No Sunday Cooking At Munda Mission

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30956, 12 January 1966, Page 2

No Sunday Cooking At Munda Mission

The Sabbath is still observed in the strictest Methodist tradition at Munda, in the Solomon Islands, where Miss Coral Dodds, of Lyttelton, spent a year as a Voluntary Service Abroad worker.

“We did not even cook food or light a fire on Sundays,” she said yesterday.

Dishes were washed “in the cause of hygiene,” but no other housework was done. If Miss Dodds typed a letter home on a Sunday she felt a bit guilty as the clatter of the machine could be interpreted as work by the natives.

Picnics were frowned upon. So was swimming on a Sunday. One of the nursing sisters at the Methodist mission station, where Miss Dodds served, incurred the displeasure of the natives by collecting shells on a Sunday. To them she was working because this was a job to them —picking up shells for the edible fish inside.

‘So we did just nothing on Sundays,” said Miss Dodds. It was the older generation of Solomon Islanders who took this rigid attitude to the day of rest. Closely H atched Younger people, though still strictly controlled by their parents, were adopting a more modern outlook to Sunday activities, she said. “All Europeans were watched very closely to see

if they broke the rules —and for leadership,” she said. ‘•This is fair enough, as it was Europeans who laid down the laws.”

Some of the English boys working there for the British Government under the Voluntary Service Overseas organisation “startled the natives” with their behaviour.

“They only acted as they would have done at home and were left pretty much to their own resources. They were not bound by mission stand-

ards as we were,” she said. Miss Dodds found that Europeans on a mission station had to be on their best behaviour all the time. “At first I felt a terrific weight of responsibility, but gradually it became a way of life and it did not worry me at all,” she said. The first V.S.A. girl on this mission station. Miss Dodds was a veritable “maid of all work” and enjoyed every minute of it.

Her main job was to look after 15 girls between 14 and 16 years from other islands who were boarders at the mission school.

“As a kind of matron’s assistant I had to see to their u’elfare before and after school and at lunch time,” she said.

Domestic Courses

While at the mission headquarters at Munda she conduc. ted two domestic courses for older girls who could not cope with more advanced school work. She taught them how to make a stove from biscuit tins, elementary sewing, cooking and household management. Any spare time she had was spent doing clerical work for the administration. At one stage because the kindergarten was without a teacher, Coral Dodds took on the job for two hours every morning.

“I had no time to get bored, we were so busy,” she said. “In the little leisure time I had I used to go to a Friday night youth club, where I made many friends. On Saturday afternoons we would sometimes go for picnics or hikes, but it was usually too hot to go out in the sun.” Swimming did not have a great appeal as there were sharks in the lagoon, though she never heard of them causing any trouble —probably because the natives did not go swimming. War Reminders

The Munda mission was situated on an airfield, built by the Japanese in World War 11. It has been in the heart of the American and Japanese fighting. “You see beached submarines on the coast, crashed American and Japanese aircraft in the bush. There are still unexploded bombs in the bush and these occasionally go off,” she said.

The mission station ran a hospital, where native nurses were trained. “Several of the nurses have 'now qualified as ward sisters, which is a great credit to the missionary sisters’ training,” she added. There were a school and hostel, an engineering workshop, where the mission boats were serviced, a carpentry department and administration offices also on the station. “We had about 15 Europeans on the station and about 100 natives, including the school pupils and workers,” she said. Miss Dodds, who went to Munda straight from Christchurch Girls’ High School, will enter the University of Canterbury this year to do an arts degree.