An Appeal to His Excellency the Prime Minister, Abdullah Bey al-Yafi

Your Excellency:

If it is not within your power — however great your integrity, however great your love of justice — to lift from people's shoulders the cares that a host of elements have conspired to lay down, care upon care, then it is within your power to go on widening the atmosphere of optimism you created around yourself the day you destroyed the hashish, opened the inquiry into the incidents of the armed processions, cleared the way for the restoration of woman's usurped right, and promised to give her at once a share in municipal affairs, that she might bear with man the responsibility for health, for cleanliness, and for putting an end to the vagrancy of childhood. It is within your power to continue along the road of spreading hope, for no optimism endures without a continued achieving of good.

On this basis, and on the basis of your good opinion of woman — this loyal Lebanese half — I submit to Your Excellency a project for reviving childhood and breathing a breath of life into the poor villages and the deprived farmsteads.

The project is easy to carry out and low in cost, because its expenses are divided among the children of the rich, the government, and the village. I presented it to two former ministers, Dr. Elias al-Khoury and Dr. Rathif Abi al-Lama', and they admired it and judged it within easy reach; but circumstances prevented its submission through official channels, and hence its realization.

Mr. Prime Minister:

The writer of these lines believes that the poor child has a claim upon the rich child just as he has a claim upon the state, and she considers that this scandalous opulence in which the children of the rich are drowning is the first cause of that crying resentment in the hearts of the fathers and mothers of the toiling classes; and the remedy is more effective and more potent if taken before the disease grows grave.

The child of the farmsteads and the poor villages, Your Excellency, is deprived of modern health care, and of the elementary training that is the foundation of his education in the days to come; he is deprived of the play and the merriment that the children of the rich enjoy in their aristocratic schools. Therefore I beg Your Excellency to cast a glance at an opinion that is, before all else, the sincere opinion of a sincere Lebanese woman. This opinion may be summed up as follows:

1 — The idea of aiding the children of the villages shall be spread in the fee-paying schools of the capital through the principals, directors, and teachers of both sexes — at whose doors I have never knocked but they hastened to answer the call with enthusiasm, eagerness, and sympathy.

2 — A "recommendation" shall be issued that one lira be added to each pupil's fees for every hundred liras, to be collected when the installments are paid and earmarked for the support of one kindergarten.

3 — Each of the above-mentioned schools shall adopt a kindergarten, to be founded in a village the school chooses, its expenses to be met thus: one part paid out of what the adopting school collects, and one part paid by the government. The building shall be provided by the village.

4 — Supervision of the founding of these houses shall be undertaken by a committee formed of the women's organizations, such as the Lebanese Red Cross society and the Children's Welfare Society — which the government has recognized as a governmental institution and to which it has attached the child-welfare projects — and the Al-Nahda An-Nisaiyah society, which struggles against illiteracy.

5 — The Ministry of Education shall undertake the oversight and inspection of these houses.

6 — At the end of every fiscal year the Ministry of Education shall incorporate into its next budget all or some of the kindergartens founded, and the schools — whenever they hand a kindergarten over to the Ministry of Education — shall return to founding new kindergartens in new villages.

The material benefit accruing from this project may be summed up thus:
(a) The education budget will not be burdened alone with paying the expenses of the kindergartens.
(b) The pupils of every modern kindergarten will, after two years, form elements prepared for the elementary school.

(c) Within a few years every village in Lebanon will have a kindergarten.

As for the moral benefit, the least of it is that the rich man's son will come to feel responsibility toward the deprived children of his country, and will grow used to saving something out of his spending on the cinema and other amusements to relieve children whom God created just as He created him, but who were born in regions far from civilization. Moreover, the pupils of the adopting schools will arrange excursions to visit the kindergarten that is their kindergarten; they will perform again in the villages the literary plays which no one does so well as the young folk of Beirut, and will hold their delightful athletic festivals, spreading the spirit of sport through the villages and scattering some merriment and entertainment among the mountain people, who never recall the good things of the favored villages except with rancor, envy, and burning of heart.

Likewise the schoolgirls can knit wool for the children of their kindergarten; and having seen, in a single school, what was gathered in clothing for the refugees, I may be allowed to predict that every girl student in the schools of Beirut will adopt a child in the farmsteads of the mountain.

There is a second benefit as well: acquainting the young men and women with new mountain regions, drawing them out to take the air and to summer in simple, modest villages where people spend half or a third of what they spend in the aristocratic villages. And finally... leading them to touch the misery of the farmsteads, to witness the deprivation endured by the children of the high barrens, and to discover talents that are so often buried in the folds of the valleys.

This is what I wished to bring to your attention, Mr. Prime Minister; and I am full of hope and expectation that you will adopt the project of the child and make it a symbol of your faith in the Lebanese woman and in the ability of the women of Lebanon to share in the service of this homeland. Peace be upon you, and the mercy of God.