Missionary from Lambar

Missionary from Lambarene

In his jungle station in French Equatorial Africa last week, Albert Schweitzer reached his 79th birthday. Early in the morning, outside his single iron-roofed room, the doctors, nurses and native helpers of his hospital at Lambarene gathered to sing hymns, then came in to offer their good wishes and presents. At the birthday breakfast, the dining-room table was gay with sprays of leek and fennel, a clump of eggplants, a few cabbage leaves--for Doctor Schweitzer does not approve of cutting flowers, or killing anything that is not needed for food. Later in the day, the patients brought their presents: a handful of nuts, a newly laid egg, a piece of fruit.

This birthday ritual is a tradition at the Lambarene mission. But the person who, after Dr. Schweitzer, knows it best, and who may take over the mission when Dr. Schweitzer has had his last birthday there, was not on hand for the party.

Emma Haussknecht sat in a comfortable living room in Manhattan, talking about 28 years of work among the tribesmen of Africa: healing the sick, clearing forests, nailing together the laths for hospital buildings, draining swamps, teaching hygiene and worshiping God.

Pillar of Strength. When she was only eight, in the Alsatian village of Colmar, the same region where Dr. Schweitzer himself grew up, Emma Haussknecht dreamed about going to Africa some day.

She and her two brothers and sister stared wide-eyed at the hand-colored slides shown by missionaries at their local meetings. And in 1913, when the whole school was talking about how Dr. Albert Schweitzer, the famed organist and musicologist, theologian and physician, had turned his back on Europe's honors to establish a jungle mission, Emma's heart took fire.

In 1925 she set out for Africa to be one of Dr. Schweitzer's nurses. When ill health forced his wife to give up the mission and return to Europe, Emma Haussknecht became Dr. Schweitzer's chief nurse and helper -- a chunky, snap-eyed pillar of strength.

This year Albert Schweitzer was too busy with a new leprosarium to visit the U.S. to report on the work in Africa to the thousands of Americans who have been providing the mission with money, drugs and materials. So he sent Emma Haussknecht.

The Utmost. Solid and sure, and cheerful as a cherub, 58-year-old Nurse Haussknecht is on a three-month tour of U.S. cities, showing and explaining a series of colored slides of the Lambarene mission, shaking hands and smiling and answering questions. She tells how old Dr. Schweitzer still makes the last rounds of all the patients in the hospital every night, because two years ago one of them, in reply to his morning greeting, said that he had not slept at all the night before, "waiting for you to say good night."

She tells of the patient from whose eye Dr. Schweitzer had just removed a cataract. "What do you see?" Schweitzer asked the man, "what do you see?" But the patient shouted to the interpreter: "Why does he ask me what I see? He made the operation. He should know!" And she tells of Dr. Schweitzer's menagerie of pet animals, and how he always keeps a rug thrown over the organ-style pedals of his piano so that his baby antelopes will not break their legs.

"It is a privilege just to live in the neighborhood of such a man," Nurse Haussknecht exclaims. "There are so many different kinds of things to do, that you have to develop every gift you have . . . Sometimes it is very difficult to live without any comfort at all. But I wouldn't have missed those years of my life . . ."

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