Rescued is a word Devaki and Lila Katuwal have never heard. But at just five years old and seventeen months respectively, abandonment is a concept these sisters understand.

So is the joy of being found and taken in.

“We were praying for God to bring us more orphaned children,” says Udaya Bhatta, director of ServLife’s children’s home in Kathmandu. “Not long after, we learned of these little girls who had been abandoned at the Bishnu Devi Temple.”

As Bhatta investigated, he learned Devaki and Lila were from central Nepal. Their father had recently died of cancer and their mother had remarried, taking her eldest daughter with her. But she left behind her younger girls at a nearby Hindu temple.

Like countless girls in Nepal, the life that awaited Devaki and Lila remained anything but promising. With no parents, no money, the obvious course for them was one of two options: slavery or prostitution. Maybe both.

That changed when God answered Bhatta’s prayers and the girls were brought to live at ServLife children’s home.

“They’re happy here – safe and wanted,” Bhatta smiles at the thought of the two pixie girls with wide black eyes and caramel skin. “What we ask now is for God’s blessing as we serve them.”