March 6, 1950
Again I am long writing you. The days find us deeper and deeper in plans for leaving. I've filed for passports, insurance and even for making my will.
For the last four months I've been in direct charge of a woman's ward and am about to go mad. I've never seen creatures who fall apart so easily! One of then insists on going into heart failure every little while.
The job at Camp Meade keeps me busy too, delivering babies, treating hundreds of cold complications, and cuts. Cuts in the strangest places! One fellow came in with a bleeding mouth which he said came of eating razor blades. Said he had eaten them for years and enjoyed it. Loved to hear them crunch between his teeth. His trouble this time came of not chewing them fine enough!
May 1, 1950
It is nearly 1 a.m. and literally the only chance I've had to write for no telling how long. For weeks it has been like this, an endless stream of work all day and interrupted nights.
Today I began in the operating room as usual at eight and finished at 4 p.m. But then my day had just begun. I still had two wards of surgical patients to look after and new ones to admit. After supper I posted all the patients due for surgery tomorrow and left orders about their preparation on eight floors.
I admit to intense fatigue. Only six weeks more of this and I shall be through here. I look forward to that day as I did to my wedding day-- but for a different reason!
For a long time the Mission Board had wanted Tissie and me to spend a week end with a Baptist Church in West Chester, Pennsylvania. I had not been home for seven week ends, and the one I finally took off meant sacrificing the precious per hour remuneration for Camp Meade duty.
However it turned out to our greatest benefit. We found the church to be the salt of earth, and the young pastor, the Rev. Malcolm MacQueen, a grand person. They are interested in personalizing missions and would like to adopt some special project like our medical work. We came away with the warm feeling that they liked us. I even preached the Sunday morning sermon, out of my heart as usual and calculated to stimulate their feeling of responsibility for a neglected part of the world.
We look forward with joy to a visit with you in Kansas. If there is to be a farewell reception at your church, let there be no tears or laments as though we were going out to be swallowed by demons. I do feel missions is a joyful enterprise, a great adventure. I also feel it is a Christian obligation and shall not be afraid to say so out loud. We do not want to be pitied, or admired for our "sacrifice". It is no sacrifice but a deep satisfaction to thus serve our Lord.
DESTINATION INDIA
October 14, 1950
It was a great day, the last of August, 1950, when the Queen Mary slipped down the Hudson on the first lap of our 15,000 mile journey. We changed to the Chusan in England. Among her many interesting passengers we discovered two old Woodstockites, Bill Whitcomb and the former Dorothy Vaugh, his wife, also returning to serve their "motherland".
We docked at Bombay the most uncomfortably hot and humid day of the whole year I do believe. But there, (wouldn't you know it?) stood another Woodstockite to meet us, David Graham, out here in the export business. He had been commissioned to make all arrangements for our home stretch across to Ongole from where I how write.
There was no doubt of a warm welcome, apart from the weather. We had letters from all the missionaries, and at every station between Madras and Ongole, morning, noon or dead of night, a delegation of them came to the train to greet us.
This letter marks a memorable day in my life, the beginning of a service I looked forward to and planned for so long. Outwardly things seem prosaic enough, unpacking and settling in, but inwardly I feel tremendously excited. All the more reason for thoughtfulness and prayer since I already know some of the problems ahead, the Telugu language being the most immediate. The Easter hymn in the Telugu language is below.
