Mrs. Alice Fawwad Nakkash at the Cénacle Libanais

The lecture at the "Cénacle Libanais" on December 13 was given by Mrs. Alice Fawwad Nakkash, president of the "Union for the Protection of Juveniles." Her subject was: "The Tragedy of the Children of the Road in Lebanon." And Mrs. Nakkash — who, if she writes, writes from the marrow of her experience, and if she speaks, speaks from the sincerity of her devotion to the cause of the vagrant child — gave in her lecture an ample survey reaching back to the founding of the "Society for the Protection of Lebanese Juveniles" at the hands of the lady of His Excellency the Prime Minister, at the side of her noble consort, in 1936.

It is a question that has become a plague to which our society has grown so accustomed that we are no longer stirred at the sight of a child waylaying the doors of the amusement halls with "chewing gum" or with an outstretched hand — until, when the streets empty, he slips away with the rest of the "flock" of vagrant beggars, whose number in Beirut alone reaches 500! Cast out by their broken, destitute families, this night like every night, they take refuge in the dens of the gang-masters, to receive in the "school of the street" lessons in crime — the chief offenses in which they are caught being theft and pocket-picking.

And when they come at last — by varying roads — to the Raml prison, to the two overcrowded rooms set aside there for boys (after passing through the court for children under fifteen years of age, founded a mere six years ago), we find them in a state surpassing in wretchedness what they would have known had they remained in the keeping of the grim hovels that are their homes, or in the street with its lures of gain by plunder... For in prison they stand exposed to moral corruption, which makes up to them whatever they may have missed of the diseases of their pestilent society.

From prison these children stumble on to the reformatory, which, for all the breadth of its grounds and the wholesomeness of its climate, lacks material care from the government and from individuals.

Individuals? And what concern of ours, as individuals, is the question of the children of the streets? Mrs. Nakkash answers that in Lebanon there are hectares of unworked land which, were the hands of the idle set to labor in them, would become gardens and orchards! "And if we bolt the doors of honest livelihood in the face of every seeker after work — we are sharers in the unemployment that is the mother of all plagues."

In her treatment of vagrancy she concludes by recounting certain private institutions which the government supports with subsidies, after the pattern of what is done in some Western countries — such as the well-known refuge of the convent of the "Good Shepherd" for girls; then the project of "Father Jacques" to establish an industrial trade school at Dawra, to be completed within a year, at a cost of some 500,000 Lebanese lira. And were we to turn aside to Sidon, we should find on a spot of its beautiful shore the "Poor Man's Kindergarten," sustained by the donations of the kindergarten's friends and by a share allotted to it from the National Lottery. She then recalled the prodigious efforts of the women social specialists, in the Bekaa and Zahle and Tripoli and Baabda, over and above the capital, bringing out their merit of energy and patience in looking into the children's cases and complaints; some of them have observed the practice of this social art in America and France, besides what they have practiced at the School of Social Training in Beirut.

She closed her valuable talk with praise for the ample, modern, broad, and comprehensive works — governmental and direct — which sister Egypt is carrying out in this field. Shall Lebanon, then, lag behind Egypt in this beautiful human duty?