Four years in Upper Burma

by W. R. Winston

“If she will, she will, you may depend on it;

But if she won’t, she won’t, and there’s an end of it.”

The family depends more on the mother than on any one else for its religious tone.

Besides that, we require, in Burma, female teachers for the girls’ schools that we need to establish everywhere, in the towns and villages of the country, and we need Biblewomen to go from house to house teaching the Word of God. The preachers and teachers whom we are seeking to train will need Christian wives. Where are all these Christian girls? They are not in existence. They have to be created. There is nothing for it but to open these Girls’ Institutions, and commence with such material as comes to hand. The method found, in all the missions in the East, to be best adapted to secure the conversion and training of native girls and young women, is a boarding school in connection with each principal station where English missionaries reside, in close proximity to the mission house, and under the care of the missionary’s wife or some other English lady, where regular secular and religious instruction may be given, without the continual drawback of irregular attendance, which is found in day schools for girls. We make no attempt to denationalise them, or to teach them expensive English habits. They live in the same frugal way as they did at home, and have their food cooked and served up exactly in the same style, squatting like tailors on the floor, and eating their rice with their fingers, without the intervention of knife and fork, just as they have always done. They follow their own fashion in dress, which has this great advantage over European fashions, that it never changes a hair’s breadth; and they spread a mat on the floor to sleep at night. Daily there is Christian instruction, and family prayers, and they are taken to Divine service on Sundays.

Under these conditions it is never long before a girl comes asking for baptism. This result, provided these means are adopted, is just as sure as the hopes of a woman’s conversion without them are precarious, in a heathen land. Up to the present our Girls’ Institution is only in its infancy, and we are only able to furnish one example to show what I mean; but as this is the only case where the circumstances have rendered it possible to test these methods in Burma, and it is a success, I may briefly give the facts. We could find hundreds of examples in Ceylon.

Some two and a half years ago Colonel Cooke, then the Deputy Commissioner of Mandalay, informed me one day that he had received, and forwarded to the provincial government, a petition from the relatives of a certain Burmese princess in Mandalay, asking for some charitable allowance for her support. Though quite destitute, she was the niece of King Theebaw, her father being one of the half-brothers of the king, and he was one of those unfortunate princes put to death in the two dreadful massacres that disgraced the reign of the last of the Burmese kings. The Deputy Commissioner recommended the case to the favourable notice of Government, on condition that the girl, then about fifteen years of age, should be placed in the Mission boarding school, under the eye of the missionary’s wife. This is the usual condition in such cases; and it was in order to secure the proper charge of the girl, and a suitable education for her, and to ensure that the twenty rupees monthly, allowed by Government, are really spent on her, and not on somebody else.

She came, and has remained in the school ever since, going on with her education, and receiving a Christian training, though no pressure whatever has at any time been used to induce her to become a Christian, nothing beyond what we give to all the children, and all the members of the public congregation. There is indeed no necessity for any urging with young people, when the Gospel has a fair chance. They themselves desire it. At a Sabbath morning service, early in the present year, when the invitation was given by the preacher to those who had been prepared for Christian baptism, to come forward for that rite, she was the first to leave her seat, and come quietly forward, and kneel down with the rest, quite unexpectedly to the preacher, who was not aware that such was her intention. Eleven new converts were received in all that Sunday and the previous one.

The work of the Mission during those earliest years had to be done amidst many drawbacks, but these I need not do more than mention, as I have already said that I do not believe in calling attention to the personal difficulties of the missionary, but rather to his work.

In addition to the feeling of unrest, and the danger of tumult throughout the country, and especially in Mandalay, the focus of all political influences, there was always the climate, with its enervating heat, to contend with. For two months of the year more especially, the dazzling glare and fierce heat of the sun, the parching drought, and the hot winds, are very exhausting, and render it very desirable for Europeans to take a holiday, and get away to the hills, a little time, for change of climate; but no such thing was possible in Upper Burma. There are, it is true, mountains up to five and six thousand feet elevation, where the climate is delightfully cool, but they are out of reach, for want of railways and roads, and no one knows yet where the proper health resorts of the future will be. It requires years of experience to know which of the mountain districts are free from the deadly fever malaria of the jungle, and which are not; consequently there was no chance of a change of climate.