Ma's House at Use.
CHAPTER VIII
Ma learns to ride a bicycle and goes pioneering; the Government makes her a Judge again and she rules the people; stories of the Court, and of her last visit to Scotland with a black boy as maid-of-all-work; and something about a beautiful dream which she dreamed when she returned, and a cow and a yellow cat.
Ma settled at Itu in a little mud hut, with a table and chair and a few pots and pans. The girls worked and slept anywhere; the babies, new and old, crawled all over the place like caterpillars, and at night lay on bits of newspaper on the floor. Ma helped in the building of the Mission House and Church, and when they were finished sent for some one to fix up doors and windows. Mr. Chapman, from the Institution, arrived, and was treated as the guest of the people, so that when he made his bed in the middle of the church the young men of the village came, as was their custom, and slept on the floor round him as a guard of honour, and got water and food for him in the morning.
Ma was as busy as a bee. She carried on a day-school, preached to four hundred people, taught a Bible Class and a Sunday School, received visitors from dawn till dusk, and explored the forest and made friends with the shy natives. Every now and then she canoed up the Creek as far as Arochuku, and stayed in the villages along the banks. Mud-and-thatch churches began to spring up. Onoyom, however, said he was not going to be satisfied with anything less than the very best House of God, and taking three hundred pounds that he had saved up, he spent it all on a fine building. When the time came to make the pulpit and seats, he said: "We want wood, cut down the juju tree." Now the juju tree is where the god of a village is supposed to live, and his men were horror-struck.
"The juju will be angry; he will not let us, he will kill us."
"Ma's God is stronger than our juju," was his reply. "Cut it down."
They went out and began the work, but the trunk was thick, and after a time they stopped.
"See, we cannot cut it."
The heathen crowd, standing in a ring watching them, were overjoyed. "Ah, ha!" they cried, "our juju is stronger than Ma's God."