Tárogató, 1938-1939 (1. évfolyam, 1-10. szám)
1939-03-01 / 9. szám
14 TÁROGATÓ WILL IRRIGATE FARMS Irrigation schemes are being started by farmers in the Canadian prairie areas in order to provide for the dry years. While these plans are not on a scale sufficiently large to permit the irrigation of the great wheat fields, they will aid the farmers in conserving their fruit and vegetable crops, and prevent their stock from famishing for want of drinking water. It is the hope of the sponsors of the scheme, that the young people in the Canadian West will take a special interest in making it a success. Already available to farmers in Alberta and Saskatchewan, the plan aims to help them finance the excavation and construction of dugouts, which will have a maximum size of 2,500 square yards. In constructing dugouts up to this size, the farmers will be assisted at the rate of six cents per square yard of earth removed. These large dugouts will be so located as to retain sufficient water to act as stock-watering dams. These reservoirs also will afford the farmers an opportunity to install, by means of their own efforts, systems of using the water to irrigate adjoining land, so that it may be used for fruit and vegetable growing. Each of these irrigated gardens will be from a quarters of an acre up to several acres in extent. TRAINING YOUNG AFRICA By James Gillingham In the great mission fields of the world the ultimate hope rests with the young people, who are trained for positions of leadership. This is particularly true of the African continent. The foreign missionary is still needed there, especially as the western materialistic civilization presses in on the susceptile minds of the people who are just emerging from their primitive life. Not all the new things the white man takes to Africa are good, and the natives are often quite bewildered. Guidance and instruction are needed, lest the white man’s impact on the virile but simple tribes of Africa be a duplication of his impact on the North American Indian. The missionary truly has a fullsized task today, but every far-seeing leader realizes that his place is temporary. The African leader must increase, and the foreign councillor decrease—and It is good that it should be so. If the numerous untouched tribes of today have to wait for light and salvation at the hands of the white missionaries, they will wait in vain. The training of Christian leaders is, therefore, one of the missionary’s most important tasks, and all missions endeavour to staff a training institute where young people may be trained for leadership. In spite of the almost overwhelming difficulties encountered by an African seeking to obtain an education, difficulties due to lack of facilities, to economic conditions and to heathen opposition, there is a steady stream of Christian leaders graduating from these training institutions. After their training they go back into the villages, where the foundations of the Christian Church are laid. What a responsibility those young people have to shoulder! Not long removed from heathenism themselves they return to the village to accept leadership in the life of the Church in the midst of the forces of darkness, and where real spiritual battles are fought. BE A BOOK LOVER By L. E. Eubanks “I like books, I was bom and bred among them,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes. People familiar with the effects of books on their readers would have suspected the truth after one interview with Holmes; he possessed the knowledge, personality, character that come from intelligent association with good books. Books are helpful in anything we do, for virtually everything has its literature. That is a highly-important fact to remember; the difference between the progress of two persons in the same work, one of whom gets along twice as well as the other, is very often a difference in their reading. Even when, superficially, it may appear that the particular subject is not a “bookish” one, investigation will disclose that it does have a more or less extensive literature; and the person who makes it a point to find and read the best books on his prospective business, sport or hobby, as a help to his actual practice and original study of the work, is the person most likely to excel. That these facts are becoming more widely recognized is shown by the growing usefulness of libraries. I suppose my home city is typical, and here the attendants state that the requests for books, and questions asked, are greater in number and more varied than ever before. Hundreds of people use the library without visiting the building. Two women spend most of their time answering telephone queries on almost every subject. Telephone calls into the main reference room average four hundred a day. An attendant in the technology room
