Our Women in the Field of Work: Suad Hobeish at the Lebanese Red Cross Pharmacy

I went to the Red Cross pharmacy to see her on a private errand, and I knew she was the employee on duty that afternoon; but I found the crowd pressing hard at the pharmacy window, so I leaned against the trunk of a tree in the garden and set myself to wait.

I could see her moving with speed and briskness, taking the prescription from the hand of the patient or his kin and withdrawing to the back section of the pharmacy, and quickly returning to hand him his order with a pleasant smile. A long while passed before she caught sight of me and invited me in! And by the time I entered the pharmacy, I had decided to begin this series of reportages!

I will not say how I persuaded her to consent — God knows it was no easy matter, for she hates talking about herself! At last she told me how she came to choose nursing as her profession...

She used to feel a weariness in her life: she was neither a student going back and forth to her school, nor an employee spending the hours at a fixed work! So she entered the nursing school of the Lebanese Red Cross, thinking that in this way she would be able, first, to amuse herself and kill boredom, and second, to profit by learning the nursing that is necessary for a woman.

She set about studying the varied program of nursing, hygiene, pharmacy, psychology, and the social sciences! The school asked of the students, as nurses, that they understand the human soul as well.

I asked her how she decided to make nursing her profession, and she said: "After we finished the theoretical lessons we entered the stage of training. To this training period belongs the greatest credit for making this honorable, arduous profession my own. I said before that I entered the Lebanese Red Cross for amusement, but I soon came to feel that I should be lost if I moved away from it! It has become a part of my life.

"In this training period we spent every morning in the hospitals, and there we came to know the real misery in the world — that misery which makes no distinction between one human being and another: the misery of sickness. And there we saw that a pleasant smile or a gentle word makes the patient forget his pain, if only for two minutes! From then on, nursing became for me a piece of myself, driving me to practice it."

After she finished the nursing course, she worked in the mobile dispensaries of the Lebanese Red Cross. These units carried care, knowledge, medicines, and first aid to the villages far from any doctors.

After this period she returned to work in the Red Cross pharmacy. She smiles as she says: "I do not think I need to say that our pharmacy does more work than any other pharmacy in Beirut! And one of the things that gives our work a special pleasure is that these medicines — or rather, most of the medicines we hand out — are of our own compounding, and not ready-made preparations from Europe or America! Were it not that we prepare the medicines ourselves, we should have thought ourselves salesgirls in any other shop, reaching up to the shelf and taking down what the customer asks for."

I asked her about the professional annoyances she meets with, and she answered: "At first we used to grumble at the doctor's shouting in our faces if we picked up one of the technical instruments to get acquainted with it. We would pick it up out of curiosity and love of knowledge, and the doctor would be angry with us because he was going to use it in a surgical operation and it was still clean from the sterilizing box! These annoyances and the doctors' shouting came to an end when we grew familiar with the sight of the instruments and knew when we might handle them and when to keep away from them.

"And I remember that for a long time I could not bring myself to eat meat: whenever I took up the knife and brought it near a piece of meat, it seemed to me it was the doctor's scalpel performing a surgical operation! — until a period of time passed during which I grew used to the sight of blood and of great wounds.

"But I find no annoyances in the pharmacy, except when the pressure of work eases; in those rare cases we begin preparing certain things we may perhaps need in the future.

These things are sometimes paper bags, or the preparing of medicines that are in heavy demand; and the employees often take advantage of these occasions to clean the pharmacy and the many shelves where the bottles of medicines and drugs are beyond counting.

Often, too, victims of accidents come to the pharmacy, and the nurses there give them first aid!

"How do you spend your free time?"
"I cannot say that I have free time in the full sense of the word; but I spend such hours in reading, going to the cinema, and visiting friends, women and men."

She is one of those addicted to reading! She reads on various subjects, but she inclines to reading about the customs and traditions of peoples; she feels then that she is making journeys in these countries she reads about or would like to travel to. She has a particular leaning toward psychological, analytical novels, and prefers reading in French. As for Arabic, she reads "the beautiful poetry we are famous for!"

When I asked her which of the Arab poets she loved best, she said: "Michel Trad, Said Akl (when I understand him), and Salah Labaki."

She inclines to seeing films based on real life, and after that, musical films.

And if she is tired at the end of the day, she amuses herself with solving "crossword puzzles."

I asked her about the kind of visits she pays, and she answered, laughing: "They are no different from all the other visits in Beirut!"

"Where and how do you spend your annual holiday?"

"I go to our village, Deir al-Ahmar, in the Beqaa. There I live the delicious life of laziness after the year's fatigue: I spend my time riding horses, hunting, and sitting up of an evening with the lively village folk! You will ask what we do with our evening gatherings? We play backgammon sometimes, and we talk at other times!"

Despite her evasion of answering my remaining questions, I was able from other sources to learn another part about her during her holiday hours! She spends the greater part of her time supervising the crops of the land her family owns. Nor do the village folk forget that she is a nurse: they come to her with their aches and pains, and they affirm that to her belongs the greatest credit for the visit of the mobile Lebanese Red Cross dispensary to their village.

And her friends admire her constant gaiety, her quickness of wit, and her loyalty in friendship.

I said to her: "This is the last question: what is the dream you would wish to see come true?"

She answered: "I will not answer — that is a secret between me and the future."

As for me, I say: "May God fulfill all your hopes, Suad!"