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Missionary conference gathering in Khargpur India was an important social eventChapter 2Khargpur and BeyondKhargpur was only one of the many mission “stations” in the American Baptist Bengal-Orissa field and the work there was only part of a wide-ranging network of religious, educational, medical and other humanitarian enterprises which engaged the devoted attention of a diverse company of workers, both foreign and local. Once a year the missionaries would gather, with their families, for a formal conference. Here mission business would be reported, plans and budgets for the coming year adopted, assignments agreed to (the Baptist way of doing things) and inspiration gained from a shared sense of doing God’s work in India, as most of it surely was! For the missionary progeny the annual conference was a social event of major importance. We would get to be with boarding school friends and reacquaint ourselves with others who either went to different schools or who lived in out-of-the-way places and were relative strangers. Kids being kids, we had our good friends, others we tolerated. Some we had difficulty relating to. One such family, the Ellers, lived in Balasore, south of Khargpur on the Madras line, where the Mission ran a highly-regarded industrial school. Mr. Eller taught engineering courses. He and Mrs. Eller decided not to send their children away but to teach them at home using the Calvert System of correspondence lessons administered from Baltimore, Maryland. Many of us thought this was strange. But the Eller children turned out to be perfectly normal. One stellar achievement of the family which did impress us, confirmed for this memoir, was the report that after an overland jour- |
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