From India | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jul 16, 1896

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 22, No. 28.

FROM INDIA.

Inasmuch as India is the great field to which the missionary contributions are sent this quarter, it will be of double interest to read the following, from a letter by Sister Georgia Burrus, to a friend in California. Sister Burrus was a former member of the Oakland church.

You probably are aware that some time ago we opened a school for Hindu girls in our house. We just closed to-day (May 1) for the midsummer holidays. We have had an attendance of from twenty-five to thirty-five as bright little girls as you ever saw. One can not help but love them. We have had a native young lady to teach the common branches. Mrs. Robinson has taught sewing, and I have given Bible lessons. It has been my first attempt to teach in Bengali, and I can assure you it has not been fluently done; but I trust that through the blessing of God, some seeds of truth may have been planted in their hearts that will brighten their lives and bear fruit in the kingdom. We expect to reopen the school about the middle of June, the beginning of the rainy season.

We are now in the hot season. The thermometer varies from 100 to 110 in the shade. But by keeping doors and windows closed we can stop out much of the heat. For my part I do not mind it, as I do not suffer from it at all. . . . One of the most disagreeable features of life during the hot season is prickly heat, which, as its name implies, is a sort of rash that breaks out all over the body, accompanied by the most intense itching and prickly sensation. For some reason, however, I am entirely free from this distressing accompaniment of Indian life. Last summer, while living at the Y. W. C. A. Home, I attributed my immunity from it, while other Europeans living there were suffering, to the fact

that I did not partake of the meat and highly-spiced food which made up their diet. But I have had to abandon that theory, as all of our family here are strict vegetarians, and yet are nearly all distressed by the prickly heat, while I go free.

We are having a dreadful epidemic of cholera here. A few weeks ago the death rate from cholera alone in the city of Calcutta was 325 in a week. Only a short time ago word was sent us that one of our schoolgirls had cholera, and wanted to see her teachers before she died. The native teacher and myself went to the house, and the sight I witnessed I can never forget. In a little room about eight by ten were two children lying on the same bed, apparently dying—our little girl and her brother. Crowded into the room were about a half dozen women, crying and sobbing. The air was hot and foul, and the children were pleading for water, but the doctor had said they must not drink water. In another room of the same house lay an oil man, the grandfather, in the very last stage of the disease, and they pointed us to two other rooms, where three others of the family had just died, and this was simply in one house. Whole families are often swept away. O, for consecrated physicians and nurses at such a time as this! There is a slight abatement in the epidemic now, and we trust when the rains come, that it will die out. Last summer there was just such an epidemic of smallpox.

. . . Bananas are cheap and plentiful, but I think we have had them every meal since we have been here, and we are getting tired of them. Canned fruit is very high. Occasionally, as a luxury, we indulge in a tin of California peaches, but it does not happen often, I assure you.