Land of Old Wives' Tales

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 394, 10 January 1947, Page 14

Land of Old Wives' Tales

HREE members of the New Zealand CORSO relief team in Greece returned to Auckland just after Christmas; they arrived by air from Sydney after spending slightly more than two months on the journey from Athens via Egypt and Singapore. J. A. Horne, deputy-leader and chief administrative officer of the team, was on his way home to Hastings; Louise Logan, a transport officer also trained in Karitane work, was hurrying onto Dunedin; and Irene McLean, a trained nurse, spent the week-end in Auckland and called at The Listener office to give some news of the work she had been doing. Mr. Horne, in a brief interview, outlined the general work of the teams and gave a short account of his views of some of the difficulties that are faced in Greece by relief teams working there. No CORSO workers were stationed in the main towns, Mr. Horne said; they worked in: groups in the larger villages and about the islands, setting up clinics and moving from village to village in rotation over periods of a week to a fortnight. The idea was that peasant women and others would thus come to know the particular day the team would be in attendance to give out medical supplies or to give medical or dental attention and advice. All the relief teams were operating in districts where no local medical aid was available. Miss Logan worked with Dr. Athol Patterson, of Wanganui, with a health team in the Cyclades islands. The team consisted of five members who moved from island to island in a caique converted to provide living quarters; this team, like al] the others at work, found its most pressing problem malnutrition. No Starvation "But I must stress the fact that none of our doctors found any case of. actual starvation in Greece," Mr. Horne said. "UNRRA has done a good job for war relief and the work to be done now is really education and not relief. There ‘is very general malnutrition and widespread disease, and much good work has been done by UNRRA and by our teams investigating and checking and setting up clinics for preventive treatment and advice." "So what would you consider the greatest trouble now?" "Politics. And then lack of shelter in the villages," he answered promptly. "There are no building materials and communications are shocking-roads and railways are still in a bad state and even the villages that have not suffered actual war damage are in a bad way. It will go hard with the peasants in many villages when supplies left by UNRRA and CORSO are exhausted. These supplies, by the way, will be distributed by responsible relief organisations." "Are their own crops back to normal production yet?" "Well, of course, their fruit and vegetable crops are splendid and this season they had an excellent wheat crop. But all their farming is on the most primitive scale and they have to work extremely hard to win their livelihood. And they like meat, they like meat very much indeed and they just can’t get enough of it. What they do get is mainly mutton. But without it cheese is their

staple diet-goat’s milk and sheep’s milk cheese. And they eat quantities of bread." % ie * O Miss McLean Greece is a land of old wives’ tales-and the old wives who tell them are the grandmothers. The grandmothers who look after the children while the younger women put in eight or nine hours’ solid toil in the fields; the grandmothers who go to the hospitals to sleep at night with their daughters and their newly-born grandchildren; the grandmothers who are the midwives working rigidly by the rules of their older wives’ tales; the grand-

° mothers who oppose every idea that seems new-fangled to them (such as the idea that newborn babies should sleep in» separate cots and not in _ their mothers’ beds); and the grandmothers who with giggles line up for inspection by the visiting foreign doctor in the hope of getting some free pills, some pink water, or best of all, a few assorted injections. Pills Were Popular "They all love injections," Miss McLean said; "They love themthey’re used to them because the Germans have been selling them their own outmoded drugs for years. Give them pills or give them injections and they’re happy. But try to give them advice, try to give them a few napkins for the baby, try to persuade them to give a 15 months old child any solid food other than hard-boiled egg and they’ll simply shrug." Miss McLean worked for most of the time in the northern districts about Florina near the Yugoslav border with Dr. Alison Hunter of Wanganui. There was also a dental nurse in the team and she found the adults competing eagerly with the children for her attentions. The team travelled by truck and sometimes slept in it. "Malnutrition," she said, "began with the babies-they are breast-fed up to 15 months and often up to two years; and if they are ever given any solid food it’s very solid indeed-hard-boiled egg! Then the children go gut minding the flocks-it’s pleasant to watch, the goats with bells and the children with their long sticks keeping the flocks on the pastures and off the roads--but it means that those children aren’t at school, and if they aren’t at school they are missing the cooked meal that UNRRA supplies for them. They

probably share instead, the enormous and heavy meal that their parents haye about two o'clock after their mothers come home from working in the fields and their fathers come in out of the too-hot sun outside the village cafe where they have been sitting all the morning smok- | ing and drinking their terrible oyzo and discussing politics." "Haven’t the men been in the fields too?" "The Men Have a Lovely Life" "Not unless it’s harvest time. The men have a lovely life in Macedonia; it’s the women who have the terrible life. But at least they have sunshine and lots of fruit and vegetables." "And are they drab or do they wear gay clothes?" "They wear their national costumes | and every village is different. It’s quite wonderful to see them on saints’ days and feast days-they have lots of holidays. The women do the most beautiful embroidery, even on their field working clothes." "What’s this terrible oyzo you mentioned?" "That's their favourite cure for malaria. It’s distilled from the grapes after the wine is made and it seems pure poison to me. Then they have another one called chiparo and that’s double-distilled: and seems like double pure poison to me. But they take them and say they are good cures for malaria." Miss McLean: worked for some time in-a baby clinic undertaking a survey of infant health in much the same way as other teams worked in clinics to make tuberculosis surveys. She said she instructed many mothers how to soft-bdil an egg and how to use dried milk and tinned milk for babies and also how to cook vegetables. But she said that such work was always made more difficult because fit was first necessary to break down the opposition to any change. In the schools she found many teachers most helpful and sometimes the head of a village was progressive and interested in new ideas-for instance one mayor arranged to have folding canvas baby cots made to the pattern Miss McLean gave him-but very often politics interrupted and quashed the work she was trying to do. A committee composed of | members of two political parties was an impossibility; and sometimes a month’s careful organising would be ruined ovefnight by the simple change of an official. The Snowball Grows Mr. Horne’s opinion that it is education and rehabilitation-not actual war relief-that the Greek peasants need today is shared by Miss McLean; and education and rehabilitation are matters for long-term planning and patience. The peasants are steeped in tradition and naturally do not change their ways easily; but the snowball of change is growing: here a child escapes malaria because it is put to bed under netting early enough to avoid the malaria mosquito in the evenings and before long other families are putting their children to bed early too; there a mother finds herself more comfortable in a clean and airy hospital than in one in which the windows are tightly closed and food is left uncovered in the wards; somewhere else an unconvinced mother is won over to scientific feeding by envy of a baby more beautiful than her own; or a farmer is encouraged by a neighbour’s success +o use better methods. Education works

slowly, but it works. \

J.