NOBLE WORK BY WOMAN

Evening Star, Issue 20422, 1 March 1930, Page 12

NOBLE WORK BY WOMAN

A FRIEND OF THE LEPERS A Florence Nightingale of Central Africa has passed away, She was _ a Scottish nurse, Mrs Draper, who, with her husband, started a leper colony at Kawimbe, in Northern Rhodesia, about twelve years ago, says the ‘ Cape Times.’ For years they ran the settlement without outside medical aid, while'they . paid the cost out of their own pockets. Happily, a lew years ago, the Governments iof Northern Rhodesia and of Tanganyika, realising what a wonderful work was being carried on in an out-of-the-way pait of Central Africa, began to make a grant of money and medicines. Mrs Draper’s apprenticeship to what proved to bo her great life work was first ten years as a nurse at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Then for fifteen years ah© carried on village nursing work in Livingstonia. in connection with the Scottish Mission there. She was then Miss May Ballantyne, and she married Mr Walter Draper, of the Kawimbe station of the London Missionary Society. Her nursing knowledge supplied just what was lacking for the relief of lepers. “My first patient,” Mrs Diaper once said, “ was a poor woman, who had long lived in caves and on roots. Like the other lepers, she was utterly neglected, and like a frightened animal, and even when I bad persuaded her to come to me for treatment, she would retire every night to sleep under an old ant hill. But 1 had the joy of seeing her gradually recover, and now a litde village has grown up of lepers who have been cured, and do not want to return to their old homes.”

At first the lepers were housed in grass huls, which were buried at intervals, as they could not be properly cleansed. Later, however, proper dwellings were erected lor them, and Mrs Draper was able to work a little six-roomed hospital for the worst cases. She was utterly fearless, and would olteu travel, without any white companion, for hundreds of miles through the bush. Nows of her coming would rapidly spread, and she would have to get out ol the machila ” in which faithful Africans were carrying her, to give injections to snlierers, kneeling by the roadside, praying for her help. Poor creatures came Iroin far and near to the kind Englishwoman, who gave them medicine and gentle words. In many cases she wms able to effect a cure and presently the rulers as well as the ruled were talking of her work. It was as if one of the prophets of old was passing through the land, so eagerly did the sick and maimed drag themselves to Airs Draper’s feet, so thankfully did they bless her name. And now' it is done. Tanganyika will see the angel of Kawimbe station no more. After her husband’s death in 1937. Mrs Draper struggled on, dome- double duty for a while, and now. worn out bv the strain ol her Aiiican years, she " has died quite suddenly. She was on leave in England, but was still working for her poor Africans. She was going to make two speeches for them in the week that proved to be her last:. So this noble woman died as she lived, working for others. She was of the line of Florence Nightingale and Father Damien.