GOD’S NEEDLE
How Lily Gaynor brought hope and healing to
the land of the witchdoctors
By Lily Gaynor & John Butterworth
Monarch. 208 pages. £8.99
ISBN 978 0 857 214 560
This book will provide a fascinating and inspiring read to any believer.
Born in 1928, Lily was an ordinary girl from an ordinary Liverpool family. She trained as a nurse, then a midwife, then at the WEC bible college in Glasgow. Arriving in Guinea Bissau, aged 29, she was told: ‘You are to learn the Papel language, turn it into a written language and then translate the New Testament into Papel’. This was to be done alongside the medical work in the clinic that Lily was to found. Home was a mud house with a camp bed, tea chest and a toilet inhabited by cockroaches. She was to work in a tribe that had 80% infant mortality, was in danger from cholera, malaria and rabies, and lived under the oppression of the local witchdoctors. However, the locals highly valued the penicillin that Lily brought and gradually began to accept other medical methods and interventions. Knitting groups from Merseyside supplied vests that were given to those who accepted vaccinations for their babies. God also gave many medical miracles. All of this eventually built up a trust that brought openings for the gospel.
