Christine Isabel Tinling’s Budget From Barbary

This little book contains twelve letters about missionary work in “Barbary” – modern day Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia. This copy originally formed part of the North Africa Mission library in Rabat. Yorkshire-born Christine Tinling [1867-1943] was a missionary with the  Women’s Christian Temperance Union was the author of numerous books on missions and also served in the Far East and India.

Christine Isabel Tinling [1869-1943], A Budget From Barbary. London: Richard J. James, 1933. Pbk. pp.153. [Download complete book in PDF].

Contents

1. The Ministry of Medicine
2. The Message in the Market
3. Among Veiled Women
4. Snaps From a City
5. An Industrial Effort
6. Aboutt he Kabyles
7. Fishing For Men
8. Handicaps
9. Jew and Gentile
10. Many Adversaries
11. The Foreign Legion
12. The Cost of Confession

Extract from pages 12-13.

The women particularly need that sympathy. It is terrible to see what they suffer, often so unnecessarily, from inefficient native midwifery. One girl lying there has been through five operations and has been cast off by her husband. If she gets well, her people will be marrying her to somebody else. As long as she remains in that hospital bed she is an individual, a soul to be loved and helped. When she leaves she will once more become a chattel and a slave. She is much interested in the Gospel and knows the choruses and hymns by heart and nurse says she is wonderfully sweet and patient.

Another has suffered much agony without a word of complaint and is an example to all in the ward. In a nearby bed is a girl of twenty who is married to a man of seventy and is in hospital on account of brutal treatment from native midwives. The Moslem women are born to trouble and expect nothing else from life. They have learned to endure silently and I suppose no-one has any idea what they do go through, except the medical missionary and the nurse. [Continue reading]