Esther John

Esther John was a Pakistani Christian nurse who is remembered as a Christian martyr of the twentieth century. She was born Qamar Zia on 14 October 1929 in British India into a Muslim family. She attended a Christian school from the age of seventeen, and her reading of the Book of Isaiah led her to become a Presbyterian Christian. After partition her family moved to Pakistan, and some years later she left home, fearing that she would be forced into marriage, took work at an orphanage in Karachi and adopted the name Esther John. From June 1955 she lived and worked in a mission hospital at Sahiwal, then trained as a teacher at the United Bible Training Centre in Gujranwala and spent the rest of her life teaching the faith in the villages around Chichawatni. She was murdered in her bed there on 2 February 1960, and in 1998 a statue of her was unveiled above the great west door of Westminster Abbey alongside nine other martyrs of the century.