At the Get-Acquainted Reception of the Lebanese Union for Child Care

There are children upon whom nature bestows her gifts, and others whom she denies the right to enjoy those gifts, so that they live, for as long as they live, marked either by a hereditary ailment or by a blow that overwhelmed their earliest years — such as infantile paralysis. Modern medicine, however, no longer resigns itself to the victims of such grave ills, so long as it can find its way to them early. And the credit for being the first in Lebanon to realize a noble project of this kind belongs to Dr. Jamal Karam Harfush, who on the evening of the 19th of last month, at the Alumni Club, arranged a get-acquainted reception in honor of Mrs. Katharine Lenroot, formerly chief of the Children's Bureau in the United States and director of the study being carried out by the International Union for Child Welfare into the problems of childhood in the world and the ways of solving them. It was attended by the famous specialist Dr. Kraft, besides representatives of the various charities, women members of the Beirut municipality, and those engaged in educational and social work — everyone who has devoted a large share of his activity and influence to raising the condition of childhood, such as His Excellency Sami Bey al-Solh, Mrs. Alice Alfred Nakkash, Mrs. Arlette Khoury, and others.

Dr. Kraft gives his treatment the name of "habituation": it comes down to awakening in the afflicted the desire to face difficulties, so that with the passing of the days they outstrip their healthy fellows, because they set a fuller value on the things of life. We learned that he intends to open his new clinic in the American and French hospitals and in the dispensary of the Lebanese Union for Child Care in the days shortly to come. He added, by way of caution, that the task of "habituation" deliberately undertakes to direct the mothers and fathers and to carry them toward the desired goal before results are to be looked for in the children themselves. To his degrees from the highest institutions of London, the said specialist joins valuable experience in engineering and in law.

"The Woman's Voice" broadcasts this glad news for the first time in the history of Lebanon, and offers its warmest wishes for the efforts of the Lebanese Union for Child Care and for their ever-growing success.