Now I can understand how hard it was for them to learn those nursery rhymes in English. Luckily for us, it was an American pastor and teacher, Dr. Ola Hanson, who developed written Kachin. I say “lucky” because he used the Roman alphabet. We each have a Bible and hymn-book in Kachin to take with us to church and school chapel. It helps our language study to mumble along with the congregation.
Mabel knew that her father, with Scottish roots, would enjoy her word pictures about the bagpipes played for the colonial governor who had just paid a visit to upper Burma:
There were about 150 dancers dressed in red and black, with beautiful woven Kachin bags over their shoulders. The women had on big silver necklaces and the men carried swords that gleamed in the floodlights. While I was impressed with the bagpipers and the dancers, the governor looked a bit bored. His Excellency is a huge Irishman.
It is difficult for us to imagine a time without the Internet connecting loved ones spread across the globe. Letters took a long time back and forth, but Mabel, Martin and their families tried to keep up conversations by mail. However out of date were the letters by the time they arrived, Mabel’s mother would share the weekly news from Burma with relatives and neighbors. When they had made the rounds, Florence Orr would save them in her dresser drawer. She would write back about what was happening in Birmingham.
Mabel, in turn, would recount visits to schools and attempts to master a new language: “Some of the students were helping me clean house the other day. I went through all sorts of antics, showing them what I wanted scrubbed and swept. We had a good time laughing at each other.”
Bhamo, February 23, 1934
Dear Families,
Our first long “jungle trip” to the mountains will be the main theme for our weekly letter. The alarm clock made us rise at 5:00 last Saturday morning. We literally took up our bed and walked, or rather “rolled,” bed rolls made of green canvas, with leather straps. We took a car twelve miles to the end of the road and transferred to mules and ponies. At ten o’clock we stopped at the village of Law Dan and had a delicious breakfast; the head of the school was our host. It was our first meal under a thatch roof. The walls of the house were made of bamboo matting. Huge clumps of bamboo, teak forests and waterfalls along the trail. We heard the shrill cries of the black gibbon, a large monkey too wild to come in view of the path. Before we came in sight of the village we were to visit, we heard drums and bagpipes coming to welcome us. All the school students were lined up along the road, singing to us. We were escorted to a spotlessly clean house, which even had a small heater, welcome at night. A steady stream of villagers came bringing an abundance of all kinds of vegetables, eggs, chickens, and rice. Had delicious chicken curry and soups. A pretty young girl gave me a bag she had woven. Monday we walked over to the village of Sin Lum. Nothing could feel better than a hot bath in a big tin tub after such a trip! Love, Mabel
Sometimes homesickness crept into the handwritten note at the end of Mabel’s report letter: “No U.S. letters this week. It is Mother’s Day and I thank you for your constant love and support.”
Slow mail service was a frustration even within Burma. When Mabel needed to have several teeth filled, she had to go all the way back to Rangoon to see a dentist. “We better complain to His Majesty the King of England about the mails [Burma then a British colony],” she wrote to her new husband when her letter to him didn’t arrive. Then her mood lightened: “The train compartment had my name as ‘Lady Mabel.’ What did the trainman think of British royalty eating her lunch from an Indian tiffin-carrier [stacked lunch bucket]?”
While Mabel was having dental work done in the capital city, Martin was working in a village on the border between Burma and China: “I learned more in a week about village people than I would have in ten years in the United States, because I learned how they feel about life, and even about Americans.”
Mabel was ready to return home to Bhamo, and she was impatient because a washout on the train tracks kept her in Mandalay on Martin’s June 29 birthday, exactly a week after hers. Their first birthdays as a married couple, and they could not be together: “Look in the bottom of my brown trunk. I fixed up your gift in case I didn’t get back in time to celebrate with you.” Then Mabel described her June 22 celebration: “A friend and I had durian last night. It has such a strong garlic smell that the others made us eat it on the back porch. Birthday dinner, chocolate cake and ice cream finally took the taste away. This is one fruit we don’t want in our little orchard.”
In August of 1934, Mabel, who struggled with dental problems all of her life, found herself headed back to Rangoon to the dentist: “I need several teeth pulled and partial dentures. I feel much too young for that.” But the dentist knew that Mabel would be far away from regular checkups and told her to wait in the city until the dentures were finished.
To a friend in the States, Mabel described the long ride home on an Irrawaddy River boat:
Ribbons of fog. When I turned out the light at 11:00 p.m., all the bugs and insects known and unknown to Burma decided to visit. With much sheet-flapping and arm-waving I finally shooed a few of them away.
In September Martin received a letter from his sister that their grandmother Jeanette, Jasper’s widow, had died. “If only I could convey something of the beauty and peacefulness that was about her when she was laid to rest,” Liz continued, “you would have been consoled as we were.” Their Grannie was buried in Seneca, South Carolina, the village where Martin was born. “The minister spoke of her, telling about how her young husband Jasper had been saved by a black man and how that had influenced all of us, especially your work in Burma.”
October 21, 1934, was Mabel and Martin’s first wedding anniversary. An English government official and his wife treated the young couple to a trip down the Irrawaddy River. To his family Martin explained such a luxury: “Of course, we would be remembering and celebrating if we were out in a jungle hut, but to get entirely away from work and have three days on a river boat just at this time is a real treat.”
Mabel added:
After months of intense heat we enjoyed the wind that was so strong it blew the toast off our plates. At one village we saw an officer weighing 360 rupee’s [money] of black, gummy opium that people had tried to smuggle across the China border. It weighed eighteen pounds! In lower Burma the street price would be more than three times what it is upcountry.
At another village we wondered why two long poles were stuck into the bamboo fences around each house. We learned that, by law, each house must have one pole with a square of tin or matting on it for beating out fire on thatched roofs, and one pole must have a hook on it for pulling burning thatch off a roof.
After a long walk up the river we had a leisurely ride back to our boat on a small Chinese sampan. The moon seemed so near to us. Mother, I shouldn’t admit it but when the students sing “Carolina Moon” in English, I do long for all of you. Letters from home make Friday a big day.
Martin’s first anniversary gift to his wife included a love note that ended: “You said that you would go to the end of the earth with me. Well, you did.”
After almost a year of study, Mabel and Martin had learned the Kachin language well enough to speak it in public. Mabel met with school students and Well-Baby Clinic mothers while Martin advised village school teachers and pastors. Sometimes he traveled by car, sometimes on a pony, and other times on foot.
Once a village chief sent an invitation of reed branches crossed, a sign that he wished their paths would cross. Martin was eager to accept:
With ponies and pack mules we started to the chief’s village, across the China border. We spent one night in a storehouse filled with rice.
