that God’s hand was on me.’
Her early work and experience with the army covered Wales and Liverpool, seeing severe poverty and deprivation and sat with coal miners dying of silicosis. An early memory was sitting on a table in a bomb shelter giving bread crusts to teenagers. Her dedicated discipline also extended to being a student England international swimmer.
Anyone wanting to support her last trip can go to https://gofund.me/b362ef1d