“After a safe and pleasant journey, Bahrein (sic) was reached Sunday, October 25, at 6am. I was very glad to be at the end of my journey, and was soon seated in the mail boat and being taken ashore.
“At the landing, a bright-faced Arab met me, who spoke to me, but the only word I understood was ‘Sahib Zwemer’, and from his gestures I concluded he desired to direct me to the mission house; so I followed him. This man, I afterward learned, was Ameen.”
That’s how Jane Alice Scardefield described her entry into Bahrain in October 1903, as a hospital and teaching member of staff for American Mission Hospital (AMH), then called Mason Memorial Hospital.
She followed Bahraini hospital worker Ameen to the mission house where she would meet the pioneers who had opened the Mason Memorial Hospital, some nine months earlier.
From a 1909 picture of the area in Manama (taken six years after Jane’s arrival), we can understand that the mission house was in the same place where the Al Raja School now stands. The mail boat which brought her to the shore, from her main ship, would have likely docked at a place where Bab Al Bahrain is located. It was built, however, 40 years later.
“One can imagine her walking besides Ameen and his donkey-cart along a vast empty space. It is the space where today multistoried banks, government offices, hotels, and stores stand,” said an AMH spokesperson.
At the mission house, she was welcomed by the hospital’s founder Dr Samuel Zwemer and his wife Amy Wilkes Zwemer. She also met the first single woman to work as a missionary in Arabia, Elizabeth De Pree (who later married James Cantine, the co-founder of the Arabian Mission, the following year), missionary Fanny Lutton, and the children of the Zwemers.
After that first day, Jane stayed on to work as a teacher and a nurse and as an emeritus missionary (a person retired from professional life but permitted to retain, as an honorary title, the rank of the last office held) in the Arabian Mission for nearly 40 years before retiring to the USA.
Jane, or ‘Jennie’, as she was also called, worked in the American hospitals and schools of Bahrain, Basrah, Kuwait, and Muscat.
She was born in New York on August 10, 1871, and was educated at the Union Mission Training Institute. She came to Bahrain when she was barely 30 years old.
In 1923, her home church in New York had even donated a Ford model T car to Bahrain’s hospital, which was used to transport patients and also help doctors make house calls.
Called ‘Medical Ford’ or ‘Little Traveller,’ it was among the first cars in Bahrain. Until then, the hospital had mostly relied on camels, donkeys, and donkey-carts.
Jane Scardefield died on March 1, 1952, in Orlando, Florida, at 81 years old.
The closing words of her write-up about the very day of her arrival are:
“We all went to the hospital. The hospital was not far (from the mission house), and the words over the doorway, ‘Mason Memorial Hospital’ made me feel grateful for such a building amid the surroundings. Truly, it is needed here.
“The day had been very warm, and in the early evening, a walk on the roof of the mission home ended my first day in Arabia.”
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