"In a letter to my parents, I wrote: "I can hardly wait to commence;
the work is so great, so inviting, so full of promise". But before
leaving America I had written them, "my heart aches at going so far
away". And my dear wife had written her parents, "the thought of
leaving home seems sometimes unbearable". She never saw her parents
again, after we said good-bye in the railroad station at Muscatine.
At the end of twenty-five years, we had been to America for a furlough
year just twice. When our train rolled among the Balkan hills on our
way out, I looked at the mountaineers clad in their sheepskins and
thought with rather a sinking heart of the loved pupils whom I had
known in Hastings College, Nebraska, during the first three years
of that pioneer institution, and of the loved parishioners whom we
had known during my three years as a pastor in Waverly, Iowa, whom
we had left behind in America in response to the call of duty as we
understood its claim on us."
[From: George E. White's "Adventuring With Anatolia College", p. 18
(Herald-Register Publishing Company, Grinnell, Iowa, March 1940)]
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"Now, Effendi, there are two roads to our tomorrow's destination,
one by the mountains and the other by the valley. The mountain
road is direct and short, the valley road long and roundabout;
the valley road is hot and crowded and dusty and has no views,
the mountain road is cool and lovely all the way; the water of
the valley road is so warm it never refreshes one, but the mountain
road has plenty of springs with water so cold you cannot drink it
for the toothache it will give you. Let's take the mountain road."
[Circassian mountain robber escorting Dr. White, early 1890's]
[From: George E. White's "Adventuring With Anatolia College", p. 25
(Herald-Register Publishing Company, Grinnell, Iowa, March 1940)]