"Usually January is a gray month in contrast to the radiant gaiety of Christmas, losing its charm as does a leftover sandwich on the day after! But we have had some bright, sunshiny days belying the season; the poinsettias and hibicus are still in bloom, and the Golden Shower and cherry blossoms are already blooming. This would make it Paradise if it were not for some sobering facts around us ... "
This is the opening paragraph of a letter Lillian Dickson wrote to tell the folks at home what was happening in her little world. She had the habit of mentioning trivial things alongside her big dreams—the wedding of a boy she had rescued from jail 15 years before, an incident at a Christmas party for orphans, the distribution of chocolates in the fourth ward of the leprosarium.
All over Taiwan, this missionary social worker has founded rescue homes for orphans and boys from the streets, free clinics and sanitariums for the sick, training schools to make young men and women more useful—her "bucketful" of help in the vast ocean of suffering. There are still those people who do not know where their next meal is coming from, the desperate who need their daily ration of hope.
And in her world there is always so much that needs to be done for those under her care. To find out how things are going, she will fly with her husband over the mountains to east or west once a week or so. Even on a busy day in Taipei, Lillian Dickson, riding in her station wagon with accordion at her side, may make as many as 20 stops.
She must tell the people at home that the TB sanitarium in the mountains still needs a separate ward for children to play. Then there is the blackfoot clinic at Peimen on the west coast. She and her husband had been there on Saturday. Those who had had operations could sing the hymns lustily. The faces of those who had not undergone surgery were masks of sufferings. They needed more doctors, nurses, a better kitchen, a new storehouse, more crutches, more beds. For mountain churches, her dreams are of reading rooms filled with books and magazines. The new chapel building at a school for boys was only half finished. Every time she saw it, it "reproached" her. She had only one rescue Home in Taipei and needed a much bigger place.
Help Is Forthcoming
In her newsletters, pounded out on her typewriter late at night, Lillian Dickson poured out her heart. Starting with thank-you notes in 1951, her reports grew into the hundreds and thousands. The scope of her work has been expanding; the letters are getting longer. But the personal tone remains, together with a point-blank appeal: "In what way can you help?"
Mustard Seed Inc. of Taipei, Lillian Dickson's social welfare nerve center, spends US$500 a month on postage alone for its 100,000 letters. She calls this "people-to-people correspondence". She not only writes letters but magazine articles and has written a book These My People. In the United States, she has appeared on TV programs and spoken on the radio. People read, listen, and wonder how big can be the heart in her small body.
All sorts of help has come, not only because of what she has said but also because of the way she said it and the nature of her work. She is not "weaving a costume for the church to wear", as she has expressed it, but is attending to basic human needs.
If there is one person in a hundred who is unhappy, Lillian Dickson will spot him. Her heart goes out to the helpless and hapless. Once at a gathering in a small mountain church, Lil heard a baby cry next door. She went right over. The mother was out shopping and the baby was hungry. Lillian Dickson took care of that.
Power of Music
Wherever she goes she carries Bible and accordion. She has journeyed hundreds of miles on thin ribbons of road all over the island. Often her destination is a tiny village.
She learned to play the accordion at 46. Since then it has shared her life, going everywhere, into even the remotest corners of Taiwan's rugged mountains. The compelling quality of her playing has helped win friends and supporters.
Christmas gift brings smile to young patient (File photo)
When the Dicksons were to hold their first worship meeting among the aboriginal Paiwan tribe, she played the accordion to gather the people. She worked down the path, a Pied Piper for the crowd that followed her. Sweet music floated through the morning air. Once she played through a typhoon that was tunneling through the mountains. Another time a whole service was repeated because the congregation wanted to hear the hymns again.
Lillian Dickson has imparted the message of her God not only in words and in musical notes but in deeds. Dr. Kenneth Wilson, who has often accompanied her, said:
"There is something vastly assuring about this woman with weatherbeaten cheeks and her accordion. She literally compels faith, your faith in her, and the faith of all to whom she comes for financial assistance as well as those whom her widely diffused program assists."
Lillian LeVesconte of Prior Lake, Minnesota, had not planned to be a missionary. At Macalester College she was looking forward to a journalistic career until the slender, handsome James I. Dickson came into her life. Love changed her plans. She married him in 1927. Together they came to Taiwan, then under Japanese occupation. Jim was the missionary sent by the Presbyterian Church of Canada and subsequently founder and president of Taiwan Theological College.
Nearly Four Decades
Lillian Dickson cried out "What a beautiful place!" when she first saw Taiwan from her ship. Soon she was to regret that man should have defaced such beauty. The Dicksons soon found that poverty and prostitution were everywhere; children were undernourished; TB was rampant and infant mortality stunningly high, especially among the 200,000 aborigines.
Music attracts people to outdoor Taipei service (file photo)
The Dicksons have been in Taiwan 38 years except for leaves and the few years of the war. V-J Day brought them back to their people. It was then that Lillian Dickson began her own missionary life with her husband's blessing and encouragement. Soon she was visiting orphanages, prisons, and the destitute, taking doctors and nurses to the bedside of the sick, and paying for medicines out of her own pocket.
Her Establishment
With love and hard work Lillian Dickson has founded a social welfare establishment that includes:
- 17 children's homes
- 143 kindergartens at mountain churches
- a nutrition kitchen in Taipei to provide kindergartens with multipurpose foods
- 24 milk stations
- Mercy's Door (a free Taipei clinic for the poor).
Medical work for the mountain people has materialized into:
- 3 TB sanitariums for adults
- 1 TB sanitarium for children
- 2 homes for undernourished babies
- 5 free maternity wards
- 9 free clinics.
All units are operated and financed by Mustard Seed Inc. of Taipei.
There are more than 750 children in the rescue homes — orphans, boys from the streets, girls from families in distress, and children whose parents are in prison or leprosariums.
At the schools for aborigines, girls are trained to teach in the kindergartens and to be nurses or to do embroidery; boys learn farming and trades. The four schools have more than 1,000 pupils. Hundreds have been graduated. They are now useful citizens, proud to stand on their own feet.
The 24 milk stations supply vitamins and milk to about 6,000 children. Clinics and sanitariums treat TB, trachoma, black-foot, and skin diseases. From the five maternity wards come 200 babies a month.
The idea of Mustard Seed, whose far-flung mission of compassion reaches from teeming Taipei to every corner of the island, came from a friend of the Dicksons. Lillian Dickson had nothing against an organization that would establish her legal status and the relations with her own government and her patrons. But she wanted—and got—a board with flexibility.
She put it this way:
"When someone comes along with a problem a little out of the ordinary, we don't want to say, "Sorry, we can't handle that because it's not our kind of work.' People will be our kind of work."
Mustard Seed supplies are sent points of need (File photo)
The Mustard Seed name is from Matthew 17:20:
"If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you."
Mustard Seed was incorporated on January 4, 1954, as a nonprofit corporation under the laws of the State of California.
Mountain Clinics
Taiwan's 13,000-foot mountains hid the problems of the aborigines from some but not from the eyes of the Dicksons. They were pioneers in mission work in the mountains. The aborigines were branded as savages by the Japanese. Christian efforts to educate and convert them were frowned upon. The Japanese even built barbed-wire fences at the foot of the mountains to isolate the aborigines. But the mountain people broke through the fences and came to the Dicksons to ask for Bibles and other books.
Despite such difficulties, the Dicksons built churches all over the Central Mountain Range and established faith in countless hearts. A clandestine Christian movement swept through the mountains. Chi-aong, the first woman convert of the tribe, carried on the Dicksons' work during the war.
With the restoration of Taiwan to China, the movement came into the open. Chi-aong became the Dicksons' right hand. In answer to her husband's call to determine the living conditions of the people, Lillian Dickson visited 70 mountain churches in four months. She came back with her report, a plan, and an angel at her shoulder.
She went to the mountains with nurses, doctors, preachers, and Chi-aong. Sometimes she had to be carried on the shoulders of mountain men when the water was over her head, wade waist-deep in streams, creep across dangling rope bridges spanning raging torrents, and climb washed-out mountain trails.
When stories of her adventures reached the Church board in Canada, the members cried: "What a woman!" They marveled not only at her intrepid independence but also at her unorthodoxy. For Lillian Dickson had been doing things without the support, approval, and guidance of the Presbyterian Church. To queries about her "unofficial activities", she drew herself up to her full height of five feet, and said, a glitter in her azure blue eyes: "You will understand if you only know how God has pushed me!"
Sewing Classes
To the unorthodox and unconventional Lillian Dickson, mission work is not a profession but a passion. She cannot turn away from suffering and injustice makes her heart simmer. "Impossible" is no longer in her vocabulary.
Today she is called the "mother of the aborigines". This dauntless woman loves children as she loves music and poetry. Having found that aboriginal women did not know how to hold a needle, she taught them to sew, opened teachers' training schools, and in the biggest program of all, helped to take modern medicine to them.
On the first day she went into the mountain with a mobile clinic, 743 patients swarmed in, seeking treatment of trachoma, TB, and skin diseases. The doctor passed the simpler cases to her. Busy bandaging wounds, cuts, and boils, washing out sore eyes and tending scabies, the amateur nurse did not forget to mete out soothing words with the bitter medicines.
The mountains of Taiwan are beautiful. Waterfalls are everywhere, shimmering like silver tinsel falling from the sky. But this missionary of the mountains also found sickness and misery in lofty places. Pregnant women were undernourished. Children had worms and trachoma and scabies were often found. In the Paiwan tribe, TB was threatening to get out of control.
Help for Lepers
In 1956, Lillian Dickson established the first Christian mountain clinic at Puli; in 1957, the first TB sanatorium; in 1958, the first maternity ward. Ten years before she had bathed an aboriginal woman's new baby in a cooking pot.
Visits to Mustard Seed clinics now exceed 28,000 a month. Funds and personnel of World Vision have helped build and equip clinics and sanitariums.
The Dicksons have been in Taiwan for 38 years (File photo)
At a Christmas party, a leper smiled grotesquely at Lillian Dickson, and tears blurred her eyes. Years later, she visited the leprosarium in Taipei. Finding out that candies and her accordion were not enough, she returned with a doctor and medicines. After countless appeals, the results began to take shape: a library, a music room, new dormitories, a church. The Christian Herald occupational therapy room was opened. For those too disfigured or disabled to return to society, World Vision has established homes for men and women.
In her Sunday round of visits, Lillian Dickson never omits the lepers. Thanks to the miracle of modern medicine and the assistance of a responsible government, many can be cured and returned to society. Those who must stay live more comfortably.
Atop a hill not far from the leprosarium is Mustard Seed's first boys' home. The building was completed in 1954 upon Lillian Dickson's return from America.
Years ago a prison visit had opened her eyes to the reality that not all boys behind bars are bad. Some were rounded up by police only because they had no place to go. She expressed her feelings in one of her letters.
"On my way to Hualien ... we go down along the coast with high mountains on one side and the sea on the other. 'Those high mountains are marble mountains,' the pastor told me one day. 'Marble mountains which ... are perhaps of the same beautiful marble as the Taroko Gorge!' I feel my Rescue Home boys are 'marble mountains' too — they have never had a chance to be developed. If they had a chance they might show qualities of goodness, leadership, steadfastness, and even genius."
No End of Projects
Beside orphans, she takes care of the children of women prisoners and lepers. One day she found a sick boy in an orphanage, took him to the hospital, watched over him until recovery, paid the bill, and took the child to her mission compound. Later, by the sheer chance of a birthmark, Lillian Dickson was able to reunite the little boy with his mother, who had been cured of leprosy.
At 65, Lillian Dickson still works hard, her energy and enthusiasm undiminished. One day a practical-minded business friend asked her: "Where are your projects going to stop?"
"Why should they stop anywhere?" she demanded. "Do you think God can supply two dollars and not three dollars? Or that, when we see a hungry or sick child, He may say, 'You don't need to care about that child — you're doing enough already."
Lillian Dickson can't take on the whole world — but she believes God can.
Mme. Chiang Kai-shek greets "good people" (File photo)
At a "Good People and Good Deeds" citation meeting a few years ago, Lillian Dickson was honored by the government of the Republic of China. Madame Chiang Kai-shek, a devout Christian herself, thanked her personally. Said Hollington K. Tong, onetime Chinese ambassador to the United States:
"Christianity's leaping growth in Taiwan, tenfold since 1945, is largely due to this tireless woman who can't say 'no' to human needs."
She is still refusing to say no and looking always to the future. In a recent newsletter she suggested a boys' town for 300. In another letter, she listed requirements for improving the clinics. She dreams of a school for 500 boys and another for 500 girls. With Lillian Dickson doing the dreaming, the dreams will come true.
People are easily spoiled by fame. Not Lillian Dickson. She is still the same simple girl that followed her husband to Taiwan nearly four decades ago, interested in people, and curious about the world. She welcomes each day because it means a new start. God is at her side and there are people to help and work for.
Lillian Dickson does not ask more of life.
Hsueh chung sung tan
To send charcoal to a friend when it snows.
—Chinese saying