Missão American Board. Distrito de Inhambane:
Rev. Francis S. Tucker,
Supervisor.Caixa Postal, 33,
Inhambane.
África Oriental.
August 27, 1928.Dear Miss Turner,
I have felt inspired to write to you several times during the past year or so. I don't know whether in the teaching profession you have times or not when a bit of encouragement and appreciation help
or nomake things seem more worth while. I know I have such times, and I imagine most people do. Perhaps this letter will fit conveniently into such a time.I remember telling you before I left college that I thought the course we had with you in Advanced Physiology was the most practical course I had had in college. I little knew then how true that statement was, but I can say it more emphatically now than then. So manymany [sic] times I have had occasion to thank my stars that I had that course. Perhaps you would like to hear a few of them. We went to Portugal in the Fall after I left college and were there eight months studying the language. It was while there that I knew of the new arrival to come in the family. Of the nine months before Helen Frances was born, we were in Portugal four, travelling all over Europe nearly fortwo [sic] more and then a month on the way out here. It was then that I was thenkful [sic] that I knew how to test urine myself. I made my own little kit and used it the whole n
oine months. (This is beginning to sound like a Lydia Pinkham advertisement, isn't it? Please excuse.We went from Portugal to Johannesburg in South Africa, which is a big city and a very interesting one. It's half white and half black, so you can imagine the problems it presents, on all sides. Our Mission carries on social, educational, religious, and medical work there, and we had a chance to get acquainted with it all during the nine months we were there. I enjoyed especially going about with the nurse or doctor and helping in the cases. I incidentally got to be quite a midwife myself. Having a baby of my own, is the biggest entering wedge in trying to help the mothers here take care of their babies. Such a need as there is along that lines. My biggest ambition now that we are here about the kraals of heathen and Christian women is to be able to have hygiene and mothercraft talks with them. The great handicap is the native dialect which I have not yet learned. May be you can't see how the Physiology class helped me in this too, but it did. I think the biggest thing you can do that class, Miss Turner, is to set the girls thinking about body organism, how it functions, & should, or could be made to. It makes life whole lot fuller, I think, to know about these things.
I guess I am getting quite involved in the things I am trying to say. There have been such numbrless [sic] times when I've thought "Suppose that I had never known about that." The nutrition part of the course is practical, and especially here, where an effort has to be made to get the right kinds of foods for "Feeding the Family". I think it's going to be great fun to them properly, calori-acally and vitamine-ly speaking.
The other day, I had a good time here with the Doctor and his wife who is a nurse. We went up to the boy s [sic] school about thirty miles from here, and examined the forty-five new boys entering the school. My job was testing their hemoglobin and taking thepulse. [sic] It certainly brought back memories of jabbing each other's fingers in Phys. 4!
Another funny thing happened the other day, when the Doctor was telling of readings of an interesting experiment that had been done by someone in America on the amount of oxygen used up in ascending and decreasing stairs by college students. Of course it was Dr. Benedict, and Frank was reminded of the time he met Peg Speare on her laborious way up stairs in Clapp, and wondered what on earth was the matter, (and Peg had to start over again because she had to laugh at the expression on his face!
I hope I haven't bored you with this raving and reminiscing. But I hope that in it I have been able to show you how very much worth while I think you Physiology classes are, and if I thought it would do any good, I would propose to the Faculty that they be made compulsory for everyone who wanted to be fit to live after they left college. I hope that you hafe [sic] lots of girls in the course who do much better than I did, and who learn much more, but I doubt if you will have any who enjoy it more or who are more grateful in after years for having had it.
With best wishes for continued success in your work,
Very sincerely,
Annah Bursaw Tucker