Ten years in Burma

by Julius Smith

Methodist Church, Rangoon

We had a modest wooden church and also a parsonage, a fair-sized building for the school, and another of equal size for the Orphanage. Besides these buildings, we had a couple of residence bungalows, intended for rental for the support of the Orphanage, but for which we were badly in debt. Considering the small size of the mission, our debts were large and troublesome. They were incurred out of the emergencies of our work, and were not the result of bad management in any way. These debts were to be met at once, and added much to my concern for the mission.

Another embarrassing feature of the finances of the mission was found in this, that we had very small missionary appropriations, and the time had been not long before when our workers in Burma had no money from home. The beginning of the mission had been made entirely without funds from America.

This was the more apparent when we look at the distribution of the missionaries. I was to take the pastorate of the English Church, and receive my salary from it; Miss Files, the principal of the Girls’ High School, had never had any salary, except what the school could pay her; Miss Scott, principal of the Orphanage, had half salary; Miss Perkins, the new missionary, alone had a salary from the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society. Mr. Warner had less than full salary, though appointed to native work. We had, also, a number of teachers all paid locally, and supplies in the mission-work, none of whom received a salary from America. Here was an outline of a situation in what was called a “self-supporting” mission-field. How to pay debts, keep all this work going, and make advance in mission operations with our limited money, was my greatest responsibility. There had never been a dollar given to the mission from America for property. The problem was easy of statement, but difficult of solution. To plunge right into this work, my first day in the country, and immediately become the responsible head of the district, was beginning mission-work with vigor and without delay. I have learned since to believe it a serious misfortune that any missionary should be so overwhelmed with work and responsibility on entering a foreign mission-field. All this, too, when we had yet to adjust ourselves to life in the tropics.

We were about to prove what it meant to be suddenly dropped down into the heart of an Oriental city, and there adjust ourselves to the most trying conditions we had ever known. The parsonage belonging to the English Church, which we occupied, shared the lot with the church building. At the time the church and parsonage was to be built, it was the policy of the Government to give a grant of land to any religious society for a church or parsonage. The city is blocked out in rectangular shape, but unwisely made very narrow and long. The blocks are eight hundred feet long by one hundred and fifteen feet wide. Our lot included one end of a block, and was one hundred feet deep. On this lot stood the church and parsonage, facing the main street. When the location was chosen, it was a fairly satisfactory site on which to have a residence, and in a Western country, with Western conditions, it might have contained a fairly comfortable residence; but in Rangoon the natives soon began to crowd into poorly constructed buildings all around the parsonage, and the filth, that so rapidly accumulates in an Oriental city, piled up everywhere. The only sewerage was in open ditches that ran on three sides of our residence. The stench of these sewers was ever present in our nostrils, and especially offensive in the rainless season. But the worst condition was the incessant noise made by the natives. This neighborhood was occupied almost entirely by Madassis, who have harsh, strident voices, and speak with a succession of guttural sounds. They are always shouting, and quietness is almost unknown to them. They quarrel incessantly. At the time we lived in this locality there were six hundred of these noisy people living within a hundred yards of the parsonage. They kept no hours for rest. All day and all night the noise went on. Sometimes, of course, they slept, and the native can sleep in bedlam and not even dream. But there are hundreds astir at all hours of the day and night. Then there were thousands of passers-by who at all hours added their voices to the din. Besides, a heavy traffic was carried on on two sides of us. The streets were metaled, and every wheel and hoof added to the uproar.

The parsonage was of the uncouth architectural plan characteristic of Burma, roomy and arranged well enough for comfort in that country, had the surroundings been endurable. But being placed upon posts, some ten feet from the ground to the first floor, and the floor and walls being made of single thicknesses of teak planks, these multitudinous sounds of the neighborhood were gathered up and multiplied as a violin gathers the sounds of the strings, and this discordant din was poured into our ears. Added to all this noise was the intense heat, which even in the coolest part of the year is very great, and you have conditions of life that tax you to the utmost. My wife and I have pretty steady nerves; but in the thirteen months we tried to live in the parsonage we did not have more than twenty nights of unbroken sleep. Just after we entered this residence, we received our first mail from home, and in the papers to hand we read the speech of the senior missionary secretary at the Missionary Committee meeting in Boston, held at the time we were sailing from New York, in which he dwelt at length, “on the luxury of missionary life in India.” I promptly sent him an invitation to spend the last week preceding the next Missionary Committee meeting in our guest-chamber, overlooking and overhearing all that happens among this noisy throng of Tamils. I felt that I had learned more of the actual conditions of life in an Oriental city in one week, than this good man had learned in all the years of his missionary official life. He did not accept the invitation.

Natives of Burma

When one is overworked with unusual duties that tax nerves to the utmost, and then lives in perpetual noise and heat day and night, he has the ideal conditions for a short missionary career. We were to prove all that this meant within one year from landing in the country.

Surprises and disappointments in the working force of a mission, at least in its earlier and less well organized state, occur with great frequency. Within less than three months, my missionary colleague, Mr. Warner, and his wife left us, and took work in another mission. He had been with our mission less than two years, having been sent out from America. It may be said here that such changes, so early in a missionary’s career, do not generally argue well for the stability of purpose or settled convictions of the missionary, and do not usually help the mission to which a change is made. But in our case it added to our difficulties, as the Burmese work, to begin which Mr. Warner was appointed, did not get started for some years afterward. There was no other man to take up his work, and there could be no one supplied for some time. This situation, coming so soon after I took up the work with the high hopes of a new beginner, added to the complications.