Monday, July 15

My soup was a great success and I made enough for a week so that has my lunch covered.  I've ordered  some soup-size containers from Temu so that I can store it appropriately but they haven't arrived yet.  Marilyn had a set of three unused containers which would do the trick: three different sizes.  She then commented that I should send some to Jamie and Nera because Nera is always sending me a bowl of whatever soup she is making.  OK, but because they have Nera's nephew, Brendan, staying with them I needed to send three portions.  That's half of my week's supply gone!

Today's story was supposed to be entitled The Hero but I added the word Reluctant to reflect the character of my protagonist.

 THE (RELUCTANT) HERO                                                              OCTOBER 14, 2022

 

In the early-1800s, the birth of a child was not always a welcome event, especially to working-class families, who often struggled to put food on the table. However, Neil and Agnes Livingstone were delighted when their second child was born, on March 19, 1813.  The Livingstone family were deeply religious and every child was a blessing. In any case, it was likely that he would be able to contribute to the family income from about the age of eight. Agnes had seven babies in all, although not every one of them survived into adulthood.

 

This particular baby, born into poverty became one of the most famous missionaries of the 19^th century, credited with bringing Christianity to the Dark Continent and becoming a hero to  generations of Africans.  He is, of course, David Livingstone.

 

I’ve seen the home where he was born and brought up, in the town of Blantyre.  It’s just a single room in Shuttle Row, a white-painted tenement block of similar rooms where whole families lived out their lives while working as spinners and weavers in the local mill for a few coins a day.  The room is about 4m square on the third level of the building.  There is no bedroom nor bathroom, simply a kitchen table and some chairs, a sink and a small fireplace.  There is a cupboard for food and a wooden chest of drawers.  There is also an alcove to the side into which a bed has been built, with another underneath which can be pulled out into the room when needed .  One is for the parents, the other for any children who survive into childhood.  The youngest child might sleep in the bottom drawer of the dresser until he is too big for that space.

 

A kettle for tea can be boiled on the fire and simple meals can be cooked.   It is usual for the women to prepare a week’s supply of porridge which is poured hot into the top drawer of the dresser.  Each morning a slice is cut off for each member of the family and it is eaten, either cold, or quickly heated in a pan over the fire.  Agnes would have bathed her baby in the sink of the shared laundry. The privy is in the yard and accessed by poking a stick through a hole to lift the latch of the door.

 

All the children must earn their keep and work is plentiful, but poorly-paid, in these days when cotton goods manufactured in Scotland are in great demand all around the world.

 

David, worked as a ‘piecer’ at the mill from the age of ten years, while still attending the Blantyre Village School. A piecer re-tied broken threads on to the spinning machines, and it was a job reserved for young children who were nimble and had small fingers.  

 

David’s father was a Sunday School teacher and he was a major influence on David’s growing interest in the Christian faith.  At the age of nine, David could recite all 171 verses of Psalm 119.  The family attended the Congregational Church and David became enthused about the number of missionaries who were working at that time in China.  He decided that this was to be his life’s work and he determined that it would be beneficial to his work if he qualified in both theology and medicine so that he could both preach and heal. Of course, he was still working fourteen hours a day so it was difficult for him to find the time for study but, his employer recognised this was a dedicated young man and was happy for David to work for only 6 months of the year, leaving him time to follow his studies at University and Medical School in Glasgow.

 

It was about this time that the London Missionary Society was seeking suitable men to undertake missionary work in Africa.  David’s ambition of working in China had been disturbed by the Opium Wars and he agreed to take up the challenge of a missionary friend, Robert Moffatt, to travel to Africa.  Moffat famously said that he had ‘sometimes seen, in the morning sun, the smoke of a thousand villages where no missionary has ever been’.

 

In early-1841, David Livingstone arrived in Capetown after a 3 month journey by ship via Brazil.  But his journey had only begun. He then slowly lumbered five-hundred-miles by ox cart from Port Elizabeth to Robert Moffat’s station at Kuruman.

 

David Livingstone would spend most of the next thirty-two years in Africa, as a missionary and explorer, covering some forty thousand miles on foot, by ox cart, steamer, or canoe through uncharted territory, suffering great hardship and much sickness, including twenty-seven bouts of malaria by one historian’s count. Running through all the years of his life was  “the thread of devotion to Africa woven in with his concern that the continent should be Christianized.”