MISSION FROM SYRIA

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 85, Issue 228, 27 September 1941, Page 2

MISSION FROM SYRIA

EVACUATION WHEN GERMANS BEGAN TO ENTER TO RETURN IF POSSIBLE. (Press Assn.) Auckland, Sept. 25. Evacuated at the end of May from Syria to Jerusalem when the Germans had already begun to enter the country and take over the aerodromes, Miss Molly Harries, of the British Syrian Mission, has arrived in New Zealand, where she expects to spend a year before returning to Syria if war conditions permit. It was only a week after the British Consul in Syria had ordered the evacuation of the British people that fighting began in earnest. Before she left Miss Harries had the experience of seeing aeroplanes of the Royal Air Force bombing an aerodrome outside Damascus, but that was the only fighting activity she saw. The British Syrian Mission members, said Miss Harries, worked chiefly through the schools. In Beirut they had a teachers’ training college attached to the school, where the mission trained its own Syrian teachers for other schools. More direct evangelistic work was done in the villages, while the mission also did a certain amount of medical work.