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Updated: May 25, 2025
"The bairns were afraid, for I was babbling more than usual, but to me it was as real as if it had all happened. We ran backwards and forwards between Itu and Ikpe, spending alternate Sundays with the Churches, and taking Miss Peacock to her outstations, and visiting Miss Welsh, It was magnificent."
The hurt was followed by erysipelas, and she was blind for a fortnight and suffered acute pain and heavy fever; but very shame at being ill after so fine a holiday made her get up although the eye was swollen and "sulky," and she was soon in the midst of her work at Ikpe as if nothing had happened. Building, cementing, painting, varnishing, teaching, healing, and preaching filled in the days.
Mary did not like that. She had never been willing to sit and twiddle her thumbs. Now her mind was full of new plans for more work. She wanted to get busy with her work for the Lord. For the next two years Mary worked hard at Use and Ikpe. She traveled between these two places, sometimes in a canoe, sometimes in the government boat, but mostly in her two-wheeled cart. There was still much to do.
She rejoiced in her new strength, and set herself with grim determination to redeem the time. She was now doing double work, carrying on all the activities of the settled station at Use, and establishing her pioneer centre at Ikpe.
As soon as the matter became a duty, she gave it careful consideration, resolving to abstain from going up to Ikpe, and to go down to Duke Town instead, where she would consult the Wilkies and the Macgregors. But she would not dream of the cost of any change being borne by Miss Cook, and she asked Miss Adam to find out if her funds would allow of her taking a trip.
She took the alphabet card, but they shied at the strange- looking thing, and would not speak. One little fellow who had been at Ikpe, and knew more than the others, began tremblingly, "A B ," and she and Alice who was with her, joined in until one after another surrendered, and before long all were shouting the letters.
Here the Chief was reaching out for the Gospel, holding prayers in his house, and trying to keep Sabbath, though not a soul could read, and the people were laughing at him. As the Creek made a bend she left the canoe and trudged through the bush to Ikpe.
Dissatisfied with what she was doing at Ikpe, she moved in all directions in her "box on wheels," prospecting for new spheres of usefulness, fording rivers, crossing swamps, climbing hills, pushing through bush, traversing roads that were unsafe and where by the law people had to go in couples, and often putting up at villages six or ten miles distant.
A play was being enacted in the town, and scores of naked young men and women were dancing to the compelling throb of the drum. But some Ikpe and Ndot lads came to support the service, and their presence helped the local sympathisers to come forward. It was very simple; she said it would have seemed babyish to Europeans, but it was an epoch to the natives.
She became sick again and very weak. Now her eyes began to get weak, so that she could not see as well. But nothing could stop her. She started the building of the industrial home for women and girls. She planted fruit trees there and planned to raise rubber and cocoa and cattle. Mary wanted to move again. Some natives had come from Ikpe to see her before she went on her vacation to Scotland.
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