Margaret Hanna was born and raised in the Shawville area. She married Christopher Willis and together they worked as medical missionaries around the world. Along the way, their lives intersected with people also with local connections, such as the family of Shawville’s Dr. Powles. Margaret, now 96, has written a book about her life. While it was intended mainly for her grandchildren and great-grand-children, her son William has reached out to THE EQUITY to make the book available to the local community at the Printshop and offers the following overview.
My mother, Margaret Lucille Hanna was born February 15, 1927 to William and Eva Hanna. Of their eight children, seven of whom were boys, Margaret and her brother Neil are the only survivors.
She lived first on the family homestead in Yarm (9th Line near Highway 303), just north of Shawville, and later on what is now the Hanna Line at Radford, attending #7 elementary school at Radford and high school in Shawville. When she was 17, she taught at Murrells School #8.
Some will know her from her community . . .
service on various guilds, including the Holy Trinity Radford guild, and the hospital guild, that she represented on the Pontiac Hospital’s Board of Directors.
In September, 1945, at the age of 18, she left Shawville to attend the nursing school at the Montreal General Hospital. That was where she met my father, G. Christopher Willis II, beginning an unlikely journey that led them to Labrador, Bermuda, London (England), Singapore, Borneo, Ethiopia, Japan, and finally back to retirement on the 9th Line in Shawville.
My father was from a family of missionaries. His parents served in Shanghai, China from 1921-1949, and his grandparents served in Guangdong Province, China until their deaths, and are both buried there.
My mother entered missionary work through my father. When they married in 1948, it was on condition she follow him as a medical missionary. Their intentions were to go to Kunming, Yunnan, China, but with China turning Communist in 1949, this changed everything.
Consequently, my parents’ missionary journey began in Bermuda where my father completed his senior residency under McGill’s training program. This was followed by a one-year stint in Cartwright, Labrador, where he was the doctor covering 250 miles of coastline, travelling by boat in the summer, and by dog team in the winter.
With China out of the question, their direction nonetheless remained eastward, with Singapore as their next destination. After three years, they moved to the remote island of Borneo, where my father established a medical mission alongside his father’s literature ministry, the Christian Book Room. This included a clinic in the town of Sandakan, and later, a hospital 86 miles into the jungle, accessible only by Land Rover. In 1963, when British North Borneo became part of Malaysia and under the control of a Muslim government, we were asked to leave.
Returning to Canada in 1967, my father was surprised to discover that what he thought was the end of his academic medical career was, in fact, the beginning. Back in the 1950s he had left Canada and the McGill medical system to which he was well known (he won a gold medal for medical research in 1953), but now, in the late 1960s, he was to discover a whole new application for medical skills he had honed in the backwaters of Borneo. All he had was what he learned in Christian service, with God his helper. Upon returning to Montreal, he oversaw the non-surgical side of the Montreal General Hospital’s ER, also having responsibilities as a medical teacher in McGill’s medical system.
In 1975, after Montreal, he returned to the mission field, becoming Professor of Medicine for the University of Hawaii at its outlying training program in Okinawa, Japan. For the next five years he trained mainland Japanese doctors, and this is where he became well known, with his teaching notes eventually translated into Japanese as a bedside medicine diagnostic textbook. It was said that while doing ward rounds, the residents and interns used to try to test him on his bedside diagnostic skills. Without his knowledge, they had already run series of tests (all very expensive!) on some of the patients he was about to see, and they would say, “Okay, Dr. Willis, what say ye?” Invariably, his quick bedside diagnostic skills would lead him to a correct diagnosis.
After a year’s service working in Ethiopia with the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) during the famine of 1984-85, his established reputation set the stage for his return to mainland Japan in 1986. One of his Japanese contacts, now an accomplished physician, had come looking for him in Montreal to lead a post-graduate medical program in Maizuru, near Kyoto. That was my parents’ last missionary work. They returned to Shawville in 1990, retiring to a house they had built in 1979 on the Hanna homestead on the 9th Line.
My mother’s journey, which took her around the world, surprisingly intersected with several from Shawville and the Pontiac. While in Maizuru, Japan, for example, she found a connection with Percy Powles, an Anglican Archbishop in Japan. To appreciate the significance of this to my mother, you would need to know that her brother Clarence was named after their family doctor, Dr. Clarence Powles, Percy’s brother.
In December 2016, after my father’s passing, my mother received a book published to record the fifty years of history of the University of Hawaii’s Post Graduate Medical Education Program in Okinawa. In the accompanying letter she was told: “Everybody agrees that Dr. Willis was a great teacher and clinician and considered to be the best teacher among the over six hundred visiting professors we had in the fifty years.”
In June of 2020, she moved to Advocate Harbour, Nova Scotia to live with my sister and her husband, where she currently lives. Her life story, titled, “Your Faithfulness Reaches to the Skies: The Story of a Reluctant Missionary,” chronicles her journey, leaving us with some important life lessons. She would be reluctant to say that, not wanting to draw attention to herself, so I have nudged her forward. I trust that if you read the story, you will agree with me. As she notes on the back cover, “Faithfulness is a word that has caught my attention over the years, a word that has meaning when we see it lived out in others, and a word to which we should all aspire. Above all, we have God’s faithfulness which rises to the heavens, something that will undergird our aspirations to be faithful. It is true that life is full of trials, but within these trials we will discover the faithfulness of God. This has been my experience.”
William (Bill) Willis lives in Shawville and is a writer, with occasional preaching engagements at some of the local churches, including the Shawville United Church. He will be at THE EQUITY booth at the Shawville Fair from 2 to 4 pm this Saturday and Sunday to discuss his mother’s book, which will be available for purchase there and at THE EQUITY office. His books are also available on Amazon.
