Missionaries Take Up New Challenge: Writing : Now Retired, Their Stories Describe Lives of Sacrifice and Dedication

They are modest, unassuming people who worked for their God in exotic, if unglamorous, locales that were generally Spartan and frequently dangerous.

They were devoted missionaries--ministers, doctors, nurses, teachers, musicians--whose lives, even in exotic-sounding places like China and Brazil, Lebanon and Thailand, India and West Africa, may have seemed humdrum on a day-to-day basis.

Often Surprised at Results

But they tell of surviving war, witnessing revolution, fleeing for their very lives, talking with world notables such as Mohandas Gandhi--and journeying for 19 days holding a box of hatching eggs, a commodity as precious to a missionary in a raw jungle as a Bible.

They are often surprised at the results of their labors, the monuments to their lives of sacrifice: a new hospital, a flourishing school, an expanding church, a choir that is a community cultural highlight.

Now, in their retirement years, these Presbyterian missionaries have taken up a new challenge: writing.

Wisely, most are writing about what they know best: their lives as American missioners.

Six-Month Program

Nineteen persons regularly took part in a just-completed, six-month artist-in-residence program underwritten by the California Arts Council in conjunction with the National Endowment for the Arts. Sessions were held at Westminster Gardens in Duarte, a facility operated by the Presbyterian Church (USA) for retired missionaries, ministers and their spouses.

Their teacher, Phyllis Osanna Love, said some of her students hope to see their work in magazines; others aspire to having a book published either commercially or privately.

These are a handful of the group and their stories:

Edith Moser, now 90, and her husband, Homer, had been missionaries 48 years in 1972 when they retired to Westminster Gardens. The mission years for the couple, both Midwesterners, began in 1922 when they went to a mysterious, faraway place: “We didn’t know where Brazil was,” Edith Moser said.

Her late husband, an expert in agriculture, asked to go to Brazil.

“We went to a 15,000-acre plantation in the state of Mato Grosso that had been a sugar plantation during the days of slavery,” she said. “About all that was left was the remains of two old slave houses.

“The nearest town had 100 people; 600 miles away there was a larger town. We were the only Americans. Sometimes a couple from town would ride eight hours on horseback to visit us.

“We were 20 years in one spot, and we worked. “

Illiteracy, she said, was 98%, and there was no school in the vicinity.

“The school, we decided, was a worthwhile work,” Moser said. “We took only children recommended by ministers of established churches there and in the states around. We had 50 to 60 boarding pupils and we all ate at the same table, our children with the schoolchildren.”

Two of the Mosers’ five children were born in Brazil. The first arrived prematurely and Mrs. Moser gave birth “with no help, no other woman.” The second son, also born there, died at 2 of pneumonia after a five-day illness.

In the beginning, Moser said, the Brazilian parents were reluctant to send their daughters to the mission school.

“It was the day of chaperones because girls as young as 12 were literally abducted from the dance floor,” she said. “Sin is not worse now. It’s as it always has been, back to biblical times.”

The Mosers learned how to process sugar, coffee and corn meal and to live off what they could produce on the plantation: “Our supplies came three days on oxen-back for the first 10 years.” An on-going problem was the poor quality of the chickens (“the strangest feathered birds we had ever seen”) they purchased from the passing caravans. They resolved to improve the local chickens through interbreeding.

Moser tells the story in “Chickens,” written in the Westminster Gardens writing class, of which she was the oldest member.

In it she relates how the family traveled to Sao Paulo one December for a mission meeting and to do some shopping. Mrs. Moser also purchased six eggs from a Rhode Island Red chicken farm near the city with the idea of improving the local strain of chickens. The eggs were carefully wrapped and packed.

“I carried that package personally during our long trip home,” Moser writes. “First there were five days on a wobbly narrow-gauge train, transfer to a 24-hour boat, wait four days in a hotel to get a small river boat to take us up the river for eight days--then a day of eight hours on horseback to our farm.”

Fortunately, Moser said, one of the plantation hens was in a maternal mood. Five of the six eggs hatched: “I cared for those precious little peeps with gratitude, loving care and great hopes.”

Her hopes were dashed when one of the chicks--the lone rooster among them--died.

“I had to start all over again,” Moser said. Later, after the advent of air service, she could order chicks sent by plane and receive them within three days.

After 20 years in Brazil, “we left because I was worn out,” she said. “The doctor said I had to stay home and rest for two years. But we went to Mexico to run a student hostel for boys. I got well in Mexico; I loved it.”

Meanwhile, the project in Brazil was foundering; the school had closed. After 10 years the mission board asked the Mosers to go back.

Edith Moser said no; Homer Moser said yes. Back to Brazil they went.

“We built a dorm, a better road and eventually we saw a strip for small planes there,” she said. “We had 95 boarding pupils in another 10 years.

“The school is still going. There are now 250 students. And in the little town the main street is named after my husband.”

Dr. Ivanoel Gibbins, a spunky, energetic woman of 85, became a doctor solely to go to India as a medical missionary: “I studied medicine because the women in India had no medical care.”

By the time she left 35 years later she had changed a women’s hospital into a general hospital, built a more modern hospital, trained nurses to work in village clinics, taught local midwives--who scorned Western medicine--modern techniques of childbirth and prevention of infection and cared for people of often-warring religions under the same roof.

Born in Nebraska, reared in Kansas, Gibbins went off to medical school in Chicago on a borrowed $100.

“My father was not thrilled with the idea of my studying medicine,” she said. “I was graduated in 1929 from the old Rush Medical School in Chicago and I did my internship here in Los Angeles at County Hospital (now County-USC Medical Center).”

She landed what others would consider a glamorous job--but one that, typically, she took in stride--as physician to John Barrymore’s baby daughter on his yacht. Then, in 1932, she went to India.

Gibbins, who has visited India three times since she left in 1967, spent the first year learning the language, then was assigned to Ambala in the Punjab to replace a retiring woman physician. Gibbins arrived to find the retiring doctor gone, the second physician on leave--and herself in charge.

“I thought I’d die,” she said. “I wanted a bath and they (the servants) got out a big old tub for me and boy! was that good!

“Then I found there were guests in the house, two doctors from southern India. There I was in my dressing gown and we had guests for tea!”

Then she got a note, “the first of thousands over the years.”

“It said to come quickly, that someone was in trouble,” she said. “It was Dr. Gibbins who was in trouble. The patient was a woman who had been four days in labor. The baby was dead and the mother was dying . . .

“I asked for the doctor in the government hospital to come; I learned later that was an awful thing to do, that the people didn’t trust the government hospital. He operated, and I thought I sure could have done a better job than that. I closed for him--that was a courtesy for a younger doctor to an older one.

“Somehow it spread all over town that the new doctor was a wonderful doctor.”

The mission, located in an area that was primarily Hindu and Sikh, built a new hospital for women. At first men could not even visit their wives, and when Gibbins let them in an older missionary nurse “thought I was awful,” Gibbins said, the perennial twinkle in her eyes.

“Pretty soon we had a male ward, and that was shocking,” she said. “Gradually we became a general hospital.”

Most of the women’s medical problems Gibbins encountered in India involved childbirth:

“The women had poor diets, their bones were small and the pelvis just couldn’t manage to deliver the baby. We had no penicillin or sulfa, and most of the women were infected by village midwives. That was the tragic part of my first years.

“But till the very end we got these patients with infections. The midwives said they knew more than we did . . . But we just kept pounding (to train them). Ooooh, those were hard days.”

In the Westminster Gardens writing class Gibbins wrote of her experiences during the partition of India and Pakistan in the late ‘40s and of her visit 50 years ago with Mahatma Gandhi, the champion of Indian independence.

Admittedly “the kind of person who is always curious about a lot of things,” Gibbins recalled her visit to Gandhi’s home.

“It was the muddy rainy season,” Gibbins said, “and we walked through mud. I left my shoes on and when we got there it took quite some time to make myself at least somewhat presentable.”

Presentable or not, Gibbins was asked to leave her shoes outside the door. Inside an English follower of Gandhi served tea while he spoke with his visitors, principally with a Swiss man with whom he had worked previously on a project in India.

Gandhi finally took note of Gibbins’ silence. She replied that she had been enjoying the men’s conversation. Then he asked if she’d like to return the following day.

“He wanted to know what I wanted, and I said, ‘I want to know why you are anti-missionary,’ ” she said. “The next day we had an hour and a half discussion.” In her memoir Gibbins writes that she felt Gandhi linked the missionaries’ evangelizing with Britain’s efforts to hold the Hindus down.

In her reminiscence of the partition of India (“a catastrophe in many ways”), Gibbins told of the strife between Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs and the fighting that resulted in the wounding of many.

“Our Philadelphia Hospital in Ambala city was in the midst of all this madness,” Gibbins writes. “Our hospital was packed with wounded people, and cholera patients were increasing rapidly.

“Our hospital had always been intended exclusively for women . . . I felt it was time to break down one more barrier and I allowed a few men to use our facilities. The men also were of various religions and castes. I would not refuse to take in a Muslim . . . .

“I went to do rounds in the men’s ward and I found Muslims, Hindus and this Sikh. I said, ‘Hello, brothers. Isn’t it wonderful you can lie here in perfect safety? This place truly is as its name, Philadelphia Hospital, the hospital of brotherly love. And the Sikh said, ‘It couldn’t happen any place but here.’ ”

Harry Dorman was born to be a missionary.

The fourth generation of a family of Presbyterian missionaries in the Middle East, Dorman was born in 1906 in Beirut, Lebanon, where his grandfather, Daniel Bliss, was a founder in 1866 of the American University and its president for 36 years.

But he refers to America as “home,” as in “After I was 14 I came home to be educated.” Educated he was: Phillips Andover Academy, Harvard University, a doctorate in education from Columbia and a master’s in divinity at Union Theological Seminary of New York.

In 1934 the Presbyterian church gave him a permanent appointment to Lebanon. His wife Virginia, a graduate of Smith College and the Union Seminary School of Music, worked with him. Both loved Lebanon--and agree that it’s no place for an American now.

Dorman first worked and taught in village churches in Lebanon. Later he was executive secretary for the ecumenical Near East Council of Churches.

He saw today’s political situation evolve over the years.

“When I first began to teach,” Dorman said, “I had Palestinian Arabs and Palestinian Jews in class and they were friendly and cooperative--and it’s their kids who are killing each other.

“The Near East Council of Churches was formed especially to help with the Palestinian refugees. That was important after 1948 (when the United Nations established Israel as a Jewish state).”

Will the Mideast political situation ever be settled?

“Yes,” Dorman said firmly. “I believe that the Palestinians will have a homeland at last. When that happens there will be a strong chance for peace. As long as we (the U.S) prevent it there will be no chance for peace. We have a heavy responsibility to push for that homeland.

“We have been mistaken in supporting some of the policies of the Israeli government . . . So many Jews here are opposed to the Israeli government but the Jewish community . . . supports it in every way. It is difficult to speak out against that.”

Dorman’s optimism about the Middle East extends to the fruits of the missionaries’ labors.

“It looks as though all (our work) has gone for nothing, but that is not so,” he said. “Small Presbyterian churches are carrying on now on their own . . . . Our work has to be carried on by nationals, by Arab Christians.”

Harry and Virginia Dorman, parents of five children, have lived at Westminster Gardens for three years. Both recall Lebanon and its people with great affection.

“Lebanon is very beautiful,” he said. “The mountains rise straight up out of the sea.

“The people in the villages are so friendly and kind and hospitable; they are famous for their politeness. If you are invited to a meal and ask to wash your hands, then the polite thing is to say, ‘Your hospitality does not wash off.’ ”

The missions of China beckoned to Dr. Frank Newman and his wife Betty and Cliff and Mary Chaffee.

Their service was quite different, but the two couples, the Newmans medical missionaries, the Chaffees a minister and his musician wife, left China for the same reason: the rise to power of the Communist government.

The Newmans went to China in 1936 and left in January of 1951 after serving at a hospital in Hunan, he as an orthopedic surgeon and she as a nurse. They were then assigned to Cameroon, West Africa, where they spent 13 years and, said Betty Newman, “When we came home we didn’t want to.”

On their return to the United States, Newman took a residency in psychiatry and his wife took psychiatric nurse training to prepare to be marriage counselors, he said, “a missionary field among our own people. When we were first married we went to Appalachia to work among the poor there. We laugh that we have gone from Kentucky to China to Cameroon to psychiatry.”

In China during World War II, the Newmans were surrounded by the Japanese but not captured. They survived air raids and at one point they packed up the hospital equipment and supplies and moved into the hills, returning a couple of years later to rebuild the burned-out hospital building.

When they finally fled, they lost all their possessions. Their daughters, then 14 and 11, had left China eight months earlier; their son, and they, followed.

Frank, now 81, and Betty, now 77, returned to the United States in 1965. They have lived at Westminster Gardens since October of 1984.

Cliff and Mary Chaffee decided to become missionaries at a teen-age Christian convention--never dreaming they would go overseas together as man and wife.

Cliff, now 72, never wavered from his goal. Mary, 68, was torn between the missions and music. Finally she did both.

Reared in Washington state, they spent two years under war conditions in China before they were advised in 1946 by Chinese friends to leave. Ironically, at home in the U.S. some suspected the Chaffees of Communist sympathies.

“There was great poverty in China,” said Cliff Chaffee, who worked there as a minister and teacher. “The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) program was channeled through the church because it was the only group it could trust.”

“We were in a famine area and we fed thousands of children,” Mary Chaffee said. “We gave them clothes--it was bitter cold in the winter.

“We were blacklisted. We had a choice to stay in China or come home, but at home we were blacklisted because we had dealt with United Nations funds.”

The Chaffees, he with a master’s from New York Theological Seminary and she with training at several graduate schools of music, went on to serve 21 years in Thailand.

Working with the Chinese community in Bangkok, he was principal of the Bible Institute of Theology. She formed choirs and worked as a leader in Bangkok’s musical community.

“I gave up music three or four times,” Mary Chaffee said. “But when we got to Bangkok it was fabulous to put it to use. I gave it up and I got it back.”

The Chaffees, whose families were long-time friends (Mary’s father, a minister, baptized Frank), are parents of three, including a daughter who lives in Bangkok and works with an agency to process refugees. They have returned to Thailand twice in the last four years, once to help modernize a church where Frank Chaffee served--”Our kids (pupils) now are the elders and deacons and doctors and lawyers.”

Frank Chaffee is a parish associate at the First Presbyterian Church of Covina and his wife still directs a choir of 30 persons. In the writing group at Westminster Gardens they are working on “Jottings,” which she described as “not autobiographies, just things for our children, dialogues, some not true but born out of truth.”