As soon as a sum of three thousand dollars had been raised, architect
friends at the Pratt Institute sent down to us competitive designs,
and one of our Labrador boys, who had studied there, erected the
building. Having at the beginning no funds whatever for current
expenses, we had to look for volunteer teachers. One denomination
helped with part of its harbour grant, but the Government would not
make any special donation toward the union school project. Even the
caput grant, to which we had hoped that we were entitled for our own
orphanage children, had by law to go to the denomination to which
their parents had belonged. This was not always easy to decide
correctly. On the occasion of taking the last census in Labrador, a
well-dressed stranger suddenly visited one of our settlements on the
east coast. It so happened that a very poor man with a large and
growing family of eight children under ten years, who resided there,
was not so loyal to his church as we are taught we ought to be. When
the stranger entered his tilt a vision of material favours to be
obtained was the dominant idea in the fisherman's mind. He was
therefore on tenterhooks all the while that the questioning was going
on lest some blunder of his might alienate the sympathy on which he
was banking for "getting his share." At length it came to the
momentous point of "What denomination do you belong to?"--a very vital
matter when it comes to sympathy and sharing up. In some hesitation he
gazed at the row of his eight unwashed and but half-clad offspring,
whose treacly faces gaped open-mouthed at the visitor. Then with
sudden inspiration he decided to play for safety, and replied, "Half
of them is Church of England, and half is Methodist!"
Being an unrecognized school, and so far off, some years went by
before the innovation of bringing up scholars from our northern
district entered our heads. We realized at length, however, that we
should close one channel of criticism to the enemy if we proved that
we could justify our school by their standard of annual examinations.
Our teachers, being mostly volunteers, had to come from outside the
Colony. Having no funds to purchase books and other supplies, we made
use of books also sent us from outside. The real value of the local
examination becomes questionable as a standard of success when far
more highly educated teachers, and at least as cleverly laid-out study
books, prevented the children in our school from passing them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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