The last but one day or so I have been reading this book, “Tibetan journey“ By George N.Pattison. A Christian missionary doctor, has written a travelogue of sorts ,meandering through the tibetain valley from China onto India via the north-eastern frontiers of Assam in the 50s.
It is a travelogue ,period ,none of the saintly bantering of st.Paul. His reference to the gospel is limited to a reference to Daniel’s three friends,the daily choices he makes in his difficult journey and his referance to his reading of the bible and a message he sends across to a friend in Tibet to send an English bible for a host who expresses a desire to learn english.He writes in a matter fact manner describing the tibetain people as filthy ,living under such hard weather conditions .
He talks of the evil within and the evil without,promiscuous living and the violence he sees at close quarters sometimes .for his sake.
However as he comes over to the Indian side and sees the razzmataz of Calcutta then , he suddenly misses the mountains and sees the civilisation for what it is .A host of greedy population reaching out to fill their stomach and their never ending desire to be entertained.He is a scotsman who needed a cause he would die for.He had two choices before him,Karl Marx or Jesus Christ and he chose the latter.
His compatriot ,who was left back in China ,had another kind of adventure.He was a prisoner to the Chinese who soon took over Tibet and amongst other things ,apparently was in a solitary confinement as well.If there is a book written about it I am sure I will get to read about it in time.
He talks about the language barrier where every hamlet seem to have a variation in the language they spoke,he describes.a lady with a breast abscess which he intervened on with much hesitation considering the infection control challenges,he talks about rampant syphillis and small pox amongst.the tribesmen there.He talks about living on a diet of eggs interspersed with invitation to some officers houses for meals which were as exotic as it were far in between.So he had eggs poached,fried,boiled,scrambelled sometimes as much as eight per day as he plodded on through dangerous ravines and extremely harsh weather through the roof of the world to the plains of India,through sub zero temperature to the boiling plains of India in summer.
Interesting read.
I presume ,he is one of those missionaries who ventured out to what has been called ‘the graveyard of missionaries ‘ and lived to tell the story.
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