What of Our Women's Social Activity? "Care" in the Service of Childhood and Motherhood

In our Lebanese society there are great humanitarian institutions that deserve a glance of appreciation and admiration for the works they accomplish in the cultural, health, social, and charitable fields — and perhaps among the most prominent of these institutions is the Society for the Care of Child and Mother, founded in 1949. Since that time the society has been in continuous expansion, an expansion that has accompanied its works in all their aspects. Having begun by confining itself to securing treatment and medicine for needy children in one small dispensary, it has now branched out in its giving: it receives sick children with their mothers in its seven dispensaries, and the number of patients it treated last year reached twenty-two thousand, whereas in its first year the number did not exceed three thousand. And today it opens its heart to expectant mothers, extending care to them; it supervises 76 deliveries and vaccinates some three thousand persons...

Astonishing figures, no doubt; and if they prove anything, they prove the high zeal with which the members of the Care of the Child society are endowed, and their readiness to sacrifice their time and their rest in the service of the project and its advancement — so, at least, we understand it, for we believe that great works are measured only by their good results. This becomes clear to us the moment we realize that it is the society's members themselves who supervise the running of the dispensaries every day, without pay, on the most modern methods of organization, spurred on by faith in the importance of the giving they offer... Blessed be this giving! And that is to say nothing of the guidance visits they pay in the poor quarters — and what social and humane fruits they reap from them!

The expansion of the projects of the Society for the Care of Child and Mother has been accompanied by a great eagerness to join the society's membership, so that the number has reached about one hundred, drawn from the elite of our cultivated ladies.

In the last quarter century the Lebanese woman has set down abundant feats in various fields, and perhaps the noblest of them all, and the closest to her nature, is her service to childhood and motherhood...

As for the mainspring of the movement, she is the permanent president, Mrs. Ni'mat Qaranful.

There is a pertinent question that is always written on people's faces: "And from where is the society's treasury fed, that it can answer for these projects without deficit?" To which the president replies: "From subscriptions and donations. Then, too, we hold a charity bazaar every year, resembling an amusement park, or a tea party at one of the great hotels, and we set aside the proceeds for the society's treasury — besides the fund-raising campaign on which we count greatly for distributing gifts of clothing, soap, and foodstuffs to five hundred poor families. Nor shall we forget here to acknowledge the kindness of the honorary president, that great benefactress Mrs. Shafiqa Diab, who has showered us with her generosity and earned the thanks of Lebanon and the thanks of its mothers and its children."

— And have you contacts abroad that help you keep pace with world progress in what concerns your project?

— Yes. We are in constant touch with the international health and social institutions, and we profit from their guidance; and we have met with much encouragement and appreciation, which strengthens our resolve to continue the endeavor. Nor do we ever fail to take part in the congresses held in Lebanon: World Health Day, the International Medical Congress, the Arab Women's Congress, the exhibition of the National Revival Society for child care, and others...