"Quarantine"
pp. 37-38 · Read in the full issue
Criticism of New Hebrides System
RESIDENTS of Vila (New Hebrides) are complaining that the method of quarantining of Tonkinese indentur ed labourers, on arrival from Indo-China, is a source of danger to public health.
The place used as a quarantine sta tion is a barracks just behind the French Hospital, right alongside one of the most frequented roads. Following the last two shipments of Tonkinese quarantined at Vila, there have been minor epidemics of ’flu, and some kind of ear trouble, and residents attribute these outbreaks to them.
It is not a strict quarantine, as the coolies are taken out to cut grass, etc., on French Government property about the town, and thus sometimes mingle with other Tonkinese and natives.
French planters, in the North, also complain that the expense of this doubt ful quarantine has to be borne by them, and say that if the coolies could be dis embarked somewhere nearer to where they are ultimately to be employed it would be less expensive, less dangerous, and that the work they did while in quarantine—and for which the planters have to pay—would at least be of some use to the people of the outer islands.
A Samoan fale (house) has been erected at the Papauta Girls’ School, Western Samoa, as a memorial to the late Miss Valesca Schultze, a pioneer L.M.S, teacher and trained nurse who served for 49 years in the Territory. She died in 1935.
Mr. R. C. R. Newman, of Brisbane, left on July 14 in the "Bulolo” to visit his son, Rev. Randall L. Newman, of the New Guinea Mission’s Station at Eroro, Papua.
Mr. Jeffrey Arthur Bell, of New Zea land. recently married Miss Viti Gladys Gosling, second daughter of Captain and Mrs. H. Gosling, at St. Andrew’s Pres byterian Church, Suva. The couple now have settled down in their new home at Palmerston North, New Zealand.
A sudden squall in the dusk of June 8 upset a canoe, in which a sailor from U. 5.6. “Bushnell” was crossing Pago Pago harbour. An immediate search, with the help of searchlights, failed to locate the man who completely disap peared.