POSTMEN'S DRIVE

Evening Star, Issue 26043, 6 March 1947, Page 11

POSTMEN'S DRIVE

N.Z. RELIEF WORK FOR CHINA Details of the relief activities in China which Dunedin contributions to next Saturday morning’s postmen’s drive would help support were given at a Corso meeting last evening by the Dominion organiser, Mr A. M. Richards Corso, as representing, all the. New Zealaud bodies concerned with postwar overseas relief, had been asked to send to China 16 men and women as relief workers. All would’.be'volunteers with special, qualifications, serving for their keep and a small allowance. Each would serve two years at least, some with Rewi Alley at his training school for leaders of village cooperatives, and others with the cooperative body that was undertaking the reconstruction of the Chinese hospitals. Precise posts were . waiting to _ be filled by these people, who comprised doctors, hospital technicians, medical administrators, engineers, architects, and nursing and machine instructors. Well qualified people had already come forward, and once funds to support them were available would be quickly in the field.

Nowhere in the world were more useful jobs waiting to be done, declared the speaker. The village co-operatives, for example, brought immediate relief to almost exhausted peasants wherever they were established by providing new goods to use and wear and a new source of income by trade with other districts. But also, by modernising village life and raising. its living standard they were preventing industrialisation’s usual .stampede into overcrowded towns and dangerous factories.

Similarly the reconstruction of China’s hospitals meant more than an immediate reprieve from otherwise certain death for hundreds of thousands who have been left sick and underfed by Japanese occupation. It means restoring China’s most potent system for health, education, and general enlightenment.