ST. HELIER, JERSEY (ANS) -- It was a rather amazing experience for me to be visiting the lovely paradise island of Jersey, which is only 14 miles long and 5 miles across. It has a population of only 90,000 and I call it “The small island with a big heart.”

Springtime in Jersey

In my more than 40 years in journalism, I have visited most of the world’s hotspots, yet I had never been to Jersey, a British Crown Dependency off the coast of Normandy, France, where all the street signs are still in French and some of the people still speak the Norman language.

Yet this tiny island is at the forefront of being aid and love to people all over the developing world and the reason my recent visit was to meet old friends who I had travelled to Kenya with back in 1976 when our team of volunteers – all from Jersey except myself – went to the Methodist Hospital in Maua, to build a new dining room and kitchen for them.
 

Jean and Jenny Le Maistre pictured in national costumes

The man behind these overseas aid projects is a former Senator, Jean (pronounced Jon) Le Maistre, who had arranged a special reunion last weekend (August 28-29, 2010, for the hundreds of people who had taken part in these 100 trips many of which were organized by Le Maistre for the Jersey Overseas Aid Committee.

So I sat down with Jean, a committed Christian, during my visit to find out more about Jersey and also about his own life. As we sat in a room in his old farmhouse overlooking The St. Ouen's Bay in the west of the Island with its five miles of golden sand, I began by asking him about the extraordinary period on the island when the Germans occupied Jersey during World War II.
 

Germans Reichsarbeitsdienst unit marching watch by Jersey uniformed policeman

“Just after the outbreak of the war, Jersey was taken over on June 30th 1940 by the German occupying forces,” he told me. “The islands had been demilitarized some weeks before that so the Channel Islands, which also included nearby Guernsey, offered no resistance and the UK government decided that it wouldn't try to protect the islands because we were not what they considered strategic value and therefore couldn't see that we needed to be defended.

“In fact it's been suggested after the war that if they'd tried to defend the islands the casualties amongst the island population would likely to have been very high and it would have been a very heavy price to pay for no real gain. So sadly, we were left to the mercy of the German occupying forces -- as they're called -- and we were occupied for five years until eventually being liberated on May 9, 1945, the day after VE (Victory in Europe) Day. In fact we were effectively the last place in Europe to be liberated.”

Jean then explained the political system in Jersey.

“Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man, are Crown Dependencies we are independent because we operate outside of Europe,” he said. “We're within Europe for normal business transactions but we're out of Europe for taxation purposes. So it means that we have our own parliament, we make our own laws, and we raise our own taxes. We are not a drain on the UK parliament as we fund our own way in every respect even to the extent of making a defense contribution to the UK government.”

Jean then revealed that he became a politician after being elected to the Jersey government in 1972 and served for a total of 33 year years.

“Initially I was a called a Deputy and I represented a town district [an electorate] of about 7,000 people and I did that for fifteen years,” he went on to say. “At the end of that period, I decided to run for a mandate from the whole island. The electors numbered, in those days, around 44,000 people.

“So I was elected in 1987 and served in that role for 18 years. During that time I had various responsibilities, but in the very early days my main responsibility was to head up the island Youth Service and develop community centers around the island which were to serve not just young people of course but mums and toddlers and old people's groups and generally fulfill what we consider to be a great need on the island for people to get together.
 

Lt-Gen Andrew Ridgway, CB, CBE, and his wife Valerie (left) with Jean Le Maistre and Bill Latham at Government House, Jersey

“I also served on the Jersey Overseas Aid Committee from the beginning. I became president in nineteen-seventy-eight, towards the end of that year, and was president for twelve years. So I served on the committee for a total of 18 years.”

It was while Jean was serving on the Jersey Oversees Aid Committee, he launched the first of overseas projects. The first one in 1972 was to Nazareth in Israel, but he first explained how his love for overseas work began.

“I first became inspired to be involved in overseas work as a very young Christian way back in the 50’s when we used to have missionaries coming back on furlough and who would talk about their work overseas and the ministry they were involved in,” he said. “So, from my teenage years, I developed an understanding about our responsibility of meeting people's needs, not just physical but spiritual as well. So I had developed this interest in how best we could help people in far away places.

“Near the end of 1971, I was approached by a man called Bill Latham, the then Deputy Director of Tearfund, which used to be the Evangelical Alliance Relief Fund and is now just called Tearfund. He approached me to take a group of young people to the town of Nazareth to help at the Edinburgh Medical Missionary Society Hospital which is the only accident and emergency hospital providing cover for 24 hours a day, serving a population of about 400,000 people.

“He explained about the very intensive pressure that it was under and the staff were getting very tired and feeling the strain. The hospital authorities had appealed to Tearfund for a little bit of relief for their staff but in addition they had a lot of maintenance jobs that needed to be done. So we were literally sent out there and the girls worked in the laundry, the sewing rooms and the kitchens cleaning the wards etcetera and the lads worked generally speaking outside on construction and maintenance.”

Jean then revealed that shortly after they arrived in 1972, the team discovered that the Mayor of Nazareth was very sick.

“They Mayor was very ill and needed an emergency operation which was life- threatening and, in particular, he needed a blood transfusion. As it would happen, he had a very rare blood group and nobody around Nazareth was able to match that blood group except for a member of our team who offered to give blood. He effectively saved the life of the Mayor because without that transfusion he almost certainly he would have died.”

Jean then explained that Bill Latham, who was also attending the reunion, went on to manage British singer, Sir Cliff Richard, and both of them have been huge supporters of both Tearfund and Jersey Overseas Aid.

“It's been a great joy and privilege to be working with Bill and Cliff over quite a number of years,” he said. “In fact, Bill was my best man when I got married to Jenny and Cliff attended the wedding as well.”

The next trip in 1973 was to the Helen Keller Blind School, just outside of Jerusalem in an Arab village called Beit Hanina on the road to Ramallah on the West Bank.

“They had enormous needs because they were largely funded by the Bible Lands Society and we've all grown to love the Bible Lands Society because of the Carol Sheets they produce at Christmas,” said Jean. “I was in contact with the secretary of Bible Lands who said that they had not undertaken maintenance and a lot of small tasks for a number of years simply because they didn't have the funds to do so and they would welcome a group to go and help them.

“So more than 20 of us went out for three weeks and thoroughly enjoyed the time there. But of course in August in Israel it can get very, very hot and we were working as indeed we were in Nazareth the previous year, with temperatures of a 100 degrees and trying to handle metal there was pretty difficult. So it was a challenge, but one that we were happy to take on. Very importantly we created enormous lasting friendships with some of the blind girl there.

Some of the participants in 'Eating Around the World'

“As you probably know the Arab culture tends to educate the men but the girls get left behind and particularly girls with disability. So the Bible Lands people were performing a very important role there in insuring that these girls would not only receive education but they would be prepared for life. In other words they could do cooking, knitting and all sorts of tasks that, in those days, you wouldn't expect blind people necessarily to do.”
From then on, the trips from Jersey have gone on thick and fast and now Jean estimated that they have sent 100 teams to various parts of the world, including Africa, Eastern Europe, South America, and the Middle East.

“I have estimated that about 1,500 people have participated in these trips and I managed to trace about 850 of them and invited them for this special event which began on Saturday at Government House with a reception,” he continued. “It was wonderful for many of those folk to meet up again. Some of them hadn't met for the best part of thirty years plus.”

On a personal note, I met up with several of our 1976 team to Kenya and we were able to catch up with what had happened in our lives over the years.

I then asked Jean if he had received any criticism from local people about money being used to help finance these aid trips.

“Yes, especially in the very early days, when people would trot out the expression that ‘Charity Begins at Home,’” he said. “Some of them found it hard to understand the concept of us sending volunteers halfway around the world to take on jobs that should have been undertaken by local people in those countries, particularly if they had no employment.

“But eventually, our people began to understand that by going into these remote villages, we were inspiring the local community there to help do things for themselves and whilst we were funding the materials for projects, which were usually extensions to schools or hospitals or some other clinic building, it was fun really to work alongside the local people. That was one of the criteria that we tried in every group was to have some of the local people working with us and providing food very often and generally supporting the groups and getting to know people.

“The friendships that were established during those overseas projects were probably at least as important as actually the project itself. Quite often, our teams imagined that that the people over there were waiting for us to go and help them, but what happened was that so many of our team members had their own lives totally transformed by serving in the way they have.

“For so many of us, it was a humbling experience of being with people who have nothing but have a wonderful lively faith and are happy and contented people. Quite often, in some of the communities, they have very poor diets and no medical facilities, as we would understand them, and also needed to understand and learn about agricultural irrigation, the way they can get good crops growing, have a good variety in their diet and learn to care for their children. And what we were doing was helping to provide the infrastructure for all of these facilities.”

I then asked Jean if there were people who had really impacted him during the overseas aid trips.

He said, “Well there would be many stories of people who were outstanding, and one of them was Doctor Hans Bernath, who was a Swiss surgeon who ran the hospital in Nazareth. Had he stayed in Europe to practice his surgery, he would have potentially earned a fortune and could have become a very wealthy person.

“Having decided to go to Nazareth, he literally gave his life to serve this community and he ended up poorer in material terms but far wealthier than probably any surgeon would in the Western world because he had the satisfaction of knowing that this hospital was doing a unique job and the kind of work he was undertaking was fairly pioneering in those days. I know that when I explain to people that he was undertaking, in the early 1970’s, hernia operations under local anesthetic. He'd often say the recovery from the anesthetic is far worse than from the operation.”

The weekend began on the Saturday afternoon at Government House which was sponsored by the local cooperative shop movement and hosted by the Lieutenant Governor, Lt-Gen Andrew Ridgway, CB, CBE, and his wife Valerie.

Then, in the evening, people gathered for a picnic in the beautiful Howard Davis Park with music provided by an African Beat Band Ashiki, Liz Shea the wife of a local minister Martyn Shea, who has wonderful voice and concluded with a group from the Community Gospel choir.

Then on Sunday morning, many gathered for a special service at St. Mark’s Church in St. Helier, to celebrate all that has happened over the past 38 years. I joined with Dr. David Steiner, who runs a Welsh-based group called Hands Around the World, to do the Bible reading, and then Tearfund’s Irish singer, Andy Flanagan, sang and shared some stories about his travels to developing countries followed by a sermon from his wife, Jenny about the world of Tearfund as they have ministered overseas to the victims of devastating floods, earthquakes, or helping to provide clean water to communities.

After this, hundreds took part in a six-mile “Walk for Water” along the beachfront to raise funds to drill a well in Malawi to provide clean water

“It costs just six-thousand pounds (UK) to drill a well which will mean that people not only have access to clean water so they don't have to walk the five or six miles a day to get their water,” explained Jean. “It was very successful with quite a few people taking part.”

The wonderful weekend ended with a special banquet called “Eating Around the World” with dishes from Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and South America.

“It represented the regions where the volunteer groups have been over the last four decades,” said Jean. “It was attended by nearly 400 people and it was a fantastic evening there were messages from different places in the world and also we were fortunate to have some folk with us who we'd worked with in Africa.
 

Dr. Francis Omaswa

“One, Dr. Francis Omaswa, gave a very inspiring thank you to the Island of Jersey for the amount of service and aid and from the volunteers in particular over many, many years. He explained that a group went out in the eighties and built an operating theater and it had been designed as a very low cost type of vision which could be developed elsewhere in Africa where of course resources are very limited. And he was pleased to tell us that not only had it been successful he believes that that design has now been replicated in over 200 hospitals around Africa.”

So with that, the inspiring reunion was over and soon more teams will be setting off from Jersey to bring their love and practical help to another remote part of the world and, in return, be blessed and finally return to the “Small Island with a Big Heart” with their own lives totally changed.

Note: I would like to thank Robin Frost for transcribing this interview.

Dan Wooding, 69, is an award winning British journalist now living in Southern California with his wife Norma, to whom he has been married for 46 years. He is the founder and international director of ASSIST (Aid to Special Saints in Strategic Times) and the ASSIST News Service (ANS). He was, for ten years, a commentator, on the UPI Radio Network in Washington, DC., and now hosts the weekly “Front Page Radio” show on KWVE in Southern California and which is also carried on the Calvary Radio Network throughout the United States. The program is also aired in Great Britain on Calvary Chapel Radio UK. Wooding is also a regular contributor to The Weekend Stand on the Crawford Broadcasting Network, and a host for His Channel Live, which is carried via the Internet to some 192 countries. He is the author of some 44 books. Two of the latest include his autobiography, “From Tabloid to Truth”, which is published by Theatron Books. To order a copy, press this link. Wooding, who was born in Nigeria of British missionary parents, has also recently released his first novel “Red Dagger” which is available here