Dr. Alice Cary is a resident of Piedmont Gardens.

When she arrived in Kyoto in 1947 as a medical missionary, Dr. Alice Cary knew one word of Japanese: “ohayo,” which means “good morning.”

Her vocabulary grew rapidly, starting with the words most useful at the campus health clinic where she initially worked: student, cough, bloody diarrhea, gallstones. She and her husband, Otis, who taught American history at what is now Doshisha University, would work in Kyoto for 48 years.

ABHOW residents have a variety of occupations and religious affiliations, but some reflect the company’s original purpose: to provide housing and health care for retired American Baptist ministers and missionaries. They include Cary, who lives at Piedmont Gardens in Oakland, Calif., and Beryl Curry, a missionary nurse who served in India and the Philippines and who now lives at Judson Park in Des Moines, Wash. With their husbands, now deceased, both women began their service in the aftermath of World War II.

When the Carys arrived in Japan, they found a devastated country. “Our war against Japan, though it was started by Japan, was really from my point of view an unnecessary overkill,” Cary says. The couple arrived by ship in Yokohama, near Tokyo. “Yokohama sounded like such a Japanese word, and I expected to see a place that looked like the Japanese prints. Everything was burned out. There were just shells of buildings left. It was a shock to me to see that.”

The Carys, who met as college students in the U.S., had parallel backgrounds. Otis was born and raised in Japan, the son and grandson of missionaries there; Alice grew up in Turkey, where her parents were missionaries.

When they began their work in Japan, they brought with them a ton of food apiece, she says. “Any foreigners had to bring food because there wasn’t enough for the Japanese. Some were literally starving, and the rations were very inadequate.” The cold cereals and cake mixes she brought got moldy, and she ended up giving them to chicken farmers, who fed them to their flocks and gave her eggs in return.

Soon after their arrival, Alice Cary joined the outpatient department of a new Southern Baptist hospital. She worked as an internist and pediatrician, while her husband taught American history at Doshisha. They lived in and ran a dormitory on campus and raised four children, two of whom now live in Japan.

The Currys’ first task on arriving in East India in 1947 was to reestablish a 15-bed jungle hospital that had been used by the Japanese as a horse barn during the war.

“It was full of manure,” Beryl Curry recalls. “We had to scour everything and then whitewash it inside. We could hardly get settled when people started coming with aches and pains and pregnancies, coming from miles around.”

She and Frank met at the University of Washington, where she trained as a nurse and he was pre-med. Since the age of 12, Beryl wanted to be a missionary. When she met Frank, she thought she’d have to choose between the mission field and getting married and raising children. But experienced missionaries told her, “There’s no reason you can’t take children overseas.”

That’s just what they did, setting out with three children and having three more abroad. Their first posting was the remote hospital near the India-Burma border, where head-hunting had not quite died out and where they were the only medical personnel for 30 miles.

“The mission board told me my first duty shouldn’t be to nurse, it should be to take care of my family. They said, ‘We want you to be an example to the community of a wife’s responsibility to her family first.’ Well, that was partly true,” she says. “But you know if you’re a nurse you can’t stay away from that either.”

She and Frank served next at a new hospital in the Philippines, then in an Indian hospital that included a tuberculosis sanatorium and a leprosy colony. “We filled in where they needed people,” she says. “We were here and there and everywhere.” In all, they served 32 years before retiring to the U.S. They moved to Judson Park in 1993.

Alice Cary and Beryl Curry both view current events through a perspective expanded by their time overseas. Cary, who moved to Piedmont Gardens 14 years ago and returns to Japan every summer, says that living abroad “did away with whatever arrogant Americanism I had. Very soon after we got [to Japan], I thought, ‘What are we doing? This is an older civilization and, in many ways, much better than ours.’”

Curry, who was in India when Pakistan became a separate country, says that when she reads the newspaper these days, she feels for the people there. The languages she learned in her travels also help her connect with Judson Park employees from the Philippines and India.

“I blurt out a word sometimes to the folks,” she says. “It has been over 25 years, but I can say some greeting words.” She enjoys the feeling of rapport that even one shared word can accomplish.

About Piedmont Gardens:
For more than 35 years, Piedmont Gardens has been an Oakland landmark and the retirement living destination for those who know the East Bay best and love it most. In partnership with Grand Lake Gardens, our continuing care retirement community promotes a richly rewarding lifestyle of activity, security, convenience, and variety for seniors.

Piedmont Gardens is a community of the American Baptist Homes of the West (ABHOW), a trusted nonprofit provider of retirement housing and health care services. As an expression of its Judeo-Christian mission, ABHOW seeks to enhance the well-being and security of seniors through the provision of housing, health care, and supportive services.

This article originally appeared in the February 2010 issue of ABHOW Words.