Chapter Fourteen, Section ***III
One of the facilities Keith set up under the ACDP, with the help of funding from the Cameron Edison Trust, was a flourmill. This was to encourage cultivators to produce one extra crop a year, either wheat or corn (maize), but hopefully both. It also provided an incentive for poorer farmers whose less fertile, up-land fields, which could not produce rice.
It was while Keith was pouring the foundations for the 10 HP diesel engine to drive this equipment, that a major tragedy struck our family. It was our youngest son, Bruce, who met with an accident that took him to within a hair's breadth of becoming a quadriplegic, or perhaps suffering death itself - a tragedy that became a Miracle. This is a story that has a prelude in a somewhat similar accident that resulted in the death of one of our patients, from a broken neck.
Following each year's rice harvest, our local farmers would pile their hay on high log platforms (machaans) to protect it from roaming animals and termites. During the winter months, when hand- feeding would be necessary, fodder was thrown down to the cattle that had gathered below. The victim concerned in this accident, was at the top of the pile when he slipped, falling to the ground to break his spine and dislocate his neck. With no X-Ray facilities available and even less experience to handle such a critical case, we had no way of assessing the full extent of the internal injuries. We dreaded such emergencies, with no doctor available and no way of transporting the patients to hospital without causing more spinal damage, or even death, on the bumpy "roads". Anyway, in this particular case, the relatives of the patient did not agree that he be taken to hospital. All we could do was to consult the medical books, seeking the Lord's help for understanding.
The accident to the farmer happened when Keith and I were preparing for an important visit to town. All that was possible was to place the patient under traction and leave him to the care of our paramedics. With no more equipment than a few sticks, bits of rope and chunks of iron, Keith set up a contraption of weights and pulleys, which did give the man some relief but there seemed to be something lacking in the therapy that caused Keith not a little consternation. As we feared, on returning home from town, we found the man dead. This was probably a blessing in disguise, for there was every possibility of him ending up as a quadriplegic. And besides, how could he possibly survive in such a remote, primitive society, with his family unable to provide daily aseptic evacuation of his bowels and bladder?
Sometime later, through the kindness of Dr. Rae W. Dunhill we received the help of a volunteer, a former ambulance officer and skilled paramedic. Warren had come to India to marry his pen friend, Nagis, a beautiful Assamese girl with a university degree. Little did Dr. Dunhill and Warren know at the time that they were largely instrumental in helping the Lord to work out the Miracle that was to save our son, Bruce, from what could have been a fate like that of our farmer friend. From Warren, Keith learned the technique of delicate manipulation required to reset a dislocated neck without damaging the spinal cord, although he did not actually perform that operation. Only once was Keith able to see Warren perform it on another patient who passed through our clinic with such injuries, after falling from a tree.
The mishap, which could have ended Bruce's life, happened during one of his most exciting vacations from boarding school. He was enthralled by so much activity.
We received fifteen irrigation pumps under the financial project.
Pumps could be seen everywhere, sending life-giving water into the thirsty fields to produce the most beautiful crops of wheat and vegetables, hitherto never seen in this part of the world. Bruce loved to help his Dad in the fields, ploughing where, in all history, the sod had never been turned before. Bruce was particularly excited to see the well he helped to dig by sharing with Keith in the blasting operation that freed an underground stream. That well now served to irrigate a citrus farm that the ACDP was developing at Nawapara, near the Mission compound.
Keith giving thanks for the first water to flow by
electric powered irrigation.
The Tigalto River is beyond the piggery and
poultry building in the background.
One of the most delightful experiences for Bruce, was to take our Alsatian dog, "Fauji", for long walks into the jungle, where Bruce searched for artefacts. He actually discovered an artefact "factory", with many fine specimens of stone knives and axes used by former local tribes, many thousands of years earlier.
It was on one of these excursions that he stopped at the Project's flourmill to watch Keith working on the concrete foundations for the heavy diesel engine. Because Fauji had a propensity for chasing buffaloes, cows, goats and any other animals that dared to intrude within the boundaries of the ACDP farms, Bruce kept him on a chain, which happened to get wound around his legs as the dog searched for shade against the low mud wall of the flour mill.
Because of our economic problems, walls and roofing always tended to be too low, which is why the beams of the flourmill's thatched roof protruded at eye level. At the same time as Bruce was watching Keith set the foundation bolts in the mill's engine room, a village mongrel dog walked into the Project compound as though he owned the place. The nonchalant manner in which this impudent stray surveyed the domain, which was exclusively within Fauji's jurisdiction, so inflamed our big dog that he took off like a rocket.
The violent tug of the chain as Fauji leaped in pursuit of the intruder spun Bruce around so that he hit his head very hard on one of the roofing beams. Bruce did not seem to be badly injured until he struggled to his feet with his head jammed hard down upon his right shoulder and twisted so that he looked to his left. His neck had been dislocated but the spinal cord obviously was not damaged because he was able to walk all the way home.
The problem we now faced was how to get the head back in the right place without damaging the cord. As the shock wore off, the most excruciating pain overcame Bruce and we had no adequate sedation to ease the torment. Through his pain, he cried out, "Dad, you will have to pull my head and put it back in place!"
What does one do in such a situation when the nearest hospital, able to cope with such an emergency, is nearly two hundred miles away? Remembering the farmer who died and the patient whom Warren had later saved, we did the only thing that seemed possible under the circumstances. By this time, Bruce was in unbearable pain but he remained conscious. In retrospect, we now know that, had Bruce lapsed into a coma, he would not have been able to guide Keith as he manipulated the head into the position it was meant to be. We called for the help of three compound workers. Elisha, son of the late Jatibhai, came running along with Bansdipa and Sohonabah. Two of the men held Bruce's legs while Keith positioned himself on the grass mat, cradling Bruce's twisted head in his lap. I stood midway over Bruce to brace Keith's feet with my own. We were now ready to apply traction. "Hurry, Dad, hurry!" screamed Bruce.
What happened next was unbelievable. Keith took Bruce's head in his strong hands and attempted to do what he had seen Warren do only once before. Was Keith doing the right thing? He agonized almost as much as Bruce in those long hours of torture. By now, it was clear that Bruce could not have endured the two hundred miles trip to hospital, over the shockingly bumpy road. Keith just had to apply the traction and he did it with all the strength he could muster. He pulled so hard that he feared the head might come off completely, causing irreparable damage to our son. Being directed by Bruce, he twisted and turned the head from its grotesque position until, ever so carefully, he was able to ease it back into its proper place. Phew! Amazingly, Bruce was still conscious, while Keith was in a bath of perspiration.
"Oh, oh, ", said Bruce. "That feels much better." He suffered no loss of sensation or movement in his limbs so we knew the spinal cord was intact. I insisted that Keith accompany our son back to school, but Bruce was adamant that he was O.K. Eventually, he returned with the Calcutta school party to Mussoorie, from where he visited Ludhiana Christian Hospital for X-Rays. After examination, the doctor provided Bruce with a collar to wear for two months and reported that, had we not done exactly as we did, Bruce could well have lost his life.
By this time, encouraging reports of ACDP progress, supported by many photographs, had reached the Cameron Edison Trust in Australia. This prompted the Trust's Director, Mr. Ralph P. Moran, to inquire about what the Trust could do to improve our own family accommodation. Because of the baseless rumours that circulated when we were in mission service, that Keith had used funds to "feather his own nest", he was most reluctant to request any assistance for our own personal needs. Besides that, he had initially asked the Lord to send him to a place that had nothing and it was not until we virtually had nothing, by Western standards, that we really began to feel the Holy Spirit working through us to lift the locally oppressed. Life, however, was such a struggle in our tiny Sahaganj mud hut, that Keith felt constrained to ask the Trust for a few basic necessities, including doors, windows, a concrete floor and tiles to replace the rotted thatching of the roof. His conscience would be clear for, after all, he was not seeking these renovations for himself but for his wife! The Lord would fully understand.
I guess that most of you readers, at some time, have moved from one home to another. You may have moved from a large house to a smaller one and experienced the difficulty of storing surplus gear. Many of our possessions included bits and pieces of what you, in the Western world, would consider to be junk. But what is one to do when every scrap of rope, wire, tin, board, plastic, rusty nails and bolts, etc., could, perhaps, come in handy for a repair job? Ironically, it was the junk that, best of all, survived the ravages of rats and termites. Because it is a Miracle that we survived for so long a time in the hut and in such a hostile climate and environment, it is worth describing the residence in greater detail.
The hut provided us with what was probably the most primitive dwelling ever occupied, in recent times, by a Western family in India and, for so long a period - five years. Traditionally, Indian village homes are square in shape, necessitating long beams to support the heavy tiled roof. Unfortunately, with the monsoon close at hand, following our break with the Mission, there had been insufficient time either to secure good roofing timber or to bake the tiles necessary to protect us and the mud hut from almost daily torrential downpours. There was also little time to make the mud walls, which require a long sunny period to dry out. The construction of mud walls and fencing and the making of bricks and tiles, are only undertaken in the middle of the hot, dry summer. However, here we were considering making a mud house after we had already lost nearly 400,000 unbaked bricks in the preliminary, monsoon rains. The whole idea seemed to be utterly crazy. Taking all the anticipated problems into account, I requested our friends to make us an oblong hut, which turned out to be nine feet wide by twenty-five feet long. We then withdrew from "The Area" and left them to it!
To make our hut, the ACDP chose a site on the banks of the Rigalto River, one hundred feet from the water's edge and on a slope to allow rainwater run-off. The early showers had eased when they started construction, but there was never a day when a shower was not expected in this desperate race against time. As with the bricks, so with the mud walls, the watery elements beat them to it and Kalemari decided to abandon all attempts to re-erect the collapsed walls. It would take a Miracle to build a mud house in the monsoon! Even if they had been able to get the walls to stand up, it would be impossible for the damp structure to bear the weight of the roofing timbers and thatch, especially when the latter became waterlogged.
Kalemari had a brainwave; there was only one way to keep the walls standing and that was to build them under cover. Now, whoever would have thought of building the roof first? But that's the way our hut was built and it was not with the help of Hindu sadhus who claim to have the powers of levitation! There was no need to overcome gravity at all. The collapsed mud walls were cleared away and, in their place, was erected a row of forked posts which supported the timber, bamboo and thatched roof. Along the line of posts the mud walls were erected. This was the first time ever that our friends had built a house on sloping ground, resulting in the structure's river-side wall being eighteen inches lower than its opposite side!
The hut on the bank of the Rigalto River.
With neither timbers nor time available, the hut was void of windows and doors. There were, however, spaces for access at both ends and four holes to let in light. To ensure some measure of privacy, three five-feet high mud wall partitions that divided our residence into living-room, store, bedroom and bathroom, protruded half way across the width of the hut, alternately from the main north and south walls. This allowed passage between rooms but prevented outside viewers from seeing right through the hut. The tops of the eighteen-inch thick partitions provided handy shelf space for storage. Plastic curtains at both ends served not only to keep out the rain but also to make us feel really snug. To add further to our sense of security, woven bamboo gates were firmly fitted over the front and back entrances after sunset. These served to discourage marauding predators such as bears, leopards, boars, hyenas and the occasional tiger that freely roamed the Surgapam jungles. To contribute even more to a peaceful night's sleep, there had to be the indispensable hurricane lanterns at both ends of the hut. Could we have wished for more?
Our Indian friends also built us a large, square, detached kitchen of similar construction - roof first - with walls only to chest level, obviating the need for doors and windows. The scene from my workbench was fabulous - beautiful wooded hills, lush jungle and paddy fields rich with harvest. In the hot summer months, however, dust, dry leaves and scorching wind, as though from a blast furnace, made cooking almost impossible. But for most of the year, when the weather was favourable, the kitchen's austere design made it a wonderful place in which to work. Over its low walls I could see all the comings and goings of people at the nearby river crossing. Some would be washing their clothes, others bathing, children playing and water buffaloes just enjoying life.
Ruth calls me to lunch in front of the hut's kitchen.
Unfortunately, the kitchen, too, with its mud stove, was built on a slope so had a downhill floor! To most people, accustomed only to the affluence of a Western society, such living conditions would be absolutely intolerable. However, when one considers the love and concern that went into providing this accommodation after time had already run out and in the face of almost insurmountable odds, the hut and all that went with it was a Miracle of Love and Grace.
It was the first impression of the hut that lingers most in my mind. When we left the mission bungalow for the last time, we were farewelled as though for good. When we came back, it was to a completely new status in the community. Keith returned from Mussoorie and I later joined him from New Delhi. The welcomes were overwhelming, among the most emotional of all our experiences. There was dancing, drumming, garlands and feasting as though we had arrived for the very first time. In a way, this was true. We had left them as "Foreign Missionaries" and had returned as equals, friends and colleagues, living right down on their economic and cultural level.
I shall never forget the first night I arrived at the hut. Only three days earlier, I had been in a big modern city, teeming with people and ablaze with light, but when we arrived at "Rigalto Bank", it was late at night and all was dark with not a light to be seen anywhere on the horizon. There was a bush toilet quite a distance from the hut, making it a real adventure just to attend nature's call.
Negotiating the little track, step by step, over the tiny bridge, with nothing but a torch to dispel the blackness and any lurking animal or reptile, one had to be thankful there were few times when both flashlight batteries and kerosene were unavailable in the bazaar at the same time. Because of the lateness of our arrival on that first night, there could be no traditional welcome, with dinner of rice, goat or chicken curry. All that festivity was to come later. They just gave us a simple meal and then it was to bed. Even the beds had been provided by our village friends, made with their own hands.
My bed was by a little "window", or rather a hole in the mud wall, which I covered with plastic in lieu of glass. For all the five years we occupied the hut, I loved sleeping in that little room, with the sound of the river like music, accompanied by so many nightlife noises. One of the most beautiful sounds came from a herds-boy playing his hand-made flute. The most delightful indigenous melodies issued from that simple instrument which the boy played to keep himself company while he grazed the water buffaloes through the cool of the night. I was eager to get up early in the morning to see exactly where we were. Our two beautiful dogs, Fauji and Honey, had already been in to say "good morning". Oh, how beautiful this world was in October.
From my tiny window I could see every shade of green imaginable. All the fields were full of lush, green crops, the jungles still fresh and the weather beginning to cool after a good monsoon. Outside my house there were great surprises. The personal flowerpots I had at the Nawapara Mission bungalow had been carefully transported to "Rigalto Bank" and lovingly placed around the hut to provide the most gorgeous display of ferns and roses. The women of the Sahaganj church knew just how much I loved flowers and gardening and they were determined to welcome me into their community in the most unforgettable way they could. Using their own precious seed, they also had prepared a vegetable garden, with its fruits ready for picking on my first day in our new residence.
The task of turning the hut into some sort of a home was fraught with many problems. Improvements just had to be made to our home if we were to survive in such a primitive environment. And it was not only the physical discomforts that threatened to destroy us after the initial excitement had worn off, but more particularly, the mental trauma of having to cope with the strain. Hardly a day ever passed without some new problem adding to the tension.
Keith set up his office in a small two-man tent which we also had to use for other purposes, including a guest room because, with the ACDP growing in leaps and bounds, there always were folk who wanted to see the Project and that meant staying a night or two. The tent-office, which contained reams of correspondence, files, registers and records, threatened to burst at the seams. On one occasion, when we were absent from Rigalto Bank, the guy ropes were too loose to withstand the violence of a storm which lashed the area, tearing Keith's office to pieces, scattering his precious documents to the four winds.
For health reasons, it became necessary to modify the roof of the hut. We arrived to find a very poor quality of thatch over bamboo with an outer covering of "Tarred Felt" which, in places, was not completely waterproof. Rats found the thatch a most congenial habitat and mould in the thatch, caused by the leaks, exacerbated my Asthma condition. To help solve the problem, particularly due to rotting thatch raining down upon us when the rats fought each other, we decided to reverse the roof, first laying the "Tarred Felt" and then the thatch on the outside to give insulation against the blistering heat. The whole covering had to be well anchored down with bamboo to withstand the violent storms, which occasionally swept our area, causing real devastation to crops and houses. How I now live in Australia without bamboo is hard to tell because, in India, we used it for just about everything.
To make the hut habitable, I just HAD to take charge. Keith was too busy with the Project to worry much about the aesthetic side of life at Rigalto Bank. Firstly, I had to get rid of all the books. They were everywhere - on the small sofa, on the dining room table, which was a small, folding metal camp type, on all the chairs so that, at times, there was no place even to sit. I hunted out the food I had preserved in bottles while at Nawapara and stacked the shelves with something to give us a more balanced diet.
Keith had either not been able to find this food or had been too busy to search. I am convinced, beyond all doubt, that a man is not meant to live alone. There has to be the female touch and, in our case, it also meant searching out the crockery, cutlery, a small two-burner bottled-gas stove and a little tin oven in which to bake bread. As we had no wardrobes in the hut, all clothing, bedding, towels etc. had to be kept in trunks, stacked one above the other.
With Bruce coming home again on school vacation in less than two months, a place had to be found for him as the hut could scarcely accommodate Keith and myself. With fears of early winter rains, it was not really building time, but something had to be done to shelter our son. We decided to use the broken pieces of half-baked bricks salvaged from the kiln and, this time, make full-height walls.
It was really the wrong time to construct the roof because the Forest Department would not issue permits for timber or bamboo so soon after the monsoon. We did, however, have on hand some very useful and reasonably waterproof covers used by herds-boys and crop watchers. These are made from two mats of woven slithers of bamboo between which are sandwiched large overlapping leaves. In lieu of proper roofing, we laid these over a bamboo frame. Fortunately, during that winter, the rain was light!
For extra protection, Keith bought a large roll of polyethylene sheeting in Ranitola and this saved us from a thorough soaking, during more than one deluge. For doors, I used roll-up blinds made from thin strips of bamboo and overlaid with green floral plastic sheeting. Clear plastic, hemmed at the top and bottom, to hold inserted bamboo sticks, served as roll-up "windows". Under normal weather conditions, they kept out both wind and rain. Our bathroom, too, was unique. With no cement available at first, the floor was covered with a deep layer of pebbles to prevent us stepping out of the tub and into mud.
We had quite a number of visitors during that first year in the hut. These included our dear friends Dr. Ivan Collett and his wife, Maria and their two children, Murray and Hazel. We bedded them down on bags of hay, which were attacked by termites during the night, much to the amusement of the children. Bruce had his experience, too, when his bed began to sink into the soft mud floor. Dennis, who had been a volunteer with us during the famine, returned from England with his fiancée and, at the same time, another friend also called to spend a few days. This was the largest group we ever had to accommodate at one time at Rigalto Bank. Even the old office-tent, now repaired, had to be pressed into service.
Cooking for ten people with such primitive facilities was no small feat. Seating them for meals during the day was not a great problem, when the weather was kind. An old packing case lid, mounted on four forked posts driven into the ground, served as a rustic table. It was at nights when we experienced some difficulties in entertaining guests. Winter nights in the interior, hilly parts of India can really be cold. To get from one side of the dining table to the other, we had to go out the back door, skirt the hut and come in by the front, or vice versa. Our guests always were most intrigued by this circuitous regimen.
It was about the same time that we had another very distinguished visitor -- Shri Pal Lakshman Lallipur, Secretary of the Bihar branch of the IACF. He had challenged us to take up the famine relief program in 1967 and, ostensibly, had visited this time to see the fruits of that emergency project. His comment, after being our guest at Rigalto Bank, was that we were on a "perpetual state of picnic! "
By the time of our second monsoon at Rigalto Bank, the tarred-felt roofing had perished to the point where it had many holes. The Leprosy Clinic came to the rescue by providing us with hundreds of antibiotic injection bottles. The roof was so low that, whenever it leaked, we could reach up to elevate the holed area by wedging an empty bottle between the bamboo supports and the tarred-felt sheeting. Or sometimes a patch would be stuck over the hole. Every tin, earthen pot or the like, had to be saved to catch the drips where a leak could not be checked. In most cases, we did save the earthen floor from becoming a quagmire, but there were times when we had to weather out the most violent of storms that lashed our little dwelling, both inside and out.
Even after we were able to get tiles, some of these occasionally were removed by the wind, crows or rats, cracked by large hail-stones or dissolved by the rain, if they had not been baked properly. It was so disconcerting to go to bed, only to wake finding a wet patch soaked right through to the mattress. For this reason, during the monsoon, I always kept the beds covered with large sheets of plastic. And, as there was no other place to escape, at times we just had to sleep in the wet bed anyway. All we could do was to lay something thick over the mattress to save us from the damp.
Even though our living conditions were so primitive, we were happy and often made a joke of our inconveniences. We may have been on a low economic and cultural level but, with renewed faith in Christ, we were really riding high. We were now one with the people we had come to serve - fully accepted. When the right time came, during the next dry, hot season, tiles were baked and Bruce's apartment roofed, along with Keith's new office.
The hut gets a tiled roof - foreground Ruth with the project's first movie projector -- the district’s first cinema.
The toilet was moved nearer to the hut and we treated ourselves to a squat-type Indian-style porcelain toilet bowl with "S" bend water-trap. With no cement available at the time, the "septic tank" was just a big, covered hole in the ground in which the termites did the work of bacteria. It was quite effective when flushed with a bucket of water and proved to be hygienic, fly-proof and odourless. In our part of the world, it was considered to be a very modern innovation and was copied by a number of our more progressive Indian friends.
As the years passed, we gradually improved the hut. As already mentioned, it was built on sloping ground. If we filled in the low side of the floor to make it level, it would have caused us to bump our heads on the roofing beams so the floor on the high side had to be dug out. This had the effect of making our floor lower than the ground outside and, in particular, lower than the drain that ran beside the hut. There were times when rats or termites burrowed into the floor and walls to cause water from the drain to burst into our hut. That floor was the worry of my life until, much later, the Cameron Edison Trust gave us funds to buy cement and have stones collected and broken to make concrete. If we, personally, had been able carefully to plan the hut in the first place, and had there been time to construct it properly, under supervision, we could have had a floor as nice as those in the Sahaganj village homes across the river.
A floor made in the proper way is levelled and plastered with cow-dung and clay, well mixed with water to make it spread nicely. When this dries, special clay, mixed with water to the consistency of liquid starch, is washed over the floor with a piece of rag. When the floor is swept and treated in this way twice a week, a lovely smooth polish can be achieved. I longed to have such a floor of which I could be proud, but my wish never was realized. Later I had to be content with that concrete floor which can be really cold in the winter when there is no way of heating such a tiny hut.
Before we acquired the concrete floor, there were numerous times when our dogs, Fauji and Honey, dug deep holes in the earthen floor as they searched burrows for snakes and rats. These unwelcome visitors found the hut a refuge from the heat of summer and the cold of winter. It was extremely dangerous to walk anywhere at night without a torch or lantern. Even inside the hut, occasionally we found Kraits and Cobras, also scorpions. Tragically, our two dogs eventually were to die from Cobra bites. The snakes liked to curl up in the store, under the pile of trunks between our bedroom and the living room. It was always most important to tuck in the mosquito net, not only to keep out the dreaded Anopheles, but also those other predators such as snakes, scorpions, spiders and rats.
Although, eventually, we were able to fit two doors to the hut, we never did get proper windows. "Whiskers", our beautiful Siamese cat, took full advantage of this. He would find his way in through the crack between the roof and the top of the walls. He also squeezed his way in past the plastic window blinds. "Whiskers" was always forgiven for he helped to reduce the rodent population. On many occasions, as though doing me a favour, he would bring home every kind of vermin from tiny mice about one inch long to huge field rats nearly as big as himself. These he would lovingly deposit on or by my bed.
Before we were able to find a mate for "Whiskers", occasionally he found it necessary to visit Sahaganj village, on the other side of the Rigalto River. So intense were his desires that, even when the river was in flood, he would swim across in a desperate bid to find relief. There were times when he had to fight off other male cats - dozens of them - which left him clawed and bleeding.
It was on such occasions that no amount of discipline on my part could restrain Whiskers from seeking the comfort he thought only I could give. He generally arrived home around two in the morning, to force his way in through the small window by my bed. "Meow, Meow!", he cried and the more I tried not to hear him, the more he insisted on attention by jumping up on the bed and walking around the edge of the mattress, outside the mosquito net. Finally, in desperation, he would try to tear the net open. In spite of all my threats, Whiskers won every time and invariably ended up in bed with me, after first demanding a meal. Not only that, but he chose the middle of the bed. No matter how many times I pushed him away, he always came back. The only way I was assured of sleep was to curl myself around him.
The animals were a great comfort to me, especially in times of loneliness, when Keith was away on tour or in town shopping. With wild animals and bandits constantly in the area, there always was a real element of risk. I shall never forget the frightening experience I once had when Keith was away on a long trip and the whole local population knew of his absence. It was before we had a back door, so what could I have done to make our hut secure against terrorists like Young Ali and his gang? And, anyway, during the summer, after we fitted our doors, they always had to be left open to get a "cool" breeze. After all, the dogs and our hurricane lanterns were our main security and protection.
Keith and I had twin beds and, on this occasion, only my bed had the mosquito net hung. During the middle of the night, I was conscious that something was wrong. A feeling of unease and fear came over me, disturbing my sleep. As I came awake, my heart skipped a beat to hear heavy breathing coming from Keith's bed. The breathing was not at all like Keith's and, anyway, he was away in town and never would have come home and slipped into bed without my knowing.
There was one arrogant Muslim of Nawapara village who, with his companions, deliberately used to visit me after Keith had left home and when all the staff had gone to lunch. On one occasion, he became very officious, demanding that I play him records and cassettes and give him free medicine. I had to remind him in rather strong words, that his own community would never tolerate a male member visiting another man's wife, especially when her husband was away. But this presumptuous young up-start seemed to be afraid of no one. Keith was always a bit apprehensive whenever he had to leave home, knowing that Islamiya found me rather attractive.
Who was in Keith's bed? I could not see, so being careful not to knock the things from my soap- box dressing table, I felt for my spectacles and, with heart pounding, reached for my torch which always had to be on hand for emergencies such as this. Whoever was in Keith's bed was sleeping very soundly, and audibly so. Turning on my torch, I flashed it through the net in the direction of my uninvited guest and there he was, fully exposed, with bare flanks to get maximum abdominal cooling.
At first, I was infuriated, until I realized he was probably acting out of a clear conscience, in wanting to keep me company while Keith was away. Nevertheless, he just had to be told that, after all, this was not really acceptable behaviour. Turning on the torch again, I flashed it in the eyes of the intruder and shouted, "Get out of that bed immediately", in a tone of voice that made his tail curl between his legs. Although it hurt me to chide this beautiful big dog in such a way, "Fauji" had to understand that, after all, he was not a human being.
It was midway through those years of sojourn in the hut that we were able to redesign the roof completely, equipping it with hand-made tiles, the whole roof had to come off for the renovations, it was a good opportunity to raise the height of the walls to give us at least four inches more head-room How nice it would be to have this extra space and be saved from further embarrassment when tall guests bumped their heads on the supporting beams! It was some months later, when Cameron Edison Trust funds arrived, that finally we were able to cement the floor.
It so happened that I was returning from South India at the very time the flooring job was being done and Keith had to meet me at the airport. All he could do was leave instructions with our Indian colleagues before he set off for the 180 miles trip to Ranitola.
During the three days he was off the job to fetch me, it rained with all the contents of the hut out in the weather, protected as well as possible with sheets of plastic. With so little time to complete the work, because of the inclement weather, our colleagues decided to skimp on procedures! Instead of first digging out the earthen floor, they went straight ahead with laying and pounding the stone and then pouring the cement. When we arrived home, it seemed that the roof had dropped toward us even more because the floor was six inches higher than before! We had gained four inches on the walls and roof, only to lose six inches on the floor! To make matters worse, the doors would not open so we had to dig out a portion of the new cement floor just to allow the doors to swing fully.
In spite of the physical struggle to survive all those years in the hut, our ministry with the ACDP and its Nav Jiwan Leprosy Clinic, was most rewarding. Our simple residence was later improved by electrification - a dual voltage system, perhaps unique throughout the whole world! Keith did all the installation himself, providing us with 230 volt fluorescent lighting, fans and radiators until 10 p.m. It was then that the electrically powered irrigation pumps, oil-mill, thresher, workshop, main office block, recreation centre and cinema closed down. During the hot summer months, we found it more efficient to irrigate in the cool of the night.
While the 415 Volt, three-phase generator and smaller single phase machine operated, they charged a bank of batteries, through a rectifier, which gave us 32 volt D.C.. This provided us with lights and fans, which could be, used right through the night, if necessary. Electric power was also supplied to our toilet, Bruce's room, Keith's, Kalemari's and the Farm Manager's offices and also the training centre. When all the switches were "ON," including those for our high powered mercury street lights, the ACDP farm looked like Coney Island or Luna Park and could be seen from the Samrapari Plateau, thirty miles away! Could we have asked for more? The Project was riding high and there were still higher peaks to climb as a result of Shri Pal Lakshman Lallipurs' visit, but I shall leave it to Keith to tell that story.
Agricultural Training School
Students of the Agricultural Training School
Electric power to the Agricultural Training School