MISSIONARY SELF-SUPPORT AT MALANGE.
“Malange Station received, at the beginning, its proportion of cloth, provisions, tools and a little money to tide a small band of workers—Sam Mead, Ardella his wife, and Bertha Mead, of 13, his
niece, and two young men—through the first year, which proved to be the second of a ‘three years’ drought and famine.’
“So a partial supply was sent for the ensuing year to prevent suffering from want. Meantime, the ‘tent-making’ by the missionaries, to ‘make ends meet,’ would have sufficed in a pinch, but the subsidy was salutary and safe, for they were not of the sort to be surfeited and suffocated even by an excess of supplies if they had had them, taking real pleasure in ‘scratching’ for themselves. Two years were required for apprenticeship, experimenting in many things, with everything to learn essential to self-support.
“About the beginning of the third year, after various changes by the coming and going of new workers, the coming of Willie H. Mead, with his family from Nhanguepepo, to join his cousin, Sam—about the beginning of the third year, marked the period when self-support really began to abound.
“Minnie Mead, Willie’s wife, turned in $40 by her sewing machine. Hèli Chatelain an equal sum by teaching languages to some traders. Robert Shields, from his private purse, put in $22. Willie has put in $80 per year from the rents of some property he has in Vermont, his old home, and, within a few months after arrival, put in $200 from pit-sawing and selling lumber. Most of these sums, with about $100 worth of goods sent as a present from Ireland to Brother Shields, were used to stock a little store for a small commercial business, as one branch of industry which was felt to be specially needful.
“Most of the business of the labor market of Angola is transacted through copper coin currency. It is so difficult to procure and keep a supply of it on hand that to purchase it, even with gold, ten per cent. premium has to be paid. The patrons of a variety shop bring in for the purchase of things they require a good supply of the copper coin.
“Robert Shields, having served a regular apprenticeship to the grocery business in Ireland, with an additional experience in it of a year and a half, was appointed to take charge of this industry, and work it in connection with his studies, and special evangelizing among the villagers adjacent to Malange.
“The farm selected at the beginning was found to be too near the
town, and the whole work of ‘a season’ on it having been destroyed in a night, there was no ground of hope for anything better by a repetition of the experiment of fencing and farming there. So Sam Mead, in a state of semi-desperation, mounted one of his bulls and managed to struggle through grass as high as his head to explore the lake shore, along which he found a neglected farm, on which were growing many valuable fruit trees; he also discovered that the farm, save its lake-side boundary, was enclosed by a strong growing hedge, and contained a body of about 300 acres of black clay and loam of the most productive quality. He immediately sought for the owner—the heir to the man deceased, who had spent so much time, toil and money on it, and he bought and paid for it with money belonging to Ardella, his wife. He then went to work with a will, under a new inspiration of hope, assisted for a time by Brothers Rudolph and Gordon, and produced abundantly a variety of tropical and temperate zone products for food.