A Yankee doctor in paradise

by S. M. Lambert

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Facts, figures, politics—those were all long rows to hoe. Now back to my School—I still call it mine, although it has passed into other hands. When you watch young people grow in body and intelligence you seem to grow with them. Despite my work in other fields, I was very close to them all for ten years, marking their improvement and their deficiencies. We had to make allowances for the first batch that came to us when we opened for business; they had been sent rather helter-skelter, but did surprisingly well under the circumstances. Because there were far more applicants than we could handle, we stiffened the entrance examinations all along the line. No more sentimentality in the choosing, and no political favoritism. We opened with forty boys, but with increased accommodations we soon had fifty. When we considered taking care of sixty there was a nervous murmur in Suva: “Pretty soon we’ll be overrun with N.M.P.’s and not need the School any more.” That was ridiculous, for the increase in graduates was far behind Fiji’s increase in population. Not to mention the needs of other island groups, clamoring for more places. I was always afraid that the School would be voted out of existence, for some unreasonable reason like the one I have mentioned.

Australia never sent any students from Papua or New Guinea; they still maintained that these natives were too “backward.” I had worked in the jungle with Papuan and New Guinea boys, and I knew that they were no more backward than the inhabitants of the Solomon Islands and New Hebrides, who were represented with us from the first. I still feel that Australia, with her tremendous problem, will never make any progress with native health until she establishes some institution similar to the one in Suva—which is out of the question now, because they haven’t the proper set-up. Sydney has an admirable school of tropical medicine and hygiene—for whites. It lacks both the clinical material and the stuff to cope with natives, and native conditions. Once in a great while this school will take in a black boy, merely to exhibit him as a curiosity.

Perhaps I am a co-educationalist; I have never settled that point with myself. But I feel very sure that no race advances very far unless its women advance with it. On the strength of that theory I made every effort to improve the condition of native student nurses. When the European nurses of the War Memorial moved to larger quarters I was glad to see the native girls housed in the abandoned building, a great improvement on what they had had.

Steps had been taken toward their advanced education. Before admission the young girls were given a course in the Methodist mission school, largely to teach them the rudiments of English. A Rockefeller Foundation fellowship sent a European nurse to the States to educate her in the modern theory and practice of training nurses. She returned in 1940 to open a school for native nurses, which would synchronize theoretical instruction with practical work in the hospital. Thus they would attain as high a rating in their profession as the N.M.P.’s in theirs. In outlying Fijian districts it was the policy to send out two native nurses with each N.M.P., to take care of two very important items: infant welfare and obstetrical cases.

I was pleased by the many marriages of these young women and our practitioners; they were usually happy. I fondly believed that two equal minds, mated in a common interest, would have all the advantages from the start. I was seldom disappointed. In the field the young wife was her husband’s busy partner. If she retired to her village to settle down and have babies, she brought modern methods into her neighborhood.

For many of the boys the English language was a stumbling block, especially at first. The Polynesian students both spoke and wrote it well; New Zealand had taken care of that. But the Melanesians were another matter; during the first years of the School they came to us with nothing better than a smattering of English. We corrected that in time by requiring a preliminary course in English for all candidates. Even then they were handicapped, and it was interesting to see the Melanesian patience with which they slowly struggled through the mystery of our grammar, until they could rival their Polynesian classmates.

As underclassmen the boys from the Cooks and Samoa, to whom English was a second language, worked on the inferiority complex of Fijians and Solomon Islanders. Then as years went on, we watched the Melanesian lads begin to pull up. No, sir, they weren’t going to let a lot of blithering Polynesians beat them at any game. They pored over books, they wrote reams, they spoke English among themselves and corrected one another’s compositions. Sir Maynard Hedstrom was offering a senior year gold medal for excellence in Public Health studies. The Polynesians were bright enough to win it more often than not, but as upperclassmen they had to put up a lively fight to outdo the Melanesians. The earnest and industrious black fellows clawed their way to the top, every hour of that four-year course.

Here’s a classroom scene, picturing the competitive spirit:—

[Numa, a Cook Islander, is pointing at a skeleton and asking questions. He addresses Daniele, from the New Hebrides. Daniele is blue black, but not negroid. His eyes are circled with white and his white teeth glisten as he tries to concentrate on something he knows perfectly well, but can’t express in English. Or if he can express it, it will come hard. He has to mine it out. Daniele is the one I liked to put on the front seat and rag, knowing that he would agonize over the answer, but would finally get it right.