Fresh Words Daily

A researcher collects. No piece of information is too small for the researcher’s nest. When I began working on “A Shrewd Sanctity” I read books on China. The history, the geography, the politics. I collected stories of early missionaries and how they coped with being an alien. I tracked down letters nurses had written home from their stations in China. I spent days in the tiny rooms of the Auckland Diocese Archives reading reports the missionaries sent home. The paper collection grew. I started a system of folders each carefully labelled – just as well because this project took me far longer than I anticipated.