Three Kings of Orient

This is how three U.S. citizens in far lands caught the spirit of the Christmastide last week:

Before the last star has faded on the horizon, on every day, seven days a week, Alex Johnson, 60, a husky (212 lb.), balding man from Miami, gets up, pulls on his khaki working clothes, leaves his stilt-legged house at the Tha Pra livestock station in the depressed northeastern sector of Thailand. Tha Pra, a corrugated plateau where the soil is poor and the people poorer, is a bumpy, 300-mile, two-day journey from Bangkok. It is also the worst place in the region to conduct agricultural experiments, but Alex Johnson, longtime teacher of vocational education, who retired as Bade County superintendent of schools in 1952, asked for a challenging assignment when he offered his services to the U.S. Point Four program. "I decided," says Johnson, "to come out to a foreign land to do some good for other people." Stationed first in Libya, Johnson was transferred after 26 months to Thailand in March 1955, with his wife Elsie took over as livestock adviser.

In his 3 1/2 years in Tha Pra, Alex Johnson has introduced the country's first silage system, taught sanitation, farm management, building construction and irrigation, brought high-yield corn (50 bu. per acre) from Indonesia, improved pasture and foliage, showed his charges how to use commercial fertilizer, planted grain and sweet sorghum, introduced the Velvet bean and the cowpea (for soil improvement). In his own acre-plus garden he demonstrated to once dubious Thailanders that pineapples and bananas can be grown well in poor soil, even cultivated tomatoes, collards, okra, eggplant, yellow squash, sweet corn and lettuce.

On Christmas Eve the Johnsons will set tables on the lawn and be hosts to about 100 local farmers, village headmen and their families. There will be plenty of curry, hot dogs, ham and soft drinks, as well as native reed-pipe music, color slides and movies. Next day, precisely at noon, surrounded by gifts of native handiwork--fish traps, bamboo baskets, buffalo and cattle bells, even blow guns--Alex and Elsie Johnson will sit down to Christmas dinner. And back home in Miami it will be midnight on Christmas Eve.

In Banmethuot, South Viet Nam, high on a virgin plateau 150 miles northeast of Saigon, tribesmen from the surrounding jungle villages and refugees from Communist-run North Viet Nam are learning modern farming techniques from 60-year-old New Yorker John Barwick and a dozen young (23-26) men from U.S. farm families. Barwick and his wife Laura worked in foreign countries (in the Middle East with Arab refugees, in Europe with prisoners of war) for 15 years before going to Viet Nam for the International Voluntary Service two years ago.

Grateful Vietnamese farmers refer to fatherly, pipe-smoking John Barwick as Ong Cu Da (roughly, "Team Chief"), have showered the Americans with honors. From mountain villagers, for whom they demonstrated well-digging techniques, the teachers received--and all proudly wear--copper bracelets.

This Christmas, to honor a batch of native mountain lads, one of Barwick's assistants will show up in Santa Claus costume, wearing a white mop for a beard, and frail Laura Barwick, mother of four Stateside children, will roast a wild boar and some venison, bake a few pies. There will be tango music blasting across the red dirt street from Banmethuot's Chinese cinema, and John will pass around iced Algerian wine. Instead of the traditional Christmas tree, cotton balls on bamboo shoots will have to do. After the party the young American assistants will leave Banmethuot; two by two, they will scatter into remote settlements of Viet Nam, teaching still others to farm--earning still other copper bracelets that cannot be found under the tree at home.

The moon is big in the Pacific at 5 a.m., and it shines through the window of a lonely, olive-drab Quonset hut. On the rocky, typhoon-tossed island of Culion, a leprosarium 200 miles southwest of Manila, Bachelor Harold Baar awakes, puts on a pair of shorts and tennis shoes, ties a red bandanna around his neck, cooks his breakfast and gets set for a day's work. Shirtless and hatless in the hot sun, he meets with ten afflicted Filipino families, shows them how to plant, plow, repair a tractor, tries to fill them with knowledge that will help them win back respect from the island people who ostracized them.

Baar, a devout Lutheran, first saw the Culion leprosy victims during World War II when he was a coast guardsman stationed at Talampulan, 22 miles away. Determined to help them, he used his G.I. Bill to earn a degree in agriculture, took missionary studies at two seminaries, orientation courses at the Carville, La. leprosarium. From Lutheran groups in Missouri he got an appointment to Culion, sailed for the Philippines with a jeep, a garden tractor and a plow.

Work in fields and Bible study in his hut occupy most of his time, though Baar relieves the routine by reading farm magazines, working with livestock, playing with German Shepherd dogs that he is breeding as future Seeing Eye dogs for blind patients. Sometimes he paddles in the sea in a native canoe or chugs by outboard motorboat to nearby Talampulan, where he can talk to the 13 U.S. coast guardsmen stationed there. When Christmas comes, Baar will spend the day at Talampulan, for he feels that he will be better prepared to carry on his lonely life if he can be with Americans on that one day, if only to share their plastic Christmas tree.

It will not be like Christmas in Oshkosh, Wis.: "I'll miss the soft, new snow and the ice skating, and most of all the all-day family reunions, and the big, brightly lighted Christmas tree that always touched our living-room ceiling, and the family singing before the fireplace, and the windows of the neighborhood with all the colored lights." Some day Harold Baar will spend Christmas with his family again. "But," he says, "there's still a lot to do in Culion."

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