Olwyn served as a nurse tutor in East Pakistan and Bangladesh, discipled many people through her contacts, and became a gifted Bible teacher in Bengali. Marrying Bangladeshi Dinesh Halder at a time when missionaries did not marry into the culture, Olwyn made a clarion call for interracial acceptance.
Early years and training
Born in Auckland, Olwyn and her brothers Stuart and Franklin grew up in a warm context, first at Sandringham Baptist Church and then at Papatoetoe Baptist. Their father, Noel, was a lawyer, and their mother, Mary, took them to Baptist Women’s Missionary Union meetings even as babies. It was easy for Olwyn to commit herself to Christ through Sunday School.
Olwyn’s life was threatened with serious pneumonia when she was six, but she survived, and the move to Papatoetoe took them to an old farmhouse with a large garden to enjoy. It did, however, require a daily trek for Olwyn when her parents enrolled her at private St Cuthbert’s School in Epsom for high schooling. She cycled to Papatoetoe station, rode the train to Remuera, and walked a kilometre to the school. Later, the family moved to Epsom.
“When I was seventeen, I heard Rev John Pritchard speak at a camp,” Olwyn recalls. “I said ‘Yes’ to serving Christ as a missionary, though the whole prospect frightened me. I felt nursing was my direction but started with dental nursing and then general nursing.” Olwyn worked at Greenlane Hospital for four and a half years, then experienced maternity nursing in Pukekohe and midwifery in Sydney, with the addition of ‘bush nursing’ in Victoria for six months. She also gained proficiency in teaching a Bible Class.
Then came a period of decision paralysis. Olwyn wanted to apply to the Bible Training Institute (BTI), later Laidlaw College, but that felt disloyal as her father was on the Baptist College Board. She went but later wanted to apply for the NZ Baptist Missionary Society. She was anxious she would be misunderstood since her brother already worked in Tripura at St. Paul’s School. Besides, she didn’t want to go to India or East Pakistan. She did nothing until one day at BTI when she offered a bargain she hoped God would not fulfil. Few visiting missionary speakers were Baptist, so Olwyn prayed. “Lord, if you want me to go to that part of the world, bring a NZBMS missionary to the platform next Monday.” What a shock when Monday’s speaker was Rev MJ Eade, a senior NZBMS missionary.
Hospital in Bengal
In a short time, Olwyn applied to NZBMS, was interviewed, and was on the boat by 28 January 1962 with missionary Melva Taylor. From Dhaka, they continued by train to Brahmanbaria on the Bengal plains, bordering India’s small Tripura State. “I’ll never forget that first sight,” Olwyn exclaims. “People everywhere. By the time our cycle rickshaw reached the mission house, I was exhausted, overwhelmed and ready to run for home—no chance, of course. I started learning Bengali with a tutor, and with long stints in Darjeeling, I would need Bangla language for the next 32 years.”
Acquiring Bangla was the main focus for two years. Olwyn was soon well familiarised with the small hospital in Brahmanbaria, which was desperately needed but very inadequate. It functioned in a dilapidated house with one extra room for deliveries or isolation, plus a hut with seven or eight beds.
A new women’s hospital was built some years later, big enough for 20 in-patients in four or five wards, a separate place to see about 65 outpatients a day, roofed shelters for women and accompanying men to wait. Most patients came on cycle rickshaws, and once a week, the outpatient focus was an antenatal clinic. In family planning clinics, Olwyn and Melva taught women how to space their children, which helped them tremendously.
There was rarely a foreign doctor, so they called on local doctors until the time of a resident doctor. The Nursing Superintendent was the redoubtable and trusted Miss Mogh, a Christian from the adjacent Hill Tracts, and the experienced Melva Taylor was the main person for maternity. Olwyn took fewer nursing duties and spent most of her time as a Tutor Sister, training nurses and nurse aids, a task she enjoyed. The young women, anxious to obtain a government diploma in nursing, often came disadvantaged and straight out of a village. Olwyn had to teach them to read and write before teaching anatomy, pathology and patient care. Some educated Bengali people helped, working in an environment with a perceived low status in the profession. Olwyn’s work grew. She aimed to instil a loving and caring attitude, a joy in seeing people improve and professionalism in an honoured service. She demonstrated compassion for patients on duty two or three nights a week. The girls became genuinely caring nurses.
Olwyn can recall difficult cases, such as when they lacked blood and intravenous fluids. Times they could only give saline. They pushed for women to come for ante-natal care so that they could predict a breech presentation or ask a family to take a patient to Dhaka in advance by train. They enjoyed the teamwork and only lost one patient in those years. The culture was not easy, though. While women preferred the peace of the total exclusion of men except for the 2:00 to 3:00 pm visiting hour, men’s behaviour varied from caring to intransigent.
“Yes, I think I grew personally,” Olwyn considers. “I did things I did not know I could do. There were, in fact, times we had to call in the church leaders, Bengali men, to get decisions and compliance. For me, the hardest aspect of living and working in Bangladesh was the attitude to women. They called white foreigners ‘red monkeys’, and children shouted that at us. Men could have up to five wives and think women of little value.”
Culture over time
There was much to admire, too. Bangladesh, for all its problems, has a communal society, and Olwyn became comfortable in the context and missed that when she revisited New Zealand. Everyone helps one another for funerals or weddings or whatever. “You take the good with the bad or surprising,” she expresses. “One surprising time, I stayed as a guest in the home of a rural Bible teacher. I did not expect to share my bedroom with a goat, but there it was, sleeping under my bed. Every time the goat turned over, my bed heaved as well.” Olwyn became so at ease that she was accepted and could joke and laugh among Bangla friends as much as with her fellow missionaries.
Her years fell into a pattern—months on the plains in Brahmanbaria, the heat of summer at a hill station in South India or Darjeeling or Pakistan (which offered cheap flights at the time), then a furlough in New Zealand after four or five years. On one furlough voyage home, Olwyn contracted unpleasant and stressful malaria. However, she received good treatment in the ship’s hospital, and it never recurred.
During the war between West and East Pakistan (1971), the missionaries evacuated while MJ Eade and Ian Brown stayed. East Pakistan obtained a separation from West Pakistan and became a new country, Bangladesh. When Olwyn and associates returned after a year to Brahmanbaria, the compound had been looted. Olwyn lost everything she had stored there, with one exception—someone found her Bible in a field.
Still there were the cultural rules to work under. Women were not to travel alone, a cultural and missionary rule that made good sense. A lone foreign woman on the train could be surrounded by 30 leering, even aggressive, men. To go to Dhaka required an escort, as a Bengali custom. The Hospital’s Bengali General Manager, Dinesh Halder, often had to go to the capital for work. Taking care of staff was part of his job, so he often escorted Olwyn or any other women going for supplies, to the dentist, or whatever. Sometimes, they took the church youth group out to a picnic or day trips, piled into a car, no seatbelts required.
In the hours of travelling, Dinesh and Olwyn got to know each other well, and their friendship developed into romance. Dinesh, five years younger than Olwyn and a respected Christian gentleman highly regarded by the other missionaries, had been dramatically converted during the 1971 war. However, such a friendship between a man and a woman would be frowned upon in Bangladesh culture, especially among Christians. Even engaged couples could meet only with family present. It would be ‘scandalous’ if they were seen together. They kept their friendship a prudent secret, and Dinesh visited Olwyn and Melva Taylor at their house only by dodging the night watchman.
When it was time for Olwyn to visit New Zealand, she went ahead. Dinesh attended a conference in Singapore and then flew to New Zealand. There, among her family, all culturally correct, they announced their engagement with the wedding planned back in Brahmanbaria. Even that sparked concern. In Bangladesh, almost nobody had heard of a Bangladeshi marrying a New Zealander. In addition, some NZBMS colleagues were thoughtfully concerned for Olwyn’s welfare if the marriage didn’t work out. The mission leaders accepted it, though. Dinesh and Olwyn talked it over with Mission Council Chair Stan Edgar, who was understanding.
Olwyn and Dinesh Halder
Marriage
In February 1978, when Olwyn was 42 and Dinesh 37, they married in Brahmanbaria, joined by her brothers and their wives, further relatives, the NZBMS missionaries and Brahmanbaria church members. The featured dress was a red sari since white is for widows there. “Dinesh’s mother and sister were good to me,” Olwyn comments warmly. “They welcomed me into their family and came to me for advice as a nurse. I looked after them, and I felt their love in return.”
Dinesh was, by this time, both secretary of the local church and administrator of the hospital. Later, he became the pastor. Olwyn’s work changed as she moved partly out of the hospital and joined in with church work, particularly youth work. Together, they led many youth camps and loved seeing young people grow as Christians. Olwyn developed into a wise Bible teacher in Bengali medium in the Bangladeshi church.
Their marriage made them a vanguard. Christians in Bangladesh saw a happy cross-cultural marriage. (Even in Nepal, when Dinesh and Olwyn visited me in 1980, it was a striking thing for Nepalis. Our young Christian neighbour voiced surprise and approval on seeing Olwyn and Dinesh together.)
Retirement in Auckland
“God gave Dinesh and me nineteen blessed years together,” Olwyn voices with thankfulness. “In 1994, we returned to New Zealand and lived in the family home in Epsom, though that was a hard decision. Dinesh wanted me to resettle in my own country for my old age.” Olwyn did short-term nursing jobs for a while and, when Dinesh became ill with cancer, nursed him until he died in New Zealand in 1997.
Olwyn became a social worker for a while; then, her family helped her move to Hillsborough Heights Village, where she enjoyed the view, reading, gardening and using the computer. She is grateful for her brothers and for long-time friends who were with her in Bangladesh. She attends Epsom Baptist Church, which has proved ideal for fellowship and personal support. Her eyesight is problematic now, but she comments, “I’m under a specialist, and I appreciate the good care here in NZ.”
Olwyn’s cheerfulness is tangible, bolstered by her favourite Bible verse, the words of Jesus, to Jairus: ‘Don’t be afraid but believe.’ “With Jesus beside us, we have strength for every challenge,” she observes. “I like a lot of verses. Another that has often guided me away from speedy action is from Ruth, ‘Sit still, my daughter, till you find how the matter will fall.’”
Sources:
NZ Baptist, December, 1998
NZB May, 1994, 13; 'Supplement to "N.Z. Baptist"', 1962
Personal interview May, 2024
Photos: Supplied by Beulah Wood
