Raising Two Categories of Children

Abstract

This was the diagnosis that Sister Sara (born Christine Johansen²), the first female missionary in the Danish Missionary Society (DMS), made in August 1889, less than a year after her arrival in India. In many ways her work in the following years was designed to change this state of affairs. She soon started taking in foster children, and like other missionaries she ran a day school for children. But the most important part of her work was a lace-making school, which she established at the mission station Siloam, outside the village of Tirukkoyilur, in 1890. Here she sought to civilize and educate both those who were children in age and the adult Indians whom she deemed to be childlike.

The great mass of people understands nothing, they are like 2–3 year old children at home; they have only one interest, one thing on their minds: to get enough to eat, and the easiest way that this can be made to happen is the one that is dearest to them; they have no feeling of honor, no conception that it would be better to feed oneself by working than by begging; therefore they are always begging, always needy, and the sad thing is that they need so infinitely little down here; they need neither clothing nor a house nor a home.¹