Bruce Moon: Reflections - a Memoir

Step out of your comfort zone and the world may surprise you!

Margaret, my dear late wife, had been working with patients that afternoon at the Tibetan Delek Hospital at Gangkyi and had accepted a lift up the hill to our residence from some workmen in a utility van.  

I had been halfway down the hill to collect our laundry from the devoted little Indian who did it for us and I had set off up the hill with my load when a van drove up with a Tibetan driver and Margaret in the passenger seat.  Of course it stopped so I clambered into the back with a couple of Tibetan workmen and their shovels.

Now I had just received a momentous piece of news when checking our emails at the bureau before I set out.  The University of Otago had awarded Margaret her PhD on “An Integrative Model of Chronic Pain” without her having an oral examination.  The examiners had concluded that given her inaccessibility and the assured outcome of any “oral”, it was an unnecessary exercise and they had made their decision accordingly.  

My immediate quandary was whether to tell her then and there or to let her find out for herself in due course.  After a few moments hesitation, I decided on the former and so she received the news that she was Doctor Margaret Moon in a utility van while bumping up a mountainside in India!

When we decided that we had had enough of the nine to five routine, we had both accepted teaching positions at a mission school in Vanuatu for which we should each receive a new but modest house and a small stipend.  It would be an adventure in a country entirely new to us.

Accordingly, on my 63rd birthday we each took up our appointments, Margaret as Head of English, teaching mainly that and biology; myself as Head of Science, teaching chemistry and mathematics with a variety of out-of-school domestic tasks.

Plunged in at the “deep end” so to speak, we were soon fully absorbed in our work.  It is quite an experience, for example, to be in sole charge at a 6:30am breakfast of rather more than three hundred lively youngsters, hunger fortunately keeping them somewhat subdued.  It is also something to be in charge of around forty of them in a chemistry lab., several so recently out of the jungle that they had to be instructed in how to utilise a flush toilet.

Seeking to illustrate to them that not all gases were colourless, odourless and tasteless, like oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide, I passed around in one class a flask of ammonia, advising them to take the merest whiff.  However one girl, known for never doing anything by half measures, took a hearty lungful and that necessitated an immediate resort to remedial assistance.  As for a coloured gas, I poured concentrated nitric acid on copper in a test tube, duly generating the brown but highly poisonous gas, nitrogen dioxide, waved it rapidly in front of them all and quickly consigned it to the fume cupboard.  That was, fortunately, as close as I came to living dangerously as Head of Science.

In mathematics, we had rather less hazardous fun, making measurements in rolling tins and coins along lines to find the value of “π”, that is “pi”.  Some of their results would have been news to any mathematician but the average of all of them was surprisingly close to the actual value so that was a short lesson in statistics as well!

As for biology, Margaret had some illustrative cards which, amongst other things, showed that the method of reproduction of little green hippopotamuses was basically the same as for any other mammal.

Her inspiration in English was to invite the senior class, about to go on a mid-term break, to ask their family members for stories they remembered of World War II when Vanuatu was the advance base for American forces and New Zealand airmen confronting the Japanese in the Solomon Islands.  The yield was low but surprisingly interesting.  It became the basis of a whole set of stories and songs which we duly collected on a subsequent mission which took us to several of the more remote islands of the archipelago. This we published as “Ni-Vanuatu Memories of World War II (ISBN 0-473-05606-09), supplying sufficient copies to the New Zealand High Commissioner to put a class set in every Vanuatu intermediate and high school.

So, yes, in Vanuatu: high priorities in education: the English language, modern science and authentic history.

And so to India

The next opportunity which arose was in India at Raphael, the Ryder-Cheshire home for the relief of suffering, at Dehra Dun, a pleasant town in the foothills of the Himalaya. There we found ample scope for Margaret to exercise her skills as a physiotherapist amongst the residents with a variety of afflictions: paralysis, mental afflictions and burnt-out leprosy cases.  My job was as liaison officer between the residents and their sponsors in New Zealand, Australia and other countries.  Almost needless to say, two-way correspondence was entirely in English, my deftness on a ricketty typewriter perforce improving rapidly!

Seeking to range a little further, we contacted Tibetan authorities in Mcleodganj, a hill suburb on the outskirts of Dharamshala and the home base of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama.  He is, as all the world knows, a remarkable man in his own right with an acute scientific mind.  One of his goals therefore has been to bring classic Tibetan knowledge and culture up to speed in modern science.

That was an opportunity for me while Margaret readily found employment for her physiotherapy skills in the Tibetan Delek Hospital where she set up a physiotherapy department, and in domiciliary work.  Many Tibetans who had fled over the high mountains in the depths of winter to escape the Chinese oppressors in their own country had suffered injuries in doing so.

And so, at 7:30, six mornings a week, I surmounted rough mountainside tracks to teach English to recent Tibetan refugees accommodated at a refuge known as Gu Chu Sum.  This name reflected the dates of three brutally suppressed risings against the oppressors in their homeland. Two of my students were Buddhist nuns, another a young woman whose father had been tortured to death by the Chinese and who wrote agonized poems in English.

Again, I gave a sequence of lectures in basic physics to senior students ‒ Buddhist monks and one lay student, at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, in effect the university for such studies.  Almost needless to state once again, these I delivered in English.  I succeeded for instance, or so I believe, in demonstrating the law of gravitation by observing the equally spaced raindrops on the clothes lines where they dried their robes between the monsoon rainstorms and also, by measurements, Newton’s (negative exponential) law of cooling.  Having obtained their predictions beforehand, I demonstrated Galileo’s celebrated experiment in dropping a large and a small cannonball (or some such) from the leaning tower of Pisa (in my case, chunks of rock from a rather ricketty table and other levels) to illustrate that experiment, not speculation, must be the final arbiter in science.

It was my lay student who floored me by asking why the absolute zero of temperature was the same for all materials.  I appealed to the source most readily available to me, the Institute of Physics in London (of which I am a fellow) for a definitive answer.  In conclusion, I had the honour of being invited to address a plenary session of the whole Institute for which I chose the title “What is Science?”.  My perceptive student acted as translator, later providing a full translated version for “Lhaksam Tzegpa” the “Journal of Comparative Knowledge” published by the Institute.  He proceeded to Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia and in due course received his Ph.D.

The Library of Tibetan Works and Archives

Determined to save all that they could from the brutal destruction wrought by the Chinese of material from their rich, unique and ancient culture and at the generous invitation of the Indian authorities, the Tibetans have set up the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives.  This is situated at Gangchen Kyishong (universally known as “Gangkyi”) halfway up the mountainside between the town of Dharamshala in the tea-growing Kangra Valley and the mountaincrest suburb of Mcleodganj where the Dalai Lama himself and most of the Tibetans live amongst a variety of Indians, noisy Israeli tourists and visitors from many other countries.

At the direction of the Dalai Lama himself, the Library is becoming an active centre for the integration of modern science into Tibetan culture. A team of bright young Tibetans, two being women, one a nun, was set up to be the nucleus of this enterprise.  Hearing of it soon after my arrival, I went to see the Director, Achok Rinpoche, a senior member of the Tibetan hierarchy, to see whether my assistance might be of any use to him.  His immediate response was positive, as I could be of help to his team both in understanding the basic science they were studying and the English in which it was written.  It was agreed that I give tutorials in English to the whole team and consult individually with its members on the particular topics on which they were working.

So first I met them all, including Achok Rinpoche himself, and invited each of them to write for me a short essay in English on any topic of their individual choice so that I could assess the level of competence in English which they had attained.  They all duly complied, the Rinpoche himself writing a piece on how he made tsampa, the Tibetan barley porridge.  (Barley is the only food grain which can be grown reliably at the altitude of the Tibetan plateau.  All, or most, Tibetans pride themselves on their ability to make porridge from it!)

They all produced reasonably literate efforts so it was clear that I did not have to start from scratch.  After a few sessions they asked me why their computer monitors informed them whenever they used the passive voice.  The ball was, so to speak, firmly tossed to me.  Why, when and how was it appropriate to use the passive voice or otherwise?  I had the rest of the hour to explain, so spontaneously I delivered a successful lesson on the passive voice!  Secretly at the time, I was quite pleased with my effort!

And then to their own individual efforts. Some itinerant American had provided them with a copy of the set of lectures on basic physics delivered by the immensely talented Richard Feynman to students taking physics as a secondary topic at a Californian university- what might be described as “popular” but vivid essays illustrated, for example by references to “Charlie Brown” and “Snoopy”.

Such references were of course utterly familiar to American undergraduates but entirely foreign to young Tibetans!  Sorting them out was for me to do.

One young man, I recall, was totally mystified by an essay which had been allocated to him.  With him, I was reading through it to ascertain the source of his difficulty when he exclaimed suddenly “Euclid was a Man!!!”  One may imagine the depth of his puzzlement in addressing a topic in geometry, entirely unaware that references to a mysterious “Euclid” were actually references to its author!  It was not too difficult to clarify his problem for him!

Thus the days went by – seldom a dull moment – until our visas had almost run our and perforce we had to leave them all until next time.

SO IS THERE A MORAL?

And so we had students in a remote Pacific Island group.  So, too,  we had students from an even more remote plateau deep in the heart of Asia,   And high on the priorities for them all was learning the English language – how to speak it, how to read it and how to write it.  And what would have been utterly infeasible without it was our command of our native tongue, English.  Indeed the same was true of our other adventures, not a part of this story, at universities in the United States of America where English is the universal language of discourse and amongst Europeans, in Norway and Denmark, amongst Poles and Czechs; young people and even the old eager to learn it..

And yet in New Zealand where, by international standards, literacy in schools is falling at a catastrophic rate, more and more effort is being put into consuming teaching time to address an archaic language, understood by a mere handful of people and spoken by less.   Adequate it may have been in its many dialects for a Stone Age society but so short of words needed for modern discourse is it that wholesale adoption of words from English has been necessary.  Yet so lacking is it in the sounds of normal English – diphthongs and voiced consonants for example ‒ that transliterations, sometimes bordering on the ridiculous, have been necessary.  “Saint John” our outstanding ambulance service, has not been exempt, now calling itself first and foremost “Hato Hone”.  Do you get it?  And in the supermarket, notices proclaim “pikitete” and “kawhe”.  How many people need that information to find what they want on the shelves?  And in the weather forecasts? No doubt it is possible to concoct a “Maori” word for “anticyclone”, but is there a single individual to whom that is useful?

Is there anything more absurd than the name of the Ministry of Transport being displaced by something in Maori when Maoris so lacked any form of land transport that they did not even know of the wheel?

And so to science, one of the great modern achievements of the human intellect and the basis of all modern technology which we take for granted and which so enhances our lives today – from electric light to cellphones; universal in its scope and applications.  Yes, it is right there on the “to do” list of both Tibetans and Ni Vanuatu and they are learning it. I know that absolutely, first hand!

But oh!  No!  Not in New Zealand – pardon – I mean Aotearoa! What is to be equated in importance or event more so by the Royal Society of New Zealand and our Universities is something called “matauranga”, a collection of empirical observations by those same stone age canoe people, no doubt helpful in their precarious survival in pre-colonial days ‒ seven brave scientists who begged to differ being censured severely ‒ but the rest have become the laughing stock of scientists internationally.

The hotly contested source of funds for many New Zealanders wishing to do scientific work is the Marsden Fund. In its recent funding round, the tidy sum of $360, 000, that is more than a third of a million dollars, has been granted to one Dr Kirsty Dunn of the University Canterbury for a research project entitled “Taniwha: A Cultural History”.  Dr Dunn, be it noted, lists three Maori tribes from which she says she is descended but, following the usual pattern we observe amongst vocal part-Maoris, does not list any British (aka “colonial”) ancestry at all despite her unequivocally British name.  Yeah, well, we don’t want to draw attention to that do we?  Maybe she could acknowledge her own multi-cultural background and the opportunities colonization has given her of learning to read and write and attend a university.

And where just is the scientific or even empirical evidence for the existence of any “taniwha” at all?

In my book they are right up there with griffins, unicorns and the dragon which was slain by St George.  But to Dunn who has looked at “various purakau” (“stories; myths, incredible stories”; West, 1985) her project “uses the taniwha to explain complexities and challenges both in Aotearoa and around the world,”.  Well, one can’t fault her for ambition but what utter lunacy is it to take any such activity seriously, let alone squander $360,000 of hotly contested research money to support a woman engaged in it who will not even describe our country by its real name?

I am a passionate and proud New Zealander, a citizen of a tiny country which has always punched above its weight – in civil rights: first to have the franchise for all adult citizens; in science: think Rutherford and many others; in fighting for democracy in two world wars: think Upham and many others. 

But today our tiny nation is setting its sights firmly in a direction contrary to that of the rest of the world.  It is a sick little country fast becoming meaningless and irrelevant.

It is for us, all New Zealanders, to admit this dire situation, face it and act to correct it.  We are unlikely to find any others to help us.

Bruce Moon is a retired computer pioneer who wrote "Real Treaty; False Treaty - The True Waitangi Story".