Whakatane Aid For Tahiti Youth

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 16, Issue 3, 2 October 1950, Page 2

Whakatane Aid For Tahiti Youth

“From far Tahiti comes a call for a missionary training school that will benefit hundreds of : native youths,” states Pastor M. C. Bland, Adventist minister in Whakatane. “Seventh-day Adventist Sabbath schools in all the world have united in one big generous effort to meet this need.” Last Saturday, Adventists in Whakatane and district contributed to this worthy purpose. Tahiti is in French Oceania, whose scattered isles break the ocean for about 1,000 miles east to west, and about the same distance north to south. They are often considered the most beautiful in all the South Seas; but heathenism and pestilence have marred their romantic history. An ordained native minister, Seme T. Vuloaloa, has aptly expressed the native viewpoint: “Now we are grateful, very grateful, because the message of our Saviour lias reached us, and the days of darkness and of cannibalism are past, and now, instead of worshipping the devil we worship the true God.”

The school will be complete with dormitories for young men and women, and buildings and all necessary equipment for instruction in domestic science and manual arts. It is part of the progressive programme for the backward peoples of the Pacific, where Adventist medical, educational and evangelical work extends for about 6,000 miles from Pitcairn in the east to Central New Guinea in the west, and includes over 17,000 Sabbath school mem-, bers. Water transport is essential, and the Adventist Pacific fleet is one of the largest fleets of mission ships afloat anywhere. It began last century when their first ship, the “Pitcairn,” built by Sabbath school offerings, sailed these seas.