Page 50 - Protestant Missionary Activity in the Arabian Gulf

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petition with the state hospitals in Bahrain and Kuwait had

caused the missionaries to seriously consider closing their

hospitals in these two cities,®'’

It was not just in the medical field that the mission

stations were facing competition. Oil revenues were also being

poured into the governments' educational programs, and by

the Spring of 1953 Miss Rachel Jackson, teacher at the Girls’

School in Bahrain, reported that a change was being implemented
in the girls' curriculum to have it supplement the government’s

86
programs rather than compete with them, The missionaries

were, in fact, highly successful competitors in both the
!
educational and medical fields even in the 1940’s and 1950’s.

Their doctors and teachers were in many respects better

qualified and more dedicated then their government or oil

company counterparts, and there was no lack of either students

or patients, But the "oil men” were a more serious problem
<$%
to the Mission as examples of non-Christian modernizers,

and they brought with them an irresistible wave of western

materialism completely devoid of the spiritual values espoused

by the Mission, Rev. Dirk Dykstra wrote bitterly of this

new materialism in the Autumn 1948 edition of the Mission's

quarterly report:

"In Kuwait there is today one main interest, It
is not nationalism, it is not religion, it is money
Allah remains the talk, but
solely and entirely,
money is the goal and end of all, and, of course, the
oil company is the Great Benefactor. The oil company,
financial success and Things are the new life for
the Kuwaiti." 87

J