Into the Great Unknown: Adventures in Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia

by Maurice Harvey

Overview

Author Maurice Harvey returns with another collection of exciting firsthand stories from his time as a missionary and as the Bible Society photojournalist. He recounts many of his firsthand experiences over the years as an international photojournalist in Into the Great Unknown.

The memoir begins with Maurice leaving the safety of his New Zealand home as a young man in the 1960s and heading into deepest Africa—bound for the war-ravaged Congo region. From there, the story continues as Maurice travels across the African continent, through post-Communist Eastern Europe, and then into Asia. His final stop is the mysterious and formidable state of North Korea.

Told with compassion and charm, these stories reflect an eye for the quirky as well the poignant. Leaving New Zealand isolated and far away from everywhere else, was for a young man in 1960, truly an adventure into the unknown. But with the strong assurance that God was with him, it became an adventure of excitement and great enjoyment.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781462063017
Publisher:	iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date:	11/23/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	3 MB

Read an Excerpt

INTO THE GREAT UNKNOWN

Adventures in Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia

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By Maurice Harvey

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 Maurice Harvey
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4620-6299-7

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Chapter One

TO AFRICA—THE JOURNEY July 1960

I made my way along a passage that seemed to rise and fall before me as I entered the dining room. A young woman was clinging to a pillar heaving her stomach out, lunch all over her pretty dress as the floor tipped and rolled beneath her.

Aboard the good ship Monowai, having departed New Zealand on the 9th July 1960, I was bound for the newly independent nation of the Congo, formerly the Belgian Congo. I had seven steel cabin trunks and had painted them bright green. Inside were packed all the things I had been told to bring. These included such exotic items as a hurricane lamp, mosquito net, canvas tent, ten changes of clothing, a compass, typewriter, insect repellent, a set of Rawleigh medicines and notes of useful but unpublished books including Where there is no Doctor and Where there is no Dentist.

A crowd of about 200 family and friends came to see me off. As was the custom in those days when seeing missionaries off by ship, they sang for about an hour. A cloth bag of letters and telegrams was handed to me just before I boarded with instructions to read one a day. All of the boys in my class at the Bible Training Institute and nearly all of the girls had written, plus there were 24 telegrams and many other letters. I managed to make them last for the 50 days of my journey to Africa.

Two folding chairs were provided for my parents to sit on during the farewell ceremony. Mum and Dad enjoyed the occasion with the usual mix of parental joy and sadness. My mother had said that she had asked God to take one of her nine children to the mission field but never expected he would choose two. My eldest sister, Edna, had already been in the Congo for 12 years. When I said farewell to my father, who was a sick man at the time, I knew that I could not expect to see him again. He wrote me a note that read, 'the tears flow ... but I am very proud and happy.' At the last minute he dug into his jacket pocket and produced a handful of half crown silver coins saying, 'It's not much'. But I knew it was a sacrifice for him as a pensioner. I asked my brother Frank to bank them for me.

Finally, at 8.00 p.m. the steamer gave a loud hoot and we threw our coloured paper streamers to the people on the wharf. Our loved ones caught and held the long ribbons of paper. As the ship slowly moved away the streamers tightened then broke. It was a marvellous sensation, a slow moving 15-minute farewell. As we headed towards the open sea it was truly a voyage into the unknown. I felt a sense of excitement with the future being dreadfully unknown. All I could do in those circumstances was to follow the Psalmist's instruction, 'Commit your way unto the Lord, and rest and trust in Him'.

I was sure I was doing the right thing by going to Africa. All I had was a one-way ticket, $300 in travellers cheques, no fixed income or promises of support—just faith that God would provide. We passed through the harbour entrance and out into the open sea. I stood on the deck and watched my homeland disappear. When darkness fell I found the Southern Cross in the night sky and wondered when I would see it again. In my youthful naivety somehow assuming that by the following night it would have disappeared over the horizon. What would my father have thought of me if he knew that? He had a much better knowledge of astronomy than I did.

Two days of eating, resting and sleeping followed—then came the storm. Thankfully I wasn't sick. I met another passenger, May Roy of CIM (or OMF as it is now known) who was a worker in the Philippines. We had tea together and she emphasised the importance of learning the local language as soon as I could.

The Second Engineer had dinner with us one night and regaled us with the story of the ship. The Monowai was built in 1925 and weighed about 11,000 tons. She was a troop carrier during the war, described as an Armed Merchant Cruiser. She was attacked by a submarine near Fiji and later took part in the Normandy landings after being converted to a Landing Ship. 'She's a great old girl, see how well she rides,' he said as he grabbed the salt-cellar before it could roll off the table.

Australia

On arrival in Sydney, I discovered that serious trouble was developing in the Congo. On the 10th of July, the day after I had left New Zealand, the Congolese army had revolted and, among other things, turned on the Belgians who had remained after independence had been declared. Many of the white missionaries had also been targeted. Leaders of the Brethren mission work in Sydney told me in no uncertain terms that the Congo was a bloodbath. They said that there was no way I could go there and that I should turn around and go home. My response was immediate. 'Well in that case,' I said, 'I'll go to the country next door.' I decided to push on with my journey, making Northern Rhodesia my destination for now. I thought perhaps I could engage in language study there while I waited for the Congo to settle down. The Brethren leaders in Sydney had no authority over me so I kept going. My diary records the contradictory remark, 'The future seems quite dark and gloomy, but I am sure all will be well.'

I had a week in Sydney staying with a retired customs officer who drove me around the city so that I could speak at various church meetings. He had a Morris Minor and when he stopped at intersections he would put the car into neutral and yank on the handbrake for all he was worth. Then, when the lights changed, he would put the car into gear and struggle to release the brake he had so fiercely applied. Before long, horns would blare behind us and he would mutter with annoyance about discourteous drivers.

I was booked on the 28,000-ton P&O Liner Oronsay, which would take me as far as Bombay. En route we called at Melbourne, Adelaide and Fremantle. In each port there were people from a local church to meet and entertain me for the day. In Perth they put on a big lunch as well as a tour of the city. Dr Victor Williams and his bride Daphne going to Ireland for their honeymoon were with me me at the purser's table. One night, my diary notes, that after a busy day in Melbourne, Victor and I went through the entire menu. On another day I wrote that our waiter was 'not very cooperative but today he began the day with a smile. We must work him too hard because Victor and I usually go through the menu.'

During the three-day layover in Freemantle I caught up with correspondence. I kept a note of the number of letters I had written. It was customary to write an acknowledgement for every gift received, whether large or small, and I was quickly finding out that this was one of the banes of missionary life. According to my record, by the 3rd December 1960 I had written 796 letters that year, all by hand.

After leaving Fremantle, I came across a couple of missionary ladies returning to East Africa. As soon as they heard where I was going, they set about teaching me Swahili. I worked hard at this new task for the rest of the voyage—only to find out much later that East African Swahili was a little different from Congo Swahili. Nevertheless it was a good introduction to Bantu languages. We crossed the equator on Tuesday 2nd August at 9.48 a.m. Little did I know that this would be the first of numerous crossings in the future. Next day we arrived at Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).

Sri Lanka, India and the Seychelles

We were taken ashore by ship's launch and I spent the day wandering around the markets and streets of this fascinating city. At the Post Office I met a young man who attached himself to me as a guide. He was useful in that he chased off the marauding beggars and rickshaw drivers who continually surrounded us, like one little girl of about 7 with a tiny baby on her back, who looked at me with large black pleading eyes crying, "Eeenglish money."

The first person I met when I disembarked was a Buddhist monk who was on the wharf handing out literature. He courteously encouraged me to read it carefully. This in itself was a challenge and an eye-opener to me and I was surprised to find that it was apparently not only Christians that engaged in evangelism.

Back on board, while we waited to leave the harbour, we were surrounded by small boats full of people selling fruit and curios. One young fellow held up a handful of British silver change. I swapped it for a pound note and he sent up by rope a small carved elephant as an added extra.

At noon the next day we arrived in Bombay (now Mumbai). As we moved slowly against the wharf I could see scores, actually it seemed like hundreds, of uniformed coolies all yelling for business. As soon as the gangway was down they rushed on board and I was surrounded by a dozen grinning, yelling men pleading for work. I chose seven of them. The luggage had been brought out of the baggage room and stacked up on the deck. It was not a little disconcerting to see my bright green tin trunks snatched up, placed on the heads of the porters and quickly leaving the ship. I watched the trunks bobbing up and down in the sea of black heads of the people on the wharf and wondered if I would ever see my luggage again.

I took my turn at customs and immigration and was soon down on the wharf, where New Zealand missionary Harold McGregor was waiting to receive me. He led me to the customs shed and behold, there were my trunks neatly piled up with seven smiling porters holding out their hands for their fee.

The McGregors had a typical Bombay apartment, with a flat roof and painted with a yellow wash, in the suburb of Bandra. On arrival, we sat down to drink several cups of tea and then set off to the market. Once we had purchased some cloth, we took it to a tailor who made up a suit and some shorts for me within a couple of days.

I had a seven-day stay in Bombay and had my first experiences of working with an interpreter while I preached. I was invited to speak at several church services and Bible studies. One day, I spoke at an open-air meeting in Bandra bazaar where we had an audience of over 200 people. My message was interpreted into the local language, Marathi. Harold said that I 'spoke like a professional as though I had been doing this all my life.'

I already knew a little about Bombay from the stories my father had told about the place. He had worked at sea as a young man and served in the merchant navy during the First World War. It was when his ship was replenishing its coal supplies in Bombay that he heard that he had become a father for the first time. I had always entertained a secret wish to visit the place one day. My father would tell us of the way hundreds of coolies would file aboard, each with a basket of coal on his head and tip it into the coal bunker. There were two gangplanks—one up and one down. The coal was usually quite fine and very dusty. As a result, the dust would rise up out of the bunker, enveloping everything and everyone. The coaling went on continuously throughout the night until the bunkers were full. On completion, the ship was in a filthy condition with coal dust everywhere.

What really amazed me about Bombay, were the countless numbers of people. So many living in huts and shacks made of every type of material imaginable, many in a wretched condition. But I soon learned that the poor shacks made of bits of tin, plastic and wood, were not necessarily a sign of poverty. There was such a shortage of housing that many people had to resort to makeshift dwellings. From these simple huts emerged men, women and children in spotless clothes as they set off to work and school.

Another day I went to town on my own and had a great time at the bazaar. As my diary records:

A walk around the Bandra bazaar was a real experience—the yelling of meat vendors as they cheerfully patted slim joints of goat and mutton urging me to buy, the flies, the smells of the fish market and the beefy smell of the beef market. These enterprising 'butchers' had about a four-foot section of the bench and sat in the middle of their piles of meat. It was not laid out according to the way we cut up a carcase, but simply chopped up into small pieces. Roast whole leg of lamb was apparently not included in Indian cuisine. Cows and pigs wandered around along with mangy scabby dogs.

The next day I caught the train into the city where I spent a long time in Crawford Market and bought a few clothes and a suitcase. Later, back at the railway station, I opened my new case to put something away, and a large crowd of people immediately gathered around to see what was inside it! A tout approached me and asked if I had seen Crawford Road yet. No only Crawford market. 'Ah, but you must see the Crawford Road and see the girls in their cages.' I had never heard of this tourist attraction and fortunately declined. Later I learned that this is where young women prostitutes are held, and Harold very gravely said, 'that was wise not to go there.'

As I took in all the suffering and poverty, the beggars, people bathing, eating and sleeping on the streets, the blind and lame, tiny babies lying naked asleep on dirty footpaths, the gabble of a strange language, I was thankful I didn't have to stay in India. I watched a man with neither fingers nor toes rolling through mud in an effort to attract attention and gain a few coins. When I arrived back at the McGregors' apartment, Harold was astounded and a little angry that I had bought the suitcase, telling me that it would have been so easy to be cheated. He was all the more surprised when I told him that I had paid only 30 Rupees for it. The price had started at 300! He sat down and muttered, 'Well I suppose you'll do all right in Africa,' which I took to mean that I knew how to look after myself in a foreign culture.

The Bombay suburban trains deserve a mention. I was advised to go into the city after the morning rush hour. The 10.00 a.m. train was crowded but, I was told, at 8.00 a.m. it would be jam-packed. I went back to the station next morning just to see how packed the trains really were. Every carriage had four doors on either side, and there were usually six to eight men hanging on to and out of each doorway, well beyond the profile of the carriage. Some passengers were riding the buffers between the carriages. There were so many people on the roofs of the trains that I couldn't count them—all riding perilously close to overhead wires that carried 1,500 volts DC.

Here's a quote from a recent article that shows the situation hasn't changed that much:

'The current problem of over-crowding is so grave, and the pressure on the infrastructure and facilities so high, that 4,700 passengers are packed into a 9-rake (nine carriages) during peak hours, as against the rated capacity of 1,700. It is now not uncommon to see 14 to 16 passengers per square meter of floor space, causing what is known as 'super dense crush' load. In other words, 550 people crammed into a carriage built to carry 200.

'There are approximately 3,500 deaths on the Mumbai suburban rail track on a yearly basis—that's about 9 every day! Many of these deaths are caused by people attempting to cross the railway tracks on foot, and avoid taking the overhead bridges that are provided for their use, hence they get hit by the trains. Some passengers die when they sit on the roofs and are electrocuted.'

I took many photographs, which was not easy because of the way people would crowd around wanting to get in the photo. Later that day, the tailor called me to come and collect my new clothes. One suit, three pairs of trousers and two pairs of shorts cost me nine pounds Sterling.

I received four letters from my sister Edna Lind. She told me that they had fled from the Congo and were now in Lusaka, Northern Rhodesia. I was not to worry, she said. I should continue my journey and perhaps stay with them for language study. Another letter informed me that they planned to move to Ndola, a town on the Copperbelt—an area with a vast number of copper mines.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from INTO THE GREAT UNKNOWN by Maurice Harvey Copyright © 2011 by Maurice Harvey. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

1 To Africa—The Journey....................1
2 A New Life In Africa—Freedom In Their Souls....................17
3 Northern Rhodesia To Nigeria—Sailing Around Africa....................45
4 Visit To West Africa—Border Struggles....................78
5 Visits To Central Africa—No Protocol For Me....................104
6 Visit To Romania, Moldava, Ukraine And Poland—Living History....................135
7 Slovenia And Croatia—Beware Of The Cetniks....................163
8 Albania—What Godlessness Can Cause....................182
9 Indonesia—Fascinating And Frustrating....................203
10 Visit To North Korea—Dirty Pictures Of A Glassless Train....................229