The Red Rugs of Tarsus: A Woman's Record of the Armenian Massacre of 1909 — John Shaqi
The Red Rugs of Tarsus: A Woman's Record of the Armenian Massacre of 1909Gibbons, Helen Davenport
History
The Red Rugs of Tarsus: A Woman's Record of the Armenian Massacre of 1909
Gibbons, Helen Davenport
Adana (Turkey) -- History; Armenian massacres, 1909 -- Turkey -- Adana
Miss Hallie Wallis has her home and dispensary near the Girls' School,
in a house built with a blind wall toward the street, and windows
opening only on the court. Within the court an outside stairway,
mounting to the balcony, leads to the living part of the house. When I
went to call, I got into the hospital side. Miss Wallis popped out of
her office to receive me and led me into a waiting-room which, although
furnished only with a few carpets and divans sporting wide-meshed native
crochet tidies, was cozy. At the door were the patients' wooden clogs.
In one corner a soft-voiced Armenian Bible woman was talking with an
elderly blind woman and a little blind boy. These people were in their
stocking feet, and although I knew it was the native custom, I felt that
they had left their clogs at the door out of respect to Miss Hallie's
spotless rooms. Miss Wallis gently divined fatigue that I didn't know
was there. In a few minutes, although it was mid-morning, there was a
steaming cup of tea and the paper-thin slices of bread and butter that
can be made only by an Englishwoman.
The Armenian doctor asked me to take a look at the work. He gave me a
high stool near his operating table. The hours of the morning flew as I
watched the tender skilful handling of the cases, one after another.
This is the only real medical care the people of Adana receive--and it
is a city of sixty thousand! I saw eighty-seven people come and go. Of
these fifty-eight were eye cases. Miss Wallis has books for the blind,
and a Bible woman who does nothing else but read to them. She is a
thorough-going saint, this Miss Wallis, a gentle, tireless saint. How
many women there are in the world, women of means, of brains and
position, who, in unawakened stolidity, live wasted lives! They belong
to the army of the unemployed just as much as bums and hoboes. Some
unmarried women, middle-aged ones, feel a little bitter as they look
upon their married sisters' lives. That is because they are not working.
Here is a woman who, by self-abnegation and glad assumption of
responsibility, has the richness of life and the wide full satisfaction
a mother feels in doing for her brood of children. Mothers haven't
really a corner on contentment and blessedness. The most common examples
of unselfishness and happiness that we see about us are the mothers. But
there is opportunity for all women to become happy through service, and
thus taste the joy of motherhood. Think of the many unmothered people in
the world, both kids and grown-ups, that cry out for woman-souls to
shelter and minister to them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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