With the Members of the Mabarra and Education Society in Damascus

Blessed be youth! For wherever it is found, there is effective will, there is fruitful work, there is activity, vitality, and perseverance!

I called on them at their permanent headquarters, in one of the quarters of new Damascus, and was received by faces that spoke contentment, assurance, and goodness — faces bespeaking a native nobility in souls steeped in the spirit of love and tenderness. And my astonishment grew when I saw among them not one who had passed her thirtieth year! All of them young married women and unmarried girls — the old generation has no place among them!

The meeting of the "Mabarra" council was drawing to its close, so I waited a few minutes while Dr. Marzuba Quwatli finished reading the final report. I noticed in it a great deal of order and a great deal of sharing-out of the work, with no distinction between one member and another, or between mother and spinster — the rule of attendance, perseverance, and division of labor applies to every one... this one in the workroom, that one in the schools, another in teaching, another in supervision, and so on through the duties distributed among the members according to inclination and competence.

My turn came, and the president of the society, Miss Malak Kuzbari, approached me smiling, proud of the information she was about to give me on the society's activity, and began to tell its story from the year 1945 down to the date at which we stand. She said:

"When we began work our number did not exceed fifteen members, and all the money we had did not pass two hundred and fifty Syrian liras, gathered from the contributions of the members themselves... Our first spur was a faith and a resolve with which our hearts brimmed... At the outset we went roaming the streets in search of some vagrant girl, whose guidance and schooling we would entrust to one of the government schools, or to a government hospital, as the situation required. We carried on with the work in this loose fashion, without any place of our own for our meetings, which we held by turns in our homes... But not much time passed before we had a permanent headquarters, taken at our own expense and fitted out, and we made ready everything needed to shelter those in whose faces the fates had scowled. Little by little we began to draw support, now from our own pockets, now by turning to those accustomed to backing charitable projects. We went on wrestling with money while money wrestled with us, until a law was issued permitting the Juvenile Protection Society, which works for vagrant boys, to assist another society resembling it in work and aim; and this assistance settled upon the 'Mabarra' — the only society working for the sake of vagrant girls... And so we began to cooperate with 'Juvenile Protection' — and in cooperation is a strength that leads on to success! Through its financial help our project was able to pass out of its narrow, limited bounds onto its broad and fruitful road; and the Ministry of Education likewise took us under the eye of its care, assigning to us, to oversee the course of these unfortunate girls' lives, a deputy from the Police Directorate and a permanent matron..."

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In answer to my question as to how the budget is secured in regular fashion, the president of the society, Miss Malak Kuzbari, said: "There is now in our society's treasury a surplus of money, gathered by way of charity fêtes, exceeding ten thousand liras... As for the standing springs from which we draw our aid, they are, in the first rank, the Khumasiyya Company, the Ministry of Economy, the boys' Juvenile Protection Society, and the Ministry of Education. Nor is the Governorate of Damascus without some share of the credit, for it provides the vagrant girls with their meal each day; and at times this meal reaches us by way of the Prisons Directorate, since we seldom receive the vagrant girls except through the police department — or when the vagrant girl is under arrest or under sentence — so that we may have a register to return to at need, or when the girl leaves us."

Then I asked her: And between what ages do the vagrant girls in your charge range?...

The president answered: "A girl is accepted between seven and eighteen, and she remains surrounded by our care and our attention so long as the term of her sentence has not ended or she has not been claimed by one of her relatives... In this stage we school her and train her in all the ways of life that will bring her onto the right road and fit her to be a good mother... Some of them marry from our house; some we place with one of the institutions or companies, or with the sewing houses, or in endowed homes; and another group returns to a husband's house or a father's house — all of it under our supervision and with our knowledge, so that if any relapse into wrongdoing occurs, we take the girl back into our arms until her soul is settled and the evil is driven out of her... And how often the miracle has unfolded swiftly between our hands, and we have found the fruit of our work sinking deep into the souls of these girls. The selfless love that shows in their eyes, in their treatment of us and their respect for us, is surely the best proof that this giving of ourselves does not go for nothing — and here are its results: blossoms going out into society, of whom we are proud."

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