BABY CALLING

Taranaki Daily News, 13 October 1934, Page 21 (Supplement)

BABY CALLING

HOW HE REACHED THE ORPHANAGE. Many a baby has been left on the doorstep of an orphanage, but few have arrived by such a hazardous route as one who is now at Faraman School. Persia. The Karasu River of Persia is usually shallow enough from its source in the mountains of Kurdistan to where it is crossed by the trade route from Kermanshalr to Hamadan border. The school is 14 miles from this bridge, but the river can nearly always be forded at Faraman, and in the summer there is so little water that even the small children can wade across. But in the spring the river is swollen with floods, and at the end of April Chis year the only way of crossing it anywhere near the school was by swimming. Early one morning a man appeared on the far bank and called across to know if he might bring an orphan boy to the orphanage. Permission was given and he went off. to arrive at the door later soaked and bedraggled, with a three-months-old baby.. He and another man had been so anxious to get the little boy to the orphanage that they had put him on a sheepskin and had swum the river, carefully pushing the baby on it frail raft before them.