BAPTIST MISSIONARY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26918, 2 November 1948, Page 2

BAPTIST MISSIONARY

Seventeen Years in India ” Indian village women are very lovable, and look most attractive in their picturesque saris, which they start to wear when they are about 10,Miss Margery Bush, a missionary at present in Dunedin attending the baptist Assembly, told a Daily Times representative in an interview. Miss Bush, who has been engaged in work for the New Zealand Baptist Missionary Society over the past 17 years, is paying her first vislt to the Dominion since the war. In Chandpur, East Bengal (now known as Eastern Pakistan), where she has been stationed for some years, an orphanage for girls is attached to the mission, and Miss Bush’s activities have included teaching, evangelistic work, and medical and administrative duties. Bengali is the language commonly spoken in those districts, and English, too, is taught in the mission schools. Many of the girls show considerable aptitude for study, and one who has recently passed her matriculation examination is now taking a teacher’s training course in Calcutta. Many people in India are iliterate, but higher education is now on the up-grade, although Miss Bush considered that one of Pakistan's problerqs would be to decide on methods of raising money for education. Missionaries in India were, Miss Bush thought, faced by peculiar religious problems. one of the first and foremost being the question of the best method to present Christianity to Hindus, who are idolworshippers with an estimated 330,000,000 . deities, and to Mahommedans, who believe in one God. with Mahomet as his prophet. . In Eastern Pakistan, Mahommedans are easily in the majority, particularly since the partition, when many Hindus moved into the Indian Union. Miss Bush has recently been appointed by the Australian Baptist Foreign Mission to the position of deputationist to the Queensland Baptist Churches. She will organise interest in mission work through films and lectures. She is a New Zealander, and was formerly a resident of Auckland, where her father was city engineer for some years.