Baptists in Burma

Tales of Baptist missionary courage began coming out of war-harried Burma last week.

> Tall, angular Brayton C. Case has stuck to his post at the repeatedly bombed agricultural school at Pyinmana near Toun-goo, despite the departure of all civil authority. He is marshaling food supplies for the Chinese armies, sending them truckload after truckload of cabbages, pigs, everything else he can lay his hands on. "If I ran off," he said, "there would be no one around to round up food for these Chinese."

Missionary Case can find food in Burma if anyone can. He introduced almost the first vegetable garden to that jungleland. Burma-born son of a Baptist missionary from New England, he went back there after finishing his U.S. training in 1913, has preached pigs and eggs to the Burmese ever since. After a hard struggle he founded his school in 1923, to train dirt farmers in a four-year course and send them back to the villages to teach their fellows the fine art of growing food.

> Medical Missionary Gordon Stifler Seagrave formed a mobile medical unit of four missionary surgeons and 35 nurses when Burma was invaded, organized an emergency ambulance service and put field hospitals where they are most needed. Last fortnight Dr. Seagrave set up temporary shop in the middle of a bomb-wrecked and deserted Burmese town, spent three days & nights at the operating table almost without rest, in his ceaseless effort to save the lives of wounded Chinese soldiers.

Last November there were some 150 American Protestant missionaries in Burma, of whom more than half are still at their stations. Eleven women Baptist workers from Burma reached Manhattan last fortnight. Mrs. Seagrave was among them. She had brought her children back to the U.S. so that her husband could move freely with the Chinese Army, without worrying about his family. Until she left in January, she was her husband's chief anesthetist, once a week dodged bombs as ambulance chauffeur for a 170-mile run on the Burma Road.

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