LIFE IN LABRADOR.

Matamata Record, Volume XIII, Issue 1112, 7 April 1930, Page 6

LIFE IN LABRADOR.

MISSIONARY'S GOOD WORK. Sir Wilfred Grenfell is on one of his busy trips to England from his beloved Labrador. It -is nearly 40 years since Dr Grenfell, as he then was, heard .of the hard life by the fisherfolk on the Labrador coast. He was then working for the Royal National Mission toi Deep Sea Fishermen in the North Sea. He left that work to act as a pioneer of similar, work in Labrador, and he has devoted his life to its people ever since (says the Christian Science Monitor). On board the Maraval, a little pow-er-driven hospital schooner, Sir Wilfred has a volunteer crew. The skipper is a Boston lawyer; the mate a Yale man from New York; the deck hands, Princeton and Dartmouth men; the cook is a Philadelphian wool merchant who had sdme experience in cooking at sea in his youth; and two college boys make themselves generally useful. Sir YTilfred maintains that his own work and that of his helpers is not to be looked on as “work” but as “fun,” for there zai, no fun in the world which comes up to that of doing a thing just because it wants doing. The aim is to give work among others to women of the coast so that they may have a measure °f .economic independence. The articles made include silk hooked-work rugs and grass baskets, and j ivory work and toy-making are carried on. In many other ways Sir Wilfred Grenfell is extending the work which ne loves. Labrador salmon, he says, can compete with the finest Scotch and Irish fish, t Parts of Labrador, too, are to be stocked with reindeer, which are now in request as a source of meat supply.