Page 91 - Protestant Missionary Activity in the Arabian Gulf

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of Muscat and Mutrah, he felt, looked on the mission hospital

as being their hospital. It was not purely a foreign trans­

plant since it vras their fees that paid for much of it. ’/frit-

ing of Mutrah in the 30's, Harrison said, the ” • » • hospital,

which is compelled to collect fees and he self-supporting

is looked on with real affection as a local institution which

is a credit to the city. 1.158

As time went on, many of the missionaries’ salaries were

still paid by the Board of Norld Missions, but the program
costs of the mission hospitals came increasingly to be under­

written by local resources. The mission even received large

local contributions for building programs. In Bahrain and

Kuwait, patients’ fees had made the hospitals self-supporting

by the 1960’s. The pastoral program was starting to support

itself, and by the early 1970’s the Kuwait congregations were

completely independent of New York and Bahrain and Muscat

were well on the way to becoming so. Although the Kuwait

government had been unwilling to subsidize the Mission Hospital

in 1967, several private business gro\*ps had offered to help.

The Bahraini government, learning the lesson of the Kuwait

closure in 1967 initiated an annual government subsidy of

Bahrain Dinars 25,000 to the mission hospital in Manama. In

a similar move, the Oman government agreed to incorporate the

Muscat and Mutrah hospitals into its state health program in

1970 and asstuned their operating costs. There was considerable

local support in the latter years for the Mission’s church
activities as well even from the most traditional members of

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