Twenty-Four Hours in Latakia

Where woman veils herself and exercises her electoral rights... and busies herself with works of charity!

I kept shifting my gaze from the green fields on my right to the congealed salt pans on the other side along the coast, before the city of Tripoli and beyond it to the north... glinting under the rays like polished mirrors, while the blue sea stretched away to where our longings stretch... and the car devoured with us the long road to Latakia.

I was seeing the road for the first time, and I confess that the credit here belongs to a gracious invitation I had received from Miss Suad Haroun to visit the city.

"Angele Abboud," my companion on the trip, sat beside me, a costly camera slung to her shoulder like any respectable American lady tourist... volunteering to point out to me every monument we passed on our way... for with every monument she has school memories that she keeps and does not forget.

I listened and gazed while the sun pouring through the car window burned my cheek, and I did not care. I was in need of the sun — my pale face bore witness to that.

We passed Tripoli, and the refineries of the Iraq Petroleum Company there reminded me of its refineries in Haifa, in the days when that was the main field of its activity; and now my turn had come with memories — I stirred them and they stirred me, and I could hardly hear Angele's voice saying: and here is the club of the company's employees... and that is a flame fed by petroleum, which the company keeps burning night and day...

And the car slid on... An island in the sea, looking poetic from afar — that is Arwad, whose people live on fishing and on the lullabies of legends...

After it we were in Tartous. I did not like it... it had neither the features of a city nor the traits of a village — something lost between the one and the other. The season there is the sugar-cane season: people carry it in the road and suck its fibers, then leave them on the ground for armies of flies to settle on... flies that strut between the cane leavings and sweets a peddler had spread out on a cart... and I still do not know where the eyes of the health inspector were!!

We left it behind... and once more Angele went back to telling me about history. There, on the right, was a huge Crusader castle standing on a knoll, and the villagers had not left it to history: they built their huts around it and went on living with the castle — a monument with a monument's stillness!!

And this is the watchtower: the shells of the war (I do not know whether the last one or the one before it — I shall ask Angele in any case) opened in it a breach that looked like a mouth which, if you asked it, was on the point of telling a great deal.

"And this is Banias," says the driver; we look out and see nothing in it to stir us except its nearness to the blue sea... where ships bound for Latakia sway along, yearning to kiss its shore, yet they remain gazing wistfully from afar, for the harbor is not yet finished being built. The Yugoslav company under contract for the project is still hard at work building it...

And we entered Latakia...

A few minutes later we were seated in soft chairs in Suad Haroun's house, each of us with a glass of refreshment in her hand and the conventional words of compliment on our lips.

She said — "Tell me, what is our city's share of you two?" And I said — "One day: twenty-four hours, no more, after which I go back in spite of myself — and let Angele stay if she wishes."

And Angele countered — "No... the Ahliah institution cannot bear my absence for more than a day."

And Suad tried to be convinced that we were businesswomen!! I was seeing Suad for the first time... and all I knew of her was that she runs an association and organizes lectures...

The young woman began to talk, and it became clear to me that the lectures are on the margin of projects, by no means slight, undertaken by the guidance association that Suad founded. Suad is a graduate of Beirut College for Women, holding from it a bachelor of science.

Suad finished school and returned to Latakia, to find herself in a narrow circle whose men live in one valley and whose women in another. And stranger still, the women are not without academic culture.

Among them are women who studied at the universities of Beirut and Damascus, and among them holders of the baccalaureate — all of whom came back to drop a veil over their faces or, if they rebelled against the veil, to live a life in no way different from the life of the veiled.

For a life that passes in harem visits, in conventional women's chatter, and in nibbling pistachios cannot be a life.

In the town are illiterate women for whom the government schools have no room, and among them poor women who cannot secure a life that would let them think of study.

That is in the poor circles; as for the wealthy ones, there are perfumed women there who yawn their days away in idle luxury.

And so "the Guidance Association for Girls" had to be born.

Suad said: I shall not speak of the association until you have touched its activity with your own eyes. And now, to the table...

The food was delicious; Suad insisted it was the work of her own hands, and we in our turn tried to believe her!!

We rose from her table to make ready to go to the public library, and I can affirm that the number of women present exceeded six hundred... a figure that some of the women lecturers of Beirut may never have known. I was told that it is like this every time the women are invited to a lecture... and the lectures follow one another, built on a studied plan to ensure variety. We finished, and went off with Suad to visit the association's center and become acquainted, at our leisure, with the members.

And we found them there —

Cultured young women, with gentleness in them, and self-sacrifice in the work of charity.

The center was the association's clubhouse and its school: classes begin every afternoon, from the first grade through the third, and the teaching is volunteered by cultured women, or by schoolmistresses who finish at their own schools only to begin teaching again in the association's school. The association provides the pupil with clothes and books, and helps her family materially if there is need for it; the association also watches over the girl in her own surroundings, so as to strengthen the tie between the poor family and the association.

Then, when she graduates from the classes of the association's school, they strive to place her in a government or a private school. Or they find her an honest lad to marry her.

And many of them prefer the second!!

A question could not be avoided: where does the association get its money? And I am told, "From membership fees, donations, and the proceeds of parties and charitable projects."

Suad was not content with what had been said; she loaded me with the association's statement, and by the faint electric light (the current being weak generally in the town) I tried to read:

"The Guidance Association for Girls is a humane, charitable association that opens its doors to all young women of every community and religion.

Its aims may be summed up as bringing out the personality of woman by raising her scholarly, cultural, and spiritual level."

I turned to Suad and said, "God bless you." And she said, pointing to the members of the association, "Rather, bless them." And I looked up to find faces that belong only to people who know how to carry responsibility, and I said: all of you together...

The evening gathering was at another house of the Haroun family, the house of Mrs. Wadi'a, and with us were the members of the association, who are also members of another association, "the Child Welfare Association."

Those present were women only, and I affirm that the talk did not turn on fashions...

It was about politics — yes, about politics, and literature...

Beside me was a physician, a graduate of a French university, Dr. Jumana al-Ahmad.

I asked her how a lady doctor lives... She said, "As the rest live, so long as I am in Latakia... only without a veil on my face."

Yes — defiance is not easy, and leaps do not come thus, without preliminaries... development moves quietly... but it can be felt.

And I fell to thinking over her words as I gazed at the splendid Oriental ornament hanging from the ceiling.

Then we went back to sleep at Suad's, in the hope of meeting the members of the welfare association at their dispensary the next morning. And we kept the appointment at nine sharp...

In the courtyard of the place were women and children, sallow and gaunt, their eyes peering out of sockets ringed with black, waiting for the doctor...

Inside were the clinic and the administration room.

We saw the president and the members dressed in white, and the president, Mrs. Wadi'a, volunteered to show me the registers and the personal-record book of every patient.

Everything orderly, arranged, clear, set out in figures. The reports say that the dispensary's doctor has examined, in the last ten months, 10,776 patients... As for the diseases, I shall not enumerate them, for they are too many to confine within a reportage... but half of them are caused by malnutrition.

They were poor, and it is not their fault that they are poor, just as it is not their fault, either, that their parents do not believe in limiting births...

A single family brings forth ten children, or a dozen... and sustenance is upon God... and upon the charitable associations...

The doctor examines the patients, and when he has diagnosed the illness the association buys the medicine and supplies the family with milk — and it goes on supplying it with milk daily for a year or more...

And stranger than this: in summer the distribution is made twice, lest the milk spoil, the mothers being too ignorant to guard it from spoiling.

The members of the association make the rounds of the houses, guiding the mothers toward cleanliness, teaching them how to wash their children's bodies, and instructing them in the virtue of sweeping the floor...

I must have shown that I thought the task too great, for I looked up at the president and she said, "I feel what is passing through your mind... To feed and treat thousands of the sick is something no association, or associations, could manage... But what cannot be attained in full is not to be abandoned in the main..." And I felt in her tone a sincerity that does not belong to those who dally with works of charity...

I looked into the doctor's room, and it was equipped with everything the clinics need...

The mothers were standing in a line, each carrying a child on her arms, with one in her belly and three at her side.

Besides the doctor, the center has two nurses who assist him... and the members of the association take part in the service, two at a time, by rotation...

I looked at the faces around me — good faces that wished they could do something of worth; in their eyes was an admission that every poor quarter in the city needs a dispensary and an association.

But the problem is a problem of money... before everything else... and at this obstacle dreams clip their own wings...

And so the visit to the dispensary ended, and two hours later I found myself getting into a car, with Angele beside me, camera and all... thinking of the city whose women, still veiled, drop their votes into the ballot boxes and busy themselves with works of charity...