20/20: Ethiopian Daughter Reunites with Family

March 3 -- Lydia Dawson was just 5 months old on the day her life was changed forever.

The baby lay cradled in her 13-year-old mother's arms as she prepared the family meal in their tiny village in western Ethiopia. Without warning, the teenage mother suffered a seizure and accidentally dropped Lydia into the open fire.

Precious seconds passed before the baby's tortured screams brought her father running to pull her from the flames.

Lydia's family lived in a place so remote and so primitive that the nearest medical care was 100 miles away. By the time the terrified family reached the hospital — five days later — Lydia's legs were so badly infected they had to be amputated, one above and one just below the knee.

Lydia's parents — too poor and too scared to remain far from home for very long — made the wrenching choice to leave Lydia at the hospital to be raised by American missionaries.

She was only a baby and already her life was marked by tragic loss.

But Lydia's childhood tragedies were followed by a series of miraculous events that carried her from the abject poverty of rural Africa to a comfortable in the United States. She is now a social worker in Seattle, married and raising a family of her own.

At 38, she recently decided to return to Ethiopia to find the mother she lost so long ago.

A Chance Encounter

After the accident that took her legs, Lydia spent the next four years in the hospital. There was no place else for her to go.

The staff — mostly made up of American missionaries — cared for her and taught her English. Mary Nell Harper, one of the nurses, remembers Lydia as a beautiful child who made everyone laugh.

"She was loved," says Harper. "And when somebody's loved, they really manage."

Lydia did indeed manage, learning to crawl instead of walk, barely noticing how different she was from everyone else around her.

A photographer, passing through, snapped a picture of the little girl with no legs for an article about Africa that later appeared in the Saturday Evening Post.