Great Suffering and Hard Lessons to be Learned
"The problem was something much better and larger than fighting death. There are many things that are worse than death. Teaching the people the great lesson that charity could be administered free from religious prejudice and without any ulterior motive was of inestimable value. In the midst of the hatred and cruelty of war [...] it was a splendid thing to be able to cheer the dying and encourage the broken hearted by constant assitance and sympathy. Perhaps to enable a failing person to die under the touch of loving care was even a higher service than to enable a strong person to live in loneliness and grief. Best of all, was to keep people alive and at the same time to influence their lives with hope and friendship."
Bayard Dodge, Report on Souk el Gharb and Abeih, Howard Bliss Collection, AUB Archives.
A few extremely poignant cases can be recounted from those trying times: A woman from New Zealand, who was married to a Syrian and lived in the village of Shweir was struggling to provide sustenance and support to her family until she could not do it anymore on her own: she applied to the Soup Kitchen in Brummana, and was accepted with her family, but did not have the necessary provisions to make the arduous journey on foot with her starving family from Shweir to Brummana. Faced with the choice to either starve on site in Shweir, or to make the treacherous journey with no supplies with already weakened children, she struggled with the dilemna. until her daughter remembered that one of her dolls was stuffed with bran: the doll was cut open, the bran was soaked into some water, and the family chewed on bran mash throughout the journey between Shweir and Brummanna, until they made it safely to the soup kitchen set up by Dr. Dray, where they were fed. In gratitude, the woman stayed in Brummana, and volunteered her services at a small make-shift hospital which had been set, in a typical planning fashion by Dr. Dray, as an Annex to the Soup Kitchen.
Only so much can be done! Dr. Nickoley captures the dire mood in his diary:
"Relief work? What can be done to meet such a situation? Anything that can be done is a mere drop in the bucket, the extent of the suffering is such that it is utterly discouraging to attempt anything." "[...] There is not food enough for all and someone must go hungry. There is not enough to keep all the people alive, someone must suffer and starve. Sending in money merely changes the order in which they shall go. The person who receives a remittance from abroad may be saved from immediate starvation because it enables him to secure food for a while longer."
Edward Nickoley Diary, 1917, Edward Nickoley Collection, AUB Archives.
The model of relief adopted, with its emphasis on practical and logistical principles such as work in exhange of food, the need to limit the number of relief recipients to a manageable number of needy individuals, to save those most "deserving" of being saved, seemed to alleviate some of the suffering, and help people maintain their morale. Relief work became much more organized and efficient. In justification of the new model of relief, Dodge writes, emphasizing the importance of work, and the need to maintain self-respect in these dire times: "As a consequence of [the] general demoralization [...] it seemed best to encourage self-respecting labor, paying for the same in grain, bread or cooked food. This seemed better than giving help to people like beggars, even though a minimum return of labor was required. Instead of developing the begging instinct by offering free charity, self-respect was maintained by offering labor"
However, the new model of relief also forced the aid workers into moral quandaries, and pushed them to make very difficult choices regarding who to include in the relief efforts, all of which must have undoubtedly taken a heavy toll on everyone's well being, morale, humanity and sanity: George Doolittle of Sidon recounts a story when Dr. Dray had to make a choice regarding which of a starving woman's five children could be realistically nourished and saved. When Dr. Dray told the woman that unfortunately only two of her children could be taken in given the resources at hand, he relented and changed his mind, when he heard one of the children, who understood the gravity of the situation, begged his mother, pulling at her skirt:"Oh Mother, Take me too!", Dray relented, and admitted all five children to the Soup Kitchen they were applying to.