A recent Newsday headline "Diego Martin Pentecostal Church celebrates 76 years of Ministry" jogged my memory. Now renamed "Destiny House of Praise", the picture of the new church which has replaced the old church at the corner of Quarry Street and Diego Martin Main Road, as well as the current Pastors Andrew and Michelle John, were unfamiliar.
Reading on, the names Sister Ruth Pemberton and Sister Clara Siemens "the two founding women who developed the church in the year 1925", and Sister Viola Rouse, who later joined the team, brought the three Missionaries forcefully to my mind and eye. Having been born in the house which stood exactly opposite to this church in Greenhill Village, by age five I was attending the Pentecostal Sunday School. My mind was now whizzing back to age six when I lived for three months with the three missionaries at their Congo Village Home. It was during World War II, my grandmother was very ill and it became difficult for my pregnant mother to manage three young children and hospital visits to her mother. The three ladies welcomed me warmly into their home.
The two things which standout in my memory are the tears which would stream down Sister Ruth's very pink, round face as she crescendoed the chords on the piano on Sunday mornings, and I wondered "why is she crying?" Today, I know that it is the Pentecostal way of praising and loving the Lord. The other has to do with 'margarine' which I do not eat to this day. There was a World War on and butter was just not available, so margarine it was at the kindly Missionaries home, and it certainly was not the refined Flora or Sunflower of this day. Margarine of that time had its own very rank taste.
Clara Siemens and Ruth Pemberton met and became lifelong co- workers and friends while attending the Christian Missionary Alliance Bible College in New York. When Ruth received the baptism of the Holy Spirit at Bible College, which was unheard of in that denomination, she moved to the Assemblies of God which had experienced the speaking in tongues.
In 1919, while attending a Missionary Rally at church, Ruth and Clara heard a missionary, Reverend Jameson, and his wife speak of their experiences and the challenges they faced in the West Indies. Feeling the call to come to the West Indies, at ages 20 and 21 the two young American women left their homeland and travelled with the Jamesons, under the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada, first to St Croix where they made friends and won many souls, one of whom Sister Viola Rouse, a nurse, later joined them in Trinidad. Leaving their converts in charge of the work, the two Missionaries moved on through the other Caribbean islands, sailing the rough Caribbean Sea in windjammers, to Antigua, Montserrat, St Vincent, Barbados, leaving the converted in charge, until they finally decided to settle in Trinidad where they met with some resistance, but started churches in areas like Woodbrook, Arouca, Tunapuna, and Piarco where they met the Rambaran family, and ended up adopting three of their eight children.
John and Helen Pemberton, both deceased, were adopted by Sister Ruth while Ramdass, who was adopted by Sister Rouse and had his name changed to Elton Rouse, is 76 and living in Cleveland, Ohio. The story is told that being right after World War I, Sister Clara's German name "Siemens" came under close scrutiny from the local authorities, even her mail was being checked, so the ladies were advised that she should not adopt Ramdass. They also adopted Clara Ruth Nicholas, whose mother, Jane, worked for them, and she now lives in West Palm Beach, Florida.
By 1924, the Missionaries had started meetings outside their car in Diego Martin, and people came to see and listen to the beat of the tambourine. However, there was much opposition in this predominantly Roman Catholic and Anglican area and it is said that rotten eggs were thrown at them. When one father, a Mr Awai, discovered his son's conversion, he put him out of his house as he wanted no part of the "save souls" and as well fired the employee, Brother Nicholas Joseph, who had witnessed to his son.
One night, in 1924, while carrying on an open-air service, the abandoned Methodist Chapel building at the corner of Quarry Street and Diego Martin Main Road came to the attention of Brother Jameson. Undaunted, he contacted the Hanover Methodist Head Church and arranged to purchase it. With help from a Canadian, Mabel Cunningham, who read in a monthly fellowship magazine that money was needed to purchase a building in a place called Diego Martin, Trinidad, the abandoned chapel became Cunningham Memorial Pentecostal Church, which was changed to Diego Martin Pentecostal Church somewhere in the late seventies.
But the three kind-hearted Missionary Sisters were not only busily building churches which today come under the Pentecostal Assemblies of the West Indies, and pioneering the evangelising of this area with the Word of God but according to Elton Rouse, who recently visited Trinidad "they took a particular area in the Cameron Hills and would go up there with bandages and other things to clean peoples' sores, doing real missionary work with no bank account, using the money they received from overseas for the people." While raising the children they had adopted, one of whom Ruth Joy Pemberton-Thomson, daughter of one of the first adopted, Helen Pemberton, who died soon after Ruth's birth, is today married to Reverend Lew Thomson of the Couva Revival Centre.
To Ruth Joy, now a mother of three grown children, Sister Ruth was the only mother she ever knew. "I was always happy with them, although mother was so busy with the church she always found time everyday to play little games with me and do the things a child would like. Wherever she went, I went with her. When mother went on furlough to the United States in 1955, I left Tranquillity and went to school there for a year. On her return Mother was posted to a church in Point Fortin where she pastored until her resignation in 1961, when she was asked by Reverend Ulseth, a Canadian Missionary who pioneered the Revival Time Assembly in San Fernando, to go and help in the music department. She trained the choir and taught new members the Bible."
A founder of the West Indies School of Theology in Maracas, St Joseph, Sister Ruth taught English from its inception to the mid-60's. In 1967 Sister Ruth was stricken with a stroke and passed away in July 1971. She is buried at Laperyouse Cemetery.
While Sister Clara who returned to Canada in 1947, did come back to help take care of Sister Ruth, fulfilling a promise she had made from their days in Bible College when Ruth used to look out for her, and eventually died in a Home for Aged Missionaries in Toronto in 1980. Sister Rouse went back to St Croix where she died, and says Ruth Joy "with her mind still very sharp."