Zaputuo’s unusual story began in 1973. She was then a nurse in the Kohima Government Hospital, a widow whose husband, a jawan in the Indian Army, had died in 1965. Only the faces of the patients altered and her life was as tranquil as it was unchanging.

One day a woman died in the hospital after giving birth to a chubby boy. The grief stricken father left the baby behind, saying he could not look after him. As the child lay unwanted in the ward, Zaputuo found herself thinking and worrying. In a decision that was to change her life, she brought the child home and named him Diezelie Angami. Bringing up Diezelie was fun, especially for Zaputuo’s only daughter Neibanuo, then just 10.

Three months after adopting Diezelie, Zaputuo heard the cries of a new-born while passing by a thickly wooded area in Kohima. Venturing inside, she found an abandoned baby boy in a bamboo basket. Naturally the child was brought home. In a year’s time, Zaputuo had collected five abandoned children.

The number of little ones kept ballooning and by 1982, Zaputuo had 72 children packed into three large rooms of her house. When there wasn’t any more place a few years later, she build the Kohima Orphan and Destitute Home – made of bamboo and tin, and which also includes a primary school – on a parcel of government land.

(Courtesy India Today, August 15, 1988)

From a plot near Raj Bhavan in 1973, the KODH was shifted to PR Hill and then to Jotsoma Village near Kohima. However, due to various problems the home had to be shifted again and finally on 31st March, 1994, the KODH moved to a plot on the Kohima-Dimapur National Highway No. 39, a few kilometers from Kohima Town, where it now resides.