SIBYL BECOMES A MISSIONARY NURSE: THE TOUR: ~LUCY'S LECTURE~---the list of tour stops---other links---site navigation
Sibyl Grutchfield Hosking wanted to be a missionary nurse in Africa.

I can see why she wanted to be a missionary.  She was raised in a very religious Presbyterian family, and she had quite a strong faith.  (Later, her faith was one of the things that her husband valued about her.)  At least one other member of her family (a cousin, I think, but I can't remember exactly where I came across it) became a missionary.  So this would have seemed like an ordinary career path for her.  Adventurous, but something that would not raise any eyebrows.

As for the nursing part, that makes sense too.  It was a standard career for a woman, and if you like doing that sort of thing, then you like it.  Sibyl could have become a doctor; there was a female missionary doctor in Angola, but that would have been a stretch, especially in her old-fashioned family.  Anyway, I don't get any impression that she yearned to be a doctor.  When she worked in a mission station with no doctor, her response was not, "If only I were a doctor, I could help more."  Rather, it was, "The lack of a doctor is keeping me from doing the things that I want to do as a nurse."

I do not know why Sibyl wanted to do her missionary work in Africa.  Other possibilities would have included China and India.  I think the other missionary in her family went to China, though I'll have to wait until I come across that information again to be sure.  I wondered if perhaps she thought there was less water travel to get to Africa.  Sibyl tended to get seasick, and she may have known that already.  But the voyage from Canada to England to Portugal to Angola is long, and Sibyl probably knew it was long.  All I can think of is that perhaps a mission in Africa seemed more rural than one in China or India.  Sibyl enjoyed the outdoors, and I figure she was less likely to be assigned to a city in Africa than in Asia.

I asked AG if she knew why her mother wanted to go to Africa.  AG didn't know.  There may have been something else about Africa that simply appealed to Sibyl.

Sibyl graduated from nursing school in May 1922.  We have the program from her graduation.  Seven months later we have a letter from the Canadian Presbyterian mission people in response to an inquiry from Sibyl about Africa.  I figure Sibyl had to get a minimum amount of nursing experience before she could apply for missionary work.

The letter from the Presbyterian mission people said that they didn't currently need any missionary nurses for Africa, but that the Congregational mission people did.

What is the difference between Presbyterians and Congregationalists?  The Presbyterians have a more hierarchical setup (a presbyter is an elder or minister) whereas Congregational churches are more localized, with the local congregation making the decisions.  That's the organizational difference.  In belief I had trouble with a search online for real differences.  My maternal grandmother attended a Congregational church, and I've always had the impression that Presbyterians were more god-fearing than Congregationalists, but that impression may be incorrect.

The real difference for Sibyl would be that Presbyterian missions in Africa tended to be located in western Africa - for example, Nigeria and Cameroon - whereas Congregational missions were in southern Africa - for obvious example, Angola.  Nigeria's climate is tropical, whereas Angola's climate is tropical to subtropical.  I'm betting Sibyl would like Angola's climate better than Nigeria's, but you never can tell.

I asked AG, who remembered her maternal grandparents but didn't remember her mother, how Sibyl's parents would have felt about a switch from Presbyterian missionary to Congregational missionary.  AG said: "Not good."  Religion was important to the Hoskings, and they would have paid attention to their choice of denomination.

We have a letter from Sibyl to her parents, which apparently enclosed the letter from the Presbyterian mission people telling her to apply to the Congregational mission people.  She expects her parents to read the letter from the mission people, but doesn't tell them what's in it.  She just tells them that everything's fine.

Another wrinkle in Sibyl's application process was the setup of the Congregational mission.  In Angola, at some point after Fred's first assignment to Angola in 1912, the setup became that the Canadians worked together with the USA missionaries.  I do not understand how that worked.  All I know is that Fred had to be approved by the Canadians as well as the Americans when he went back in 1922, and Sibyl had to be approved by the Americans as well as the Canadians.  We have the 1923 letter in which Sibyl was approved by the American board, but not her Canadian approval letter, assuming there was one.

Meanwhile, Sibyl had gotten to know, through the American mission board, some real live Africans: Kamba Simango and his wife, Kathleen Easmon Simango.  We have a booklet about them from 1922 or 1923, and both Kamba and Kathleen had very interesting stories.  Kamba was from southern Africa, with bad experience with the ruling Portuguese in his area, and Kathleen's great-grandfather was an American slave who escaped to Nova Scotia, and then went with other escaped slaves to the Freedman's Colony in Sierra Leone in western Africa.  The two of them, from different parts of Africa, met in the USA, where each of them had come to study with the intention of going back to Africa as missionaries.  So Sibyl saw the possibilities for what mission work could do for the Africans, as well as learning from them what it was like in Africa.

Sibyl's home Presbyterian Church in Rockwood, Ontario, was pleased to have one of their own going as a missionary, and took up a collection for her.

The next wrinkle in the process of becoming a missionary nurse in Africa was getting a passport.  A birth certificate was needed, of course, but Sibyl was born in the province of Quebec, which did not issue birth certificates at that time.  Sibyl's father swore under oath as to her date and place of birth, and if there were any further issues in getting a passport, I haven't heard about them.

And another wrinkle...Sibyl was not allowed to go directly to Africa.  Angola was part of Portuguese West Africa, and Portugal required that missionaries learn Portuguese before going to Angola.  So Sibyl went to Lisbon for Portuguese lessons, with a stop in England on the way, where she visited some relatives.

Sibyl was in Portugal for over a year.  It seems like a long time, and the Canadian mission board thought it was a long time, but I think there was something about Sibyl kindly accompanying somebody on the voyage to Angola, so Sibyl had to wait for that to happen.  She arrived in Angola in the summer of 1925.

I think Sibyl knew before she left Canada that she would be assigned to the Chissamba station.  She went there as soon as she arrived in Angola, and started helping the missionary doctor there.  He was Dr. Hall.  There was a Mrs. Hall, but I don't know what Mrs. Hall did in Chissamba, except that she wasn't a nurse, because Dr. Hall was working without a nurse.

And soon he was working without a nurse again, because it was decided that Sibyl must learn the local language, Umbundu.  She was working on it in Chissamba, but then she went to another station to learn it from Dr. Sanders, the mission's expert in the language.  She spent several months there, from what I understand, and went back to Chissamba after Christmas, in January 1926.

Now Chissamba had a doctor and a nurse, and all was well, for a few weeks.  Then Dr. Hall left on furlough.  As I understand it, a missionary works for five years, and then gets a year of furlough.  So Sibyl was left to work on her own in Chissamba.  Periodically a doctor would visit from another mission station, but mostly Sibyl worked alone.  She did not approve of this situation, and told this to the mission board in Canada.

As it turned out, Dr. Hall did not return after his furlough.  He had had a difficult time in Chissamba, working without a nurse and trying to get the station's medical facilities up and running, and he felt badly used by the non-medical missionaries at Chissamba.  We have a letter that he wrote to Sibyl, and he sounds overwrought.  It's impossible to know to what extent his complaints were justified.  Sibyl praised his work unstintingly to the mission board in Canada, but that doesn't tell us anything about what the problem was.

Sibyl mentions a missionary minister in a letter to Canada, Mr. Steed.  Or Stead.  If I ever have figured out whether it's Steed or Stead, I forgot what I decided.  Anyway, she mentions how this Mr. S. had had some difficulties but had worked it out, and wasn't that nice?

The reason I mention this is that one thing I noted, when Fred had his issues with the mission board in Canada after Sibyl became engaged to him, was that Sibyl totally backed him.  Those letters were among the first I read.  It was later that I read these previous letters and started thinking about how Sibyl had experience with the imperfections of the Canada mission board, so it wasn't blind love that led Sibyl to back her fiancé.

We have a letter written by Dr. Mary Cushman, a medical missionary, telling about her visit to Chissamba in 1926.  Sibyl gets some favorable mentions, and we get an idea of what sort of issues Sibyl was handling as the sole resident medical missionary in her station.

The last letter I have included is from January 1927, which is after Sibyl and Fred started corresponding, but only a couple of months afterward, and it seems to fit with Sibyl's initial period in Angola rather than the time when she knew Fred.

There, now, I've told you about Sibyl's progress to becoming a missionary nurse in Africa, but I do recommend that you go read Sibyl's letters from Africa as well as Dr. Cushman's letter.  There's interesting stuff there!

I have plans for additional Tours for Sibyl:
  • Letters between Fred and Sibyl before they got engaged
  • Documents between when the engagement happened (May/June 1927) and when the wedding took place (May 1928)
  • Documents from after the wedding and when they were on their way home to North America

I shan't be doing them right away - there's so much else to do! - but that's the plan.  In the meantime, quite a few of the documents for the planned Tours are already available on this website, so you'll see them if you look at the document pages for Fred and for Sibyl.

​I've added a couple of helpful maps below.
The first map is the best I could manage on Google Maps for Sibyl's journey from Canada to Southamption, England to Lisbon, Portugal to Lobito, Angola.  There was no option for boats, and it told me there were no flights for my route, so I used an auto route, which was not available across the Atlantic.  (Wouldn't it be cool to have a bridge from Newfoundland to Greenland to Iceland to Scotland?)  Therefore you'll have to imagine the line across the Atlantic to England, and then in your head move the lines (like rubber bands on pegs) from England to Lisbon and from Lisbon to Angola out into the ocean.  But at least this gives you a sense of how far Sibyl traveled from Rockwood, Ontario to Angola.
Picture
Sibyl's journey to become a missionary. More or less.
The second map comes from:
  • https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/31014/PDF/1/play/
...which is:

“IN THE IMAGE OF GOD”: A GLOBAL HISTORY OF THE NORTH AMERICAN CONGREGATIONAL MISSION MOVEMENT IN ANGOLA, 1879 – 1975 by KATE BURLINGHAM A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in History
  
There's no scale, but Google Maps tells me that the driving distance from Lobito to Bailundo is 277 kilometers (172 miles).  Google Maps doesn't give all the useful mission names, but it does have Bailundo and Huambo.  It couldn't give driving directions to Dondi (which it calls Dondi Health Station) or Chissamba.  You can't get there from here.
Picture
The best map I could find of the Angola missions
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