Source/Author: Charles Davies

PART I

Delle and I were attending an Epworth League Institute in Winfield, Kansas, when we volunteered for full-time Christian Service anywhere as missionaries. Following our application to the Board of Foreign Missions of our church we were assigned to Borneo as one of the most needy places for industrial agricultural missionaries. We were to establish an industrial agricultural school for immigrant Chinese colonists.

We bade farewell to our friends and relatives in Pawnee Rock on October 12, 1911 and arrived in Singapore on January 1, 1912. There were only two other missionaries in Sarawak at that time, the Rev and Mrs James Hoover. We lived with them in Sibu for a time and studied the Chinese and Malay languages.

On May 1, 1912, the first ship load of Hinghua Chinese arrived. Our first assignment out of Sibu was to go with them down the Iban River and help them get settled. The Government had built three temporary longhouses for them and a smaller one for a food supply store with two rooms upstairs. The storekeeper and the Chinese preacher lived in one room and Delle and I in the other. We had two army cots and a dirt stove where we did our cooking. This was a great adventure for us and for the Hinghuas. They had come from a part of China where there were no trees and now they were on the bank of the river with acres of dense jungle just behind them.

Their only tools with which to attack the jungle and transform it into productive farm land with homes, churches and schools were crude axes, hoes, knives and saws. At first they didn’t even know how to build a simple bush fire to clear the ground. The continual heat and humidity were a great handicap to them till they became acclimated.

Following this we went some twelve miles down the Rajang river to Bukit Lan where the government was giving the mission all the land (400 acres) needed for an experimental agricultural farm. This too was dense jungle and much of it was low and swampy.

Our first home here was a two-room attap house about 50 feet from the river which was about 60 feet deep at high tide. In our bedroom we had two army cots with nets to keep off the mosquitoes, centipedes, scorpions, snakes and rats and lizards. There were no windows and our outside door was just a hole in the wall. We had a mirror and one kerosene lamp. In our kitchen we had a dirt stove with two iron rings to set our cooking pots and pans on. We used wood for fuel and had no chimney to carry off the smoke. Our kitchen table and chairs were made of driving posts into the ground and nailing boards over them. We had some board shelves for our food supplies and dishes. Our chief food was rice which we had three times a day.

We lived here until we moved into our board frame house (the only one outside of Sibu) in December. This bungalow was about four hundred feet back from the river on higher ground, and was built right up against the jungle on stilts about seven feet above the ground. This gave us double floor space and put us up above the night prowlers referred to above. But we learned by experience that many of them were very good climbers! We had a bathroom and a room for work tools on the ground floor and later we had our Iban school here. Our kitchen was a separate house in the rear. It was too hot for Delle to do the cooking and then we needed to have a cook to “save face”. Wild pigs and deer would come out at night. I shot one wild pig on the boys’ playground.

Our next big job was to build a school, which was in fact a combination school-dormitory-church-parsonage. This was no easy task for there was no lumber yard where one could go to purchase sawed and planed boards. The framework of both buildings was made of very hard lumber hewn out by hand and assembled without a single nail. We used this hard wood as a safeguard against the ever-present termites.

While this was going on we went out weekends and at other times among the Foochow Chinese immigrants. At this time there was a boys’ and a girls’ school in Sibu. The boys’ school had 25 and the girls’ 18 girls and two little orphan boys. There were five rural schools. The entire school enrolment was only 125. There was no definite course of study. The mission paid the rural teachers US$5.00 per month. They had the schools in their own homes. Board and room at that time was 50 cents per month and if parents were too poor to pay, children were taken in free.

Our next big adventure at Bukit Lan was to install a rice mill to hull the rice of the Chinese and Iban farmers in the surrounding territory. The only other rice mill was at Sibu. The Ibans were not long in discovering the value of the mill and came great distances.

By Charles C. Davies
Methodist Message
September 1970

PART II 

One day Hujan, a former chief of the tribe in Bawang Assan River Valley said, “We have been watching your work among the Chinese and see that they are being helped by you; they have schools for their children and are living better lives. But we Ibans don’t have any friends to help us and I have come to ask you to be our friend as you are the friend of the Chinese.” I assured him that we would be glad to be their friends. “You know we live in long houses and are ignorant and dirty and superstitious”, he continued. Enden, my wife, and I have been watching the way you and Mrs Davies live. We want to build a house and live to ourselves and be clean too, but we can’t. If we started to build someone would see a bad omen or have a bad dream and we would have to call it all off. But you worship a different God from us and are not afraid of the evil spirits. If you will be our friend we want you to come to our valley and drive out the evil spirits so we can go ahead and build.”

I went the next morning and was given a great welcome. They gave me a present of three hen eggs, which was their way of saying that I need not be afraid for they recognised me as their friend and I would be protected by them. Then Hujan wanted me to see the place where he wanted to build. He gave me a knife with which I cut some stakes to locate the building site. While we and others stood within the area, I said, Hujan, you said we worship a different God from you and that we are not afraid of evil spirits. Would you like me to pray to my God and ask Him to help you not to be afraid and be able to build? He said that he would and so I had the first Christian prayer with the Ibans of the Rejang River Valley — some 300 miles of waterway with no roads.

It was then that Hujan reminded me that not one of them could read ot write and asked me if I would take some boys and teach them. I gladly agreed and it was not long before they had my launch, “The Lucile”, loaded with eager boys. This was just before Christmas 1915.

Iban was not a written language and of course there were no school books. As a result I had to make my own lessons from day to day. The boys were clever and eager to learn. They had never heard of Jesus, but were quite responsive and ready to listen. They ate with the Chinese boys and soon wanted to pray before they ate as the Chinese boys did. Then they wanted to have a worship service on Sunday afternoons like we had for the Chinese boys.

Progress
Looking back across the years from then till now, what do we see? Those two little schools in Sibu have grown into a real school system, with a two-year kindergarten, an elementary school, and a high school with two departments — English and Chinese — with a total enrolment of over 1500 pupils. There are many large Chinese schools outside Sibu and the Ibans also have schools. The government requires all schools to teach English in addition to any other languages used. There are elementary school books in the Iban Language and the entire New Testament is now being printed in Iban by the American Bible Society.

The tribe of Ibans at Bawang Assan, where I had the first Christian prayer, has become an out-standing Christian community with a church and a parsonage. They have their own resident pastor, a Sunday School, a WSCS, and an MYF. Three men of the tribe are teaching in their central school and two young women are in the Theological School preparing for full-time Christian service. Rosely Umba, a grand-daughter of Hujan and Enden, is preparing to be a Christian teacher and Catherine Rima is preparing to be a Methodist Minister. These two young women, as do all the other Theological School students, go out on definite assignment to work during weekends among the various churches or longhouses. All these young people will be required to be in residence at Bukit Lan for three months to receive agricultural and medical training in order to be more able to lead their people into an abundant way of life.

In the Sarawak Iban Provisional Annual Conference of the Methodist Church, there are now more than 12,000 members. Truly we may say: “WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT”.

The Rev Charles E. Davies was a contemporary of the Rev James Hoover and one of the first Methodists to come into any regular contact with the Iban people. He was unfortunately only able to spend a few years in Sarawak because of ill-health, but is still alive and is over 90 years of age.

Methodist Message
October 1970