IN SAVAGE LANDS.

Press, Volume LXV, Issue 19775, 13 November 1929, Page 15

IN SAVAGE LANDS.

MISSIONARY'S EXPERIENCES. A woman who preferred life for years in the midst of cannibals in unsurveyed lands to a life of ease and luxury told her story to a large attendance at St. Albans Church of Christ, and gave further details to a Press reporter, in an interview last night. The woman who made such a preference is Miss G. Yesbury. a missionary of the world-wide Evangelisation Crusade, an organisation commenced by a once world-famed cricketer —Mr C. T. Studd, of Cambridge University—with the definite object of penetrating with the Gospel to lands where it and white men had never entered. Savage chiefs in Central Africa, whose claims to nobility largely varied with the number of wives they had—and not a few had as many as 1000 "wives"!—were numbered amongst the queer personages Miss Yesbnry interviewed as prospective new adherents of Christianity. The results have been so encouraging Miss Yesbnry said, that once bloodthirsty cannibals now are evangelists themselves in many instances. Women Merely Chattels. Glimpses of realities in Africa and amongst the mid Indians of Amazonia ware furnished by Miss Yesbury's picturesque descriptions and by lantern slides from actual photographs. Native women and girls had been simply the goods and chattels of the men, said Miss Yesbury, and their lires had been worth knives, a leopard skin, or a piece of "hippo" hide, and were bought and sold for those considerations. The aged had been —and were still being, where the missionaries had not yet been —turned into the forest to die or be eaten by lions. Humans had been preyed upon by humans, and eaten alive arm by arm! Conditions are altering slowly but surely under the management of the missionaries. "Once you have heard the wail of a dying heathen you would never forget it," declared Miss Yesbury "It is absolutely impossible to describe the conditions the people are living under. There are many millions of women whose life is worth less than rust on the sword." A missionary's life ie a strarge mixture of occupations and greatly different from that commonly pictured as being merely preaching to hungry Crowds of natives. Besides acting as preachers, however, missionaries in Central Africa and Amazonia, at least, act daily as composers, teachers, bakers, cooks, gardeners, barbers, dentists, -doctors, tailors, and tinkers. But the arts in which they must excel are fishing and hunting, or the natives would ask where the missionaries were educated. For food on treks and other occasions the evangelists often partook of the native concoctions. Stew a la Central Africa consisted partly of snakes' flesh, rats, and other delicacies. Mud walls formed the limits of r&urch, home, and social life in thoee villages where settlement had become established. Although they had lived in lion country teeming with poisonous snakes, ants, and other forms of vicious life, the missionaries had had no casualties, in spite of the fact that the mud houses were made without doors or windows. Miss Yesbury, who is a young Englishwoman, born in London, has visited Australia, and is completing a lecture iour of New Zealand.