Children's Day in Lebanon

Sunday, March 23 last, was a memorable day for the child, organized by the Child Welfare Committee of the Lebanese Women's Union; and Her Ladyship the First Lady of Lebanon graced this "Day" with her exalted patronage.

The Woman's Voice is pleased to record some of the scenes it captured of this "Day," and offers thanks in its pages to the noble benefactress Mrs. Zahia Salman, president and founder of the Child Welfare Committee and originator of the idea of "Children's Day," who toils night and day in the service of the deprived child and in directing the attention of countrywomen and countrymen toward him.

Most of the Lebanese cities took part in the celebration of Children's Day, and it was a splendid national festival, in which students, boys and girls, and the youth of the parties and organizations roamed the streets, the quarters, and the shops, collecting the donations that will be spent on developing the projects aimed at caring for deprived children.

Yet the correspondent whom The Woman's Voice sent to follow the work of organizing this day noticed a most regrettable thing: the reluctance of the national institutes — such as the Hikma Institute, Zahrat al-Ihsan, and the Patriarchate — to take part in collecting donations, after the example of the foreign and other private institutes.

Below is the text of the splendid appeal with which Mrs. Zahia Salman closed the Child Week program on Radio Lebanon. And may the government see fit to make this "Day" an official national holiday:

To every daughter of my sex whom the Creator has honored with the blessing of motherhood! To the mother who enjoys ease of living with her children, whose little ones have never known the bitterness of deprivation!

To the mother of generations and the weaver of nations, to my sister, woman, I address this appeal of mine! And my appeal is but an echo of the appeal of the deprived child, a reverberation of his feeble voice; nay, it is the expression of what stirs the heart of a mother who has seen with her own eyes childhood in torment, and so has come to beg your aid, and who has seen with her mind's eye the dark future that awaits these innocent children, and so has come to call on you for rescue!

And who has a better claim than the mother to answer the child's call? And who more deserves that instinctive tenderness and overflowing affection with which a woman's heart brims at the word "child" than a child whom cruel fate has denied the blessings of tenderness, affection, and care?

These neglected, dirty children, running loose in the open street with bare feet and worn-out rags, are the sons of the nation; they are our sons, and we are their mothers even if we did not bear them. They are time's deposit in our trust and the future's charge upon our necks; they are stones in the building of this dear homeland — but rough stones that need polishing, and irregular stones that need to be made even.

We are building a nation, and the nation in which poverty, ignorance, and disease hide behind the balconies is building only for a short term, because it rears in its bosom the crimes of vagrancy, beggary, and criminality, which return to society as deadly elements and as pickaxes of demolition against the building.

The evil, the whole evil, is that we should shut our eyes to these crimes gnawing at the body of our new generation, feigning ignorance of their existence; or that we should shed the responsibility of fighting them; or that we should throw that whole responsibility onto the government's shoulders and go off to our amusements with easy minds!

A woman's responsibility in society, as mother to her children and manager of her home —

for all the sanctity and importance of that responsibility — does not require her exclusion from taking part in this national effort or in any other. The wise woman knows her first duty and performs it; and if she widens the horizon of her thinking and the scope of her work, she does not go beyond her proper sphere as a mother — if we consider her a mother to her children and a mother to the nation — nor beyond the sphere of her rights as a living citizen, if we remember that she is half the nation; and that, upon my life, is what we want her actually to be.

You have heard a great deal about the work of the Child Welfare Committee, and you will hear more; but on this occasion I shall confine my words to saying that our committee will work, with the same energy you have known in it, to open a new home in the near future, God willing.

The Child Welfare Committee and the Lebanese Arab Women's Federation welcome every lady who joins her activity to our activity and her voice to our voice, and puts her hand in our hands to lift the evil from neglected childhood.

And now, before I close my word, I offer thanks and acknowledgment of kindness to the lady of benefactors, Her Ladyship the First Lady of Lebanon, for gracing Children's Day with her exalted patronage; and to the esteemed Lebanese government, which has never ceased to look kindly on the child welfare project since its inception — and it will surely redouble that kindness, God willing.

I also find it incumbent upon me to address a word of sincere thanks to the fine Lebanese press for encouraging our project and devoting its long columns to our appeals on various occasions; and to the educational institutes and the organizations, their heads and their members, for the valuable assistance they have never ceased to render us on the annual Children's Day.

As for Radio Lebanon, which has opened this wide place in its programs for our talks, and carried to you our voices and the voices of the children in our care, it has a beautiful page in the history of our committee.

I also seize this opportunity to salute the president of the Women's Union, Miss Ibtihaj Kaddoura, bearer of the banner of the women's renaissance in this country and the first to demand woman's rights.

And to you, honored listeners — and to the benefactors and benefactresses among you our thanks, past and to come — until we meet tomorrow on Children's Day, and may you be well with every returning year.