Health and Social Guidance Week

We had pointed, in previous issues, to that new breakthrough in the field of social service: the holding of a week of health and social guidance for mothers — the week which the Lebanese Child-Welfare Society, aided by the many organizations and institutions whose names we listed at the time, held by way of experiment. The experiment proved highly successful, which encouraged the society to open a permanent center in the child-welfare home under its supervision: a center to which mothers come once a week, and there receive the health, educational, and social information they need from trained nurses of the Public Health division of the American University of Beirut. For two years now the president of the Child-Welfare Society has been writing appeal after appeal, urging the Ministries of Health, Education, and Social Affairs to adopt the idea so that its benefit may spread to all, setting out in detail the methods of work and the smallness of the costs.

It was a happy surprise when Mrs. Zahia Salman received, in the middle of this month, an invitation from the Directorate of Social Affairs to attend a meeting devoted to studying how the idea of guidance might be carried out and extended. That meeting was followed by a second, at the close of which it was agreed that the Ministry of Social Affairs, the Ministry of Health, and the Municipality should cooperate with the women's organizations: the city is to be divided into districts, the work distributed in an organized manner, reports written on the present condition of these quarters, and such reforms as are possible undertaken at once, the most important taking precedence over the merely important. When the work succeeds, the same plan will be applied in the outlying districts.

Our congratulations to the Child-Welfare Society, and our sincere wishes for the success of the work.