Margaret Nicholl Laird - First Years in Ubangi-Shari

First Years in Ubangi-Shari

After briefly studying French in Paris, she traveled to Ubangi-Shari and arrived in the town of Fort-Sibut in 1922, where she joined Baptist Mid-Mission missionary Rosenau. After studying the Sango language at Fort-Sibut for only four months, she was asked by the director of the mission, Mr. Haas, to move to the town of Bangassou in southeastern CAR to run a French school which the French colonial administration wanted to have opened there. In Bonjanou she came to know another missionary named Guy Laird, a widower with a young son named Lawrence. Although initially reluctant to marry a man who had already had another wife, she soon overcame these reservations and married Guy Laird in 1924. In 1925 Margaret gave birth to Eleanor Louise, who died only four months later. In 1927, while on furlough in Englewood, Colorado, Margaret gave birth to her first daughter, Arlene, and in 1928, two weeks after returning to Fort-Sibut in Ubangi-Shari, she gave birth to a second daughter, Marian.