The Olive Bowl

“ Brian de Smidt arrived in Beirut on November 21 st (1961) for his school holidays, after an absence of over two years, and returns to South Africa in January with his grandmother.” While I was in Cape Town, life carried on for the family back in Lebanon. Dad was still principal of the Lebanon Bible Institute, but the family was now based in Beirut. The notice above and the letter below were from the January 1962 “Light on Lebanon”, a quarterly journal of the Lebanon Evangelical Mission. Brenda wrote about my arrival, and gave family news in the ‘Friends of Lebanon Corner” in that edition. “ There are 5 of us in the de Smidt family, although at the moment, only 4 of us are here in Lebanon, as Brian, age 13, and the eldest, is in Cape Town, South Africa. However, we are impatiently waiting for his visit to us at Christmastime, when the family will be complete for two months. I am 11 ½ and attend the mission school, known at the Lebanon Evangelical College for Girls. It is really f...

Our morning task was to clean the lamps and D.G. Mills had taken me under his wing. True to his nature, he was meticulous and expected the same of me. He showed me how to carefully remove the glass chimney and clean it gently on the inside with some newspaper. My hands have not been known to fit in small spaces, but at age 11 they managed to squeeze through the bottom of the cylinder and I gently wiped the soot away. My efforts were inspected and a final flourish with toilet paper completed the first assignment. We then pumped the paraffin out of the large tin, filled each lamp base and screwed the top with the wick back on. We wiped these carefully, placing the clear, clean chimney back in the clasps and setting the lamp aside, ready for use in the evening. It would be many years before this seaside holiday village would get electricity. “Oupa DG” as I called him was not really my grandfather, but he was my Aunt Jess Mathew’s father and he took a kindly interest in me in the years I...