Spent- 35 Years In Bengal Mission

Northern Advocate, 23 August 1948, Page 5

Spent- 35 Years In Bengal Mission

Visiting Whangarei in the course of a tour of New Zealand which she terms her “swan song,” is Miss A. L. Cowles, a former Baptist missionary in British Tippcrah, East Bengal, Pakistan. “Living in India requires good health and the power of endurance,” said Miss Cowles in an interview today. She has had ample time to form this conclusion, having been in Bengal for 35 years before she left that troubled state in 1946. Her present tour of the Dominion is the last before her retirement, and she intends to resettle in the country, having been born here. Miss Cowles’ mission in East Bengal involved travelling by houseboat over the waterways of an area as large as the Wellington Province. Part of her'time was spent in working at the mission hospital. Christians were a mere handful of the population, which w r as mainly Mohammedan. Any converts were usually forced to leave the province by their irate I’elatives. CHANGES FOR WORSE “Changes for the worse have, by all accounts, occurred since’ I left India,” said Miss Cowles. “Nevertheless, I would like to return and have a peep over the fence at the people’s daily lives. “Probably the first thing the people would ask me would be: ‘ When will the the prices of food and clothing come down?’ “Rice cost seven times as much as when I left, and clothing is almost is costly. “When Burma becomes more settled, however, that country may be able to resume the export of rice to Bengal.” Miss Cowles does not think that missionaries’ work has been made difficult by the current animosity between India and Pakistan.

One reported source of annoyance was the erection of customs barriers between the two nations, where none existed before.