POOR BUT CHARMING

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 10, Issue 89, 3 February 1947, Page 4

POOR BUT CHARMING

RELIEF WORKERS IN GREECE “The islanders had- marvellous blue weather, warm sea, islands carpeted with flowers and lots of delicious fruit. But they rarely had milk, or meat, or even fish since the Italians had requisitioned their nets, and without UNRRA rations they would never have kept alive. They were usually poor and quite often dirty, wearing ragged clothes and living in primitive barns or houses, but they were always delightfully generous and full of fun and very very appreciative of the medical help that our New Zealand CORSO team brought to their doctorless islands.” This is how Miss Louise Logan, the first CORSO relief worker among the Greek islands to return to New Zealand, describes her stay. Miss Logan, a Karitane nurse who served as an ambulance driver in Dunedin before she volunteered for CORSO, was one of a team of four New Zealanders under Dr. Athol Patterson who made a regular threeweekly medical circuit through the islands. Their conveyance was a “caique,” a 40ft. fishing boat with auxiliary engine, converted for the purpose by installing six bunks (the two extra were for interpreters) and some cupboards and stools. “We would land at dawn at an island,” she continued, “and begin to unload our medical gear on to donkeys that came down the steep path from the leading village to meet us. The path was often stepped and always it zigzagged to a hilltop, because the whitewashed villages were built up there on the high points in the bad old days as defence against bandits. The whole population would turn out to meet us and messages would go to other villages, to come in to the clinic that we would at once establish .in some empty house. We got plenty of cooperation and even if a man had only two eggs in the whole world he would press us to accept one as a gift. But water was very hard to get. Often it had to be carried up from the coast on donkey-back or on women’s heads. So we might have to do a day’s injections and treatments on a couple of large jugs of it—and, of course, disinfectants.” t

“While on shore at their main base on Syros island the CORSO workers were billeted-with private families. Miss Logan’s hosts were wealthy by island standards. They actually had a lavatory, and a great

tank cut into the rock under the house for their own water. Poor families might have only one blanket among them and everybody covered up their pictures in summer because of the flies and washed their carpets in the sea and put them away until winter when floor coverings really were needed.” Clothing from New Zealand and elsewhere had been “pathetically welcome” to people many of whom had had nothing new since the war started. The quality of everything sent from New Zealand had been excellent. But distribution was “a heart-breaking business.” You see some woman would get a sound but rather faded nightdress and then the very next to come up ‘a really elegant pullover.” CORSO woi'kers will gradually be returning to New Zealand in the next few months although some with special qualifications are remaining longer at the particular request of other organisations in Greece and will continue to be maintained out of New Zealand CORSO funds.