We found that enteric fever was endemic in the village; but I was able to improve things a little by having channels made from the stagnant pools and cattle-pens to the fosse, from which the water drained away to a lake south-east of the village, and thus the rains of the wet season helped to cleanse the village and somewhat sweeten the atmosphere. It cost some trouble to get those channels cut, for the stagnant water with its coat of green slime on it had stood in pool and pen from time immemorial, and why make any change? One Sabbath afternoon, while we were all in church, a child toddled out of a hut and fell into one of the stagnant pools and was drowned. The mother, who was in the hut, heard nothing. She wondered why the little fellow had not found his way back into the hut again. On looking out to see where he was, she saw the body in the pool. An alarm was raised, we were called out of church, and did our best to restore animation, but we had been called too late.
A space of some six feet at the north end of our large hut was partitioned off by a low mud wall, and this we made our bedroom. We had besides two small huts; half of one was my study and the other half served as a storeroom, while the remaining hut was used as a kitchen. Everything was of the most primitive, makeshift, and inconvenient nature; but nothing else could be obtained until I could get a house built. When circumstances will not bow to mind, the only alternative is for mind to bow to circumstances, and make the best of it. This we did, and, all things considered, were fairly comfortable.
In 1873 the late Rev. Dr. Mullens, the then Foreign Secretary of the London Missionary Society, and the late Rev. John Pillans were sent by the Board of Directors to visit the Madagascar Mission. During the fortnight they spent with us in Vònizòngo, I took them down to see the village of Fìhàonana and our former habitation there. After looking into the hut, Dr. Mullens said: ‘Well, you did write us some strongly worded letters about your need for a proper house; but I admit you had cause. We had no idea in London that you were living in a hovel like that, and amid such surroundings.’ And yet we were no worse off than hundreds of missionaries who go to found new mission stations in other heathen lands. Those who spend all their missionary life amid the comforts and conveniences, such as they are, of city or sanatorium stations, know little of what life at lonely country stations in unhealthy districts means, and consequently do not always sympathize as they ought with others less fortunately placed.
A missionary’s life at a lonely station, far from friends, fellow labourers, and human sympathy, is often very trying, but it is also one in which many useful lessons are taught more directly than they could be anywhere else, or in any other walk of life.
It was while living in the village of Fìhàonana that my wife had her first severe attack of malarial fever, while our child had croup badly, followed by a severe attack of bronchitis, brought on by the bitterly cold night winds, from which our hut afforded us insufficient protection. In this connexion I am reminded of a splendid feat of one of our Malagasy men, who had been a servant of ours, but had fallen into disgrace and been discharged. When he heard that I wanted a man to go to the capital for medicine for my child, he volunteered to go, and ran to the capital and back, a distance of eighty miles, in fourteen hours! We took him back into our service, my wife trained him to be a good cook and a first-class baker, and he only left our service in 1898 to take up a temperance restaurant at Fìhàonana.
On July 12, 1871, we left Antanànarìvo for Vònizòngo, and arrived that evening at Fìhàonana, where we settled down to work. We lived and laboured there until driven away in July, 1879, after many months of severe suffering from fever. The first and last years of our first term of service were trying indeed. In our first year my own protracted sickness, followed by my wife’s dangerous illness, made it a specially trying time for us. Throughout our last year we had not a single month in which one or other of us was not prostrated by fever. We had two very bad fever seasons in succession in Vònizòngo, and lost some five thousand of our people. The interval between our first and last years was simply glorious. Full of our work, we flung ourselves heart and soul into it. We loved our work and our people, and were loved by them in return. As their first missionaries we were their first Rai-àman-drèny, ‘father and mother.’ They had several teachers after us, but none that they ever recognized in the same way as their Rai-àman-drèny.
Then our children were about us, and we were as happy and contented as could be. But after the first term of service it is always a very different story, for it is then but an impoverished, lopsided life that the missionary and his wife must live. He is a very fortunate man who is able to spend two years out of the next twenty with his family. Therein lies the sacrifice and suffering of missionary family life; and the children feel it most, for they miss their parents greatly, just at the very time when their help and advice would be of highest service. Good, kind, warm-hearted friends do much for the missionaries’ children, and make such compensation for their parents’ absence as is possible. Ninety per cent. of all missionary families have to suffer in this way (otherwise I should feel ashamed to mention the matter); and yet I question if ten per cent. of the members of the home churches, whose messengers, in a very real sense, the missionaries are, ever give a single thought to this side of missionary life.
Our first Sabbath at Fìhàonana was one long to be remembered, for on that day I spoke for the first time to my own people. The small chapel was quite full, although there were few present except the regular congregation. They were all clean, tidy, and attentive, and the only thing I had to find fault with was that so many of them chewed tobacco, or rather sucked snuff, which they placed in their lower lip, holding it between the lip and the gum, and expectorated into spittoons, which were for the most part open tins or earthenware basins, or empty ‘Day and Martin’s’ blacking bottles! I had only once to ask them to desist from such a filthy and objectionable practice in the house of God, though I had the greatest difficulty in putting a stop to the same thing twelve years afterwards in the city congregation of Ambàtonakànga.
We began a day-school at once, and my wife started a sewing-class. We had also a large Sabbath school class for young and old, for Bible reading on the Sabbath afternoons. My first schoolmaster was Rakòtovào, a fine, open-faced, manly fellow, who did splendid work in that school for some years, and then rendered still better service as an evangelist for many more. He and his two sons were carried off by some of his personal enemies, who accompanied the heathen mob which attacked Fìhàonana during the rising in 1897, and all three were shot—murdered in cold blood.
Our station school began with thirty, but went on increasing until we had two hundred and sixty. I did my utmost to get a school started in connexion with every village congregation, or preaching station, for from the first we recognized that in the children lay the hope of the future. My success, however, was by no means what I had expected; very few, except church members, would send their children to school, and as most of these were old, and their children quite grown up, we had but poor schools indeed for some years.