By Faith and By Love. Beverly E. Williams
11:00 p.m., all the bugs and insects known and unknown to Burma decided to visit. With much sheet-flapping and arm-waving I finally shooed a few of them away.
In September Martin received a letter from his sister that their grandmother Jeanette, Jasper’s widow, had died. “If only I could convey something of the beauty and peacefulness that was about her when she was laid to rest,” Liz continued, “you would have been consoled as we were.” Their Grannie was buried in Seneca, South Carolina, the village where Martin was born. “The minister spoke of her, telling about how her young husband Jasper had been saved by a black man and how that had influenced all of us, especially your work in Burma.”
October 21, 1934, was Mabel and Martin’s first wedding anniversary. An English government official and his wife treated the young couple to a trip down the Irrawaddy River. To his family Martin explained such a luxury: “Of course, we would be remembering and celebrating if we were out in a jungle hut, but to get entirely away from work and have three days on a river boat just at this time is a real treat.”
Mabel added:
After months of intense heat we enjoyed the wind that was so strong it blew the toast off our plates. At one village we saw an officer weighing 360 rupee’s [money] of black, gummy opium that people had tried to smuggle across the China border. It weighed eighteen pounds! In lower Burma the street price would be more than three times what it is upcountry.
At another village we wondered why two long poles were stuck into the bamboo fences around each house. We learned that, by law, each house must have one pole with a square of tin or matting on it for beating out fire on thatched roofs, and one pole must have a hook on it for pulling burning thatch off a roof.
After a long walk up the river we had a leisurely ride back to our boat on a small Chinese sampan. The moon seemed so near to us. Mother, I shouldn’t admit it but when the students sing “Carolina Moon” in English, I do long for all of you. Letters from home make Friday a big day.
Martin’s first anniversary gift to his wife included a love note that ended: “You said that you would go to the end of the earth with me. Well, you did.”
After almost a year of study, Mabel and Martin had learned the Kachin language well enough to speak it in public. Mabel met with school students and Well-Baby Clinic mothers while Martin advised village school teachers and pastors. Sometimes he traveled by car, sometimes on a pony, and other times on foot.
Once a village chief sent an invitation of reed branches crossed, a sign that he wished their paths would cross. Martin was eager to accept:
With ponies and pack mules we started to the chief’s village, across the China border. We spent one night in a storehouse filled with rice. Before dawn we felt the floor shaking beneath us. An earthquake? No, just the horses tied to the house posts, waking up in a playful mood. At a mid-morning rest stop we were served tea by a Chinese woman with pitifully small bound feet. Such a sight is common on Bhamo roads, for, as one author put it, we are living at China’s back door. The chief and his elders gave us a royal welcome. In every country (the United States included) there is ignorance, poverty, selfishness, and war. But slowly God’s love is bringing life and healing.
In letters home Martin tried to alternate the “heavy” news about poverty and the need of the Kachins with descriptions of the countryside:
Villagers are getting the dread disease of dysentery during the rainy season because so many of the wells are contaminated . . . We love to watch the people planting rice. It looks a bit like wheat, but greener. There is no greener green in the world.
The packets of letters that Mabel’s mother kept in her dresser drawer included many of the envelopes from afar. Early in 1935 the stamps were Indian, with a picture of England’s King George the Fifth. Printed on the bottom were the words noting that they were for use in Burma: “British India.”
To the families, Mabel tried to send descriptions of what it was like to celebrate Christmas far from home in a warm and tropical climate. After describing the special programs at school and church, she allowed herself a little reflection of Birmingham and of holidays the family was celebrating without her:
I am wondering how each of you spent Christmas Day. I tried not to think of you. But I want to be just where we are, doing the work we are trying to do. Martin made me a teakwood tray in the school carpenter shop, a complete surprise. I gave him a wristwatch and a sweater he has already worn after playing tennis. On Christmas Eve we read the Christmas story and listened to “Silent Night” on our Victrola [record player].
After the holidays Martin returned to supervising the teachers and headmasters in village elementary schools:
Just got back from a trip on foot so I still have a lot of kinks in my joints. It is almost mail time but I must tell you about my elephant. No, he really isn’t mine, because I forgot to take a cage to put him in that morning. Two of the Kachin young men with me were some distance ahead. As I came around the curve there they stood as if glued to the path. It did not take me long to figure out that something over in the jungle needed to be looked at. And there he was, a great big fellow; at least I think he was big, because I didn’t wait to measure him. One of the young men dropped his hat. I must have jumped around, or over him, as he bent down to pick it up. Ordinarily elephants in the jungle are not dangerous, and will run away from people, but when you see one close up you want to move out of their way.
Back in town, every week-day evening, Martin would meet with teachers from the nearby villages who would come to confer about their schools. And while he and Mabel had been late night stay-ups, they learned to go to bed early and awaken at 5:00 a.m. to help supervise the high school boarding students who worked for their tuition:
About a dozen boys work in the carpenter shop. Yesterday morning, while it was cool, a group of us planted grapefruit and orange trees. I’m trying to get a hive of bees for the orchard.
In 1935, as soon as her first weeks of pregnancy had safely passed, Mabel wrote to the families that she and Martin were expecting their first child in early October. She told how she would be driven to the hospital in Namkham (NAAM-KAAM), seventy miles from Bhamo, in plenty of time to await the birth. A second letter followed:
Now don’t think that anything has actually gone wrong. It’s just that I do not feel equal to the long trip because the rains have caused many mud slides. The doctor at the local clinic said that I was progressing normally but thought it unwise to make that trip. Please don’t worry.
By telegram Mabel’s parents learned that their first grandchild, a boy, was born on October 3, 1935, and that mother and baby were fine. It was years before they knew that the facilities at the Bhamo clinic had not been adequate for their daughter’s long and complicated labor.
For Christmas that year Mabel made a “tree” of branches from a bush and decorated it with small toys and a tiny stocking for their baby. They invited friends, also far from home, for a festive dinner:
We ate by candlelight and had English plum pudding for dessert. Afterwards we sat around the charcoal brazier (imagining it a fireplace) and sang carols in our native Swedish, Finnish, English and American accents. In spite of the foreign tongues, the evening seemed more like home than any since the Christmas of 1932 that I spent with all of you.
9
January was rice harvest time, and Mabel accompanied Martin to several village celebrations that reminded them of an American Thanksgiving. They were humbled by the gifts from church members, poor themselves, who gave offerings to support schools in even more remote areas.
The Bhamo school continued to expand. Early in 1936 Martin reported:
Twenty-two little ones in a revived kindergarten, 168 high-school students, the largest enrollment in the school’s history. Extra carpentry and singing classes added. The once-empty house next door is full; a clinic, sewing room, library, and teacher’s lounge. Even the porch is filled with a kindergarten class. Sweet potatoes and peas flourish in the school garden. And some of the lemon, grapefruit, and orange trees are thriving.
Martin