It Wounds My Eye!! (A Reportage)

It wounds the eye and pains the soul, the sight of these little ones with their big baskets, walking bent under their weight, or sprawled on the sidewalks and in the markets with their baskets beside them — so that if you try to buy something, they rush up before you can call them and crowd around you, jostling, each one trying to win the chance of serving you.

A group of children whose faces have withered and whose bodies have wasted away, until they appear as misery made flesh.

A group of little ones fated to go down into the arena without weapons: their morals have been corrupted, and ignorance has overwhelmed their minds, so that they no longer tell the ugly from the fine, the rotten from the sound.

An army of little ones who, were they put to good use and well directed, would bring relief to suffering humanity, and the country would have men of them...

Faced with the insistence of the representative of The Woman's Voice magazine, and after long reflection on those sights of ours that wound the eye — and how many they are! — I have found nothing worse than poverty and begging, which, it seems, are unhappily on a steady increase among us.

It is not outward show and loose display that pain us in our life, so long as poverty runs rampant among us. And it is a disgrace to us, government and people alike, that we mount no campaign to fight begging by positive, practical means — such as establishing shelters and refuges for the infirm and the blind.

It wounds my eye to see these filthy alleys and walls in the country where UNESCO convened.

And to see a man in the street standing at his ease, "face to the wall," in full view of the girls and women passing by!...

...And the sight of a boy of eight toiling as a laborer for the sake of a loaf of bread, with a lump in his heart at the sight of boys of his own age going off to school, with no one demanding grinding labor of them.

...to beg, or to go "into service," instead of being at school receiving care like my children and other people's children. Their only crime, for which they suffer this deprivation, is that they were born poor.

1 - It wounds my eye, in Beirut, to see a girl light her cigarette in the tramway cars or in public establishments.

2 - And the young man overdone in his elegance, reeking of perfumed scents while he affects silly gestures.

3 - The schoolgirls who have gone to excess in adornment and paint, wearing high-heeled shoes as though they were off to a dancing party and not to a school or a college.

It wounds my eye: a man heedless in his car as it races through the streets of the capital, whose attention is never caught by the sights of misery all around him, who does nothing toward the happiness of the sons of his homeland, but passes them in the streets and shuts his eyes, so as not to see their gaunt, pallid faces and their dirty outstretched palms... begging for mercy.

It wounds my eye to see, in the most beautiful and the busiest spot in Beirut, daughters of my own sex making a trade of slavery and shame. I say: these houses must disappear; and I hold it, in any case, a public scandal to keep them in Burj Square.

And it wounds my eye to see young boys filling the markets, either to sell chewing gum or