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