You never knew who you might meet in the Caux kitchens in the 1960s. The kitchen which prepared dishes for Asian guests was presided over by a small Burmese woman in her 60s. Few would have guessed that she was a former headmistress from Myanmar (then Burma) and a friend of Mahatma Gandhi.

Daw Nyein Tha – or ‘Ma Mi’, as her family and friends called her – became the youngest headmistress in Myanmar in 1921, aged 21. Her style was authoritarian. After 10 years, her staff and pupils finally rebelled when, as the Christian head of a Christian school, she refused to allow the Buddhist girls to observe a religious fast day. The incident caused a national furore.

Now I knew why Christ had put me in the school – not just to be headmistress but to learn to love people.

The issue was finally resolved when she accepted that she disliked the girls and that her pride and conceit made it hard for the teachers to work with her. She apologized publicly. ‘Now I knew why Christ had put me in the school – not just to be headmistress but to learn to love people,’ she said later.

This lesson stayed with her throughout her life, as she moved away from teaching and into work for reconciliation and justice both at home and around the world. She first encountered Moral Re-Armament (now Initiatives of Change) on a visit to Britain in 1932 and embraced its message of inner listening and starting with yourself.

Wherever she was, Daw Nyein Tha remained a teacher – often using her hands to convey her truth. She liked to demonstrate a Burmese proverb: ‘When I point my finger at my neighbour, there are three more pointing back at me.’ The phrase became one of MRA’s best known songs, written by Cecil Broadhurst for the musical Jotham Valley and made famous by the Colwell Brothers. (Listen to the song here)

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When she visited Mahatma Gandhi in his ashram in 1941, she used a handkerchief pulled taut between two hands to show the tension between two people who each insist on having their way. When one hand stops pulling, the other also has to yield and they can work together.  ‘Yes,’ responded Gandhi mischievously. ‘It works very well with a handkerchief, but does it work with people?’

In Thailand in the early 1950s, she used a hollowed-out seed containing three tiny ivory elephants to make her point. Thailand and Burma had nursed a smouldering enmity ever since the Burmese destroyed Thailand’s ancient capital and stole its prized white elephants 200 years earlier. These memories rankled in Thailand, but had been largely forgotten in Burma. Now the Burmese airforce, chasing Burmese rebels, had bombed Thai border villages and feelings ran high.

At a meeting with the Thai prime minister, Daw Nyein Tha emptied the three ivory elephants into his palm. ‘These little elephants have been away from Thailand for such a long time,’ she said. ‘They were so homesick, they have got very thin.’ The Prime Minister laughed, and the story went out on the radio. Later the Burmese Prime Minister apologized to the people of Thailand on Burma’s behalf and backed this up with financial compensation.

Daw Nyein Tha spent most of the last years of her life in Britain and Switzerland, unable to return to Myanmar, then under military dictatorship.

She taught those who worked with her in the Asian kitchen at Caux some simple principles, as Marjory Procter writes in her biography The World My Country: ‘It was the people for whom you cooked that mattered…. Why you were cooking was more important than what you were cooking.’

Asked by an Italian journalist what someone like her was doing cooking, Daw Nyein Tha replied, ‘I am not cooking. I am obeying God.’

It was the people for whom you cooked that mattered…. Why you were cooking was more important than what you were cooking.

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Some time during this period, my mother helped in the Asian and African kitchen at Caux. She wrote the recipes she learnt, including ‘Daw Nyein Tha’s prawn curry’, in a small notebook. She also jotted down some ‘principles of Asian cooking’ – starting with the sweeping generalization that ‘no one east of Burma likes lamb’ and continuing with the essential components of a curry meal: ‘something hot and something mild; something dry and something wet; something sour and something fried; some sort of bread’. I still have the notebook, stained and blotched from use, as my mother offered a taste of home to foreign students in Oxford, where we lived.

Mary Lean, United Kingdom

You can read more on Daw Nyein Tha here:

• Joyful Revolutionary, Harry.S. Addison, Friends of MRA, 1969
• The World My Country, by Marjory Proctor, Grosvenor Books, 1976

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Watch an extract of this film from our archives (1950) showing a Burmese group with Daw Nyein Tha (05'57", first woman on the left, front row)

Watch Daw Nyein Tha speaking to three women in the film Ma Mi from Burma from our archives.

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This story is part of our series 75 Years of Stories about individuals who found new direction and inspiration through Caux, one for each year from 1946 to 2021. If you know a story appropriate for this series, please do pass on your ideas by email to John Bond or Yara Zhgeib. If you would like to know more about the early years of Initiatives of Change and the conference centre in Caux please click here and visit the platform For A New World.

Near the coffee bar in the Caux Palace stands a grand piano, the gift of American mezzo-soprano Muriel Smith. She was a familiar face at Caux conferences in the 1960s, filling the meeting hall and theatre with her unforgettable voice.

Muriel grew up in Harlem, New York. She created the role of Carmen Jones on Broadway in the 1940s, a time when few black singers were prominent outside the jazz scene. In the early 1950s she moved from Broadway to the London revue and recital stage and then to Drury Lane, where she starred for five years in South Pacific and The King and I.

In 1957, she was the first black opera singer to take the lead in Carmen at Covent Garden. Her artistry and hard work had brought her to the top of the ladder in the musical world.

That autumn riots broke out in Atlanta, Georgia, and Little Rock, Arkansas, over new integration laws. The news hit Muriel hard. ‘A great sense of helplessness came over me,’ she wrote later. ‘What practical thing could I do? Or where could I put myself in order to be in the path of something that might need to be done?’ 

What practical thing could I do? Or where could I put myself in order to be in the path of something that might need to be done?

The next year, she turned down Sam Goldwyn’s insistent offer of a role in the film of Porgy and Bess, because she felt it did not enhance the dignity of her people. From then on, she devoted her talents to promoting understanding of the black race and healing racial divisions worldwide.

She found in Moral Re-Armament (now Initiatives of Change) the framework for which she had been looking. For 15 years she travelled widely, using musicals, plays, films, recitals and personal encounters to express her vision of a united humanity. 
 

She and numerous other committed artists created The Crowning Experience, a musical based on the life of pioneering black American educator, Mary McLeod Bethune, and took it to Atlanta. It was the first show in the city where black and white members of the audience were seated equally. Residents maintained that its four-month run contributed to the integration of the city without further violence.

In The New York Times she explained, ‘Born and raised with the race question in America, I have through my life and through my career tried to bring an answer to this problem. I discovered that the answer to that great wound in this nation could begin in my heart and in my life. It meant I had to be honest about my past, clarify motives, and unselfishly to strike out with no thought of personal gain or ambition, with the love for the world that comes when we surrender our wills to be wholly committed to the power of God.’

I discovered that the answer to that great wound in this nation could begin in my heart and in my life.

Both The Crowning Experience and another play written for Muriel, Voice of the Hurricane, were made into feature films and shown all over the world. Muriel often travelled with them, speaking to the audiences after the screenings.

In the early 1970s, Muriel returned to America to care for her aging mother in Richmond, Virginia. After her mother's death she herself contracted cancer, and while under treatment gave recitals and theatre performances. In 1984 she received an award from the National Council of Negro Women for her services to the arts and to the community.

Shortly before her death the next year, she said, ‘I felt that my country needed the healing (and still needs it) that could be found in facing the moral dilemma of judging people of the human family racially rather than on the basis of character. One of the choices I made was to give up my personal career in order to make such a statement.’

On her piano at Caux, there is an invitation: ‘If you play, do so with a full heart and Muriel’s generosity of spirit!’

If you play, do so with a full heart.

Discover a selection of Christmas carols, sung by Muriel Smith

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Watch The Crowning Experience (1960)

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Watch Voice of the Hurricane (1964)

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Discover a film from our archives on the Hollywood premiere of The Crowning Experience

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This story is part of our series 75 Years of Stories about individuals who found new direction and inspiration through Caux, one for each year from 1946 to 2021. If you know a story appropriate for this series, please do pass on your ideas by email to John Bond or Yara Zhgeib. If you would like to know more about the early years of Initiatives of Change and the conference centre in Caux please click here and visit the platform For A New World.

• The Crowning Experience and Voice of the Hurricane: Initiatives of Change
• Crowning Experience Hollywood Premiere: Initiatives of Change
• Photos: Initiatives of Change
• Photo piano: Andrew Stallybrass

In 1962, a documentary about a remarkable 62,000-mile journey was premiered in Caux. Two years before, Chief Walking Buffalo of the Nakoda (Stoney) Nation and Chief David Crowchild of the Tsuut’ina (Sarcee) had led a First Nations delegation of eight from Canada on a tour that took them to Europe, Asia, Africa and the Pacific, including Caux. It is estimated that 100 million people saw and heard them through press, radio and television.

Walking Buffalo’s association with Moral Re-Armament (later Initiatives of Change) went back nearly 30 years. In June 1934, in a ceremony in Banff, Canada, he and other leaders of the Nakoda Nation had made Frank Buchman, the founder of MRA, a blood brother, naming him A-Wo-Zan-Zan-Tonga (Great Light out of Darkness). It was the beginning of a lasting friendship which led to the involvement of indigenous people from across the world in Buchman's work and Caux conferences.

Over the years the blood brothers kept in touch and met again in 1958 at an MRA world conference. There Walking Buffalo met people from across the world who had found new purpose in their lives. After three weeks, he decided to renounce bitterness, pride and fear in order to support Buchman in his work. ‘I have had good reasons for hatred but now I know that I can even forgive those who have done me wrong,’ he said. ‘I feel like a new man.’

Now I know that I can even forgive those who have done me wrong. I feel like a new man.

Walking Buffalo saw his role as helping the people and leaders, indigenous and non-indigenous, to respect and protect Mother Earth for the benefit of future generations. With passion, humour, and stories he shared his knowledge and understanding of the traditional values of his people.

The journey, in 1959-60, took the delegation to 18 countries. In Europe Chief Walking Buffalo visited 13 countries in 11 weeks, meeting Chancellor Adenauer in Germany and leaders of the Greek and Turkish communities in Cyprus. In Scandinavia he was welcomed by the Sami people 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

In New Zealand, the Canadian party were honoured guests of the Confederacy of Maori Chiefs. In Australia they were welcomed by the Acting Prime Minister and the Governor of West Australia. Their talks and celebrations with the Aboriginal community lasted three days. ‘They showed us the futility of bitterness and hate, and how to work with white people for a God-led country,’ said one Aboriginal participant. They also visited South Africa, Zimbabwe then known as Southern Rhodesia, the Central African Federation, Uganda, and Kenya.

They showed us the futility of bitterness and hate.

During 1961 – his 90th year – Walking Buffalo also took part in campaigns in Brazil, Japan and the US. Back home in Canada, he shared his thoughts with his grandchildren. ‘Lots of people hardly even feel real soil under their feet, see plants grow except in flower pots, or get far enough beyond the street lights to catch the enchantment of a night sky studded with stars,’ he told them. ‘When people live far from scenes of the Great Spirit’s making, it’s easy for them to forget his laws.’

Walking Buffalo died in 1967. In 1976, his son, Bill McLean, accompanied the cast of the MRA review Song of Asia to several regions of Quebec. He came to Caux in 2001, with three Nakoda chiefs. Walking Buffalo’s great grand-daughter, Alana, was a Caux Intern in 2004 and has since done trustbuilding workshops on the reserve – so the story goes on.

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Watch the colour film, made in 1962, of Chief Walking Buffalo's journey around the world (photographer: Robert Fleming, narrator: Edward Devlin)

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This story is part of our series 75 Years of Stories about individuals who found new direction and inspiration through Caux, one for each year from 1946 to 2021. If you know a story appropriate for this series, please do pass on your ideas by email to John Bond or Yara Zhgeib. If you would like to know more about the early years of Initiatives of Change and the conference centre in Caux please click here and visit the platform For A New World.

• Film Walking Buffalo - World Journey: Initiatives of Change Canada, 1962
• Photos: Initiatives of Change