Layla Baalbaki Asks a Select Group of Our Ladies About a Wish They Fulfilled in the Past Year and a Wish They Are Working to Fulfill in the New Year

The years pass... and man, everlasting, weaves wishes and struggles, stubbornly, to fulfill them.

In this swift, decisive interval between an old year passing away and the light of a new year, I set out to a select group of our ladies, in search of “a wish each of them fulfilled in the past year, and a wish she will work to fulfill in the year to come!” And the answers were these:

1 — Dr. Jamal Karam Harfush

A holy supplication — a call to return to God — is Dr. Jamal's wish, to the letter:

For the answer of Dr. Jamal Karam Harfush proved a supplication that brings our materialistic man back to God, and to His teachings, His lights, and His glad tidings.

The Doctor confided her wish to me on a sunny morning after snowstorms, and it flowed into my thoughts gently, that I might distill it, drop by drop, into yours:

“My wish is that the world should meet God, so that man may meet his brother man! My wish is that God grant us the grace of patience, that we may try to build anew each time we fail; that we believe in the ideal, that we may draw nearer to God; and that we conquer our evils, so that peace may triumph!”

Her gentle, spiritual way of thinking astonished me — and she is kindness itself. She smiled serenely and answered: The finest wish that came true for me in the past year was the full recovery of my “health,” which helps me carry out my professional and social duties...

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2 — “We are old-timers; why don't you dig for the new wishes?”

She would put me off — politely, forcefully, by any possible means — so I gathered my courage and answered her:

In the street I meet thousands of ladies, millions of people, who may not possess a single idea to fight for — and an old wish is like a rare antique...

She cut me short:

— “Look, my dear, my heart chirps when I see troops of girls entering the university and leaving it for the great world. My hope for the future is in the Muslim woman — I mean the one who has gained a complete education, one that fits her to enter the battle; so that woman may live by her own powers, her own aims, her own personality, all her own capacities — not a dependent on the man who has taught her to expect his protection.”

And I could not help admiring the personality of Dr. Saniyya Habboub; I warmed to her stern, radiant, then tender glances, and I asked her about her house, her children, her husband. She welcomed me into her orderly domestic world and whispered in my ear a wish fulfilled in the past year: she visited America, after 25 years. She went back to the medical school where she had specialized. She came upon her fellow students — and behold, one was a professor and a dean, another the owner of a hospital. And behold, she was living her youth over again, as though she had left the place only seven days before.

The welcoming faces. The kind treatment...

The Doctor lit a cigarette, and — as though the vagueness of the idea in my eyes troubled her — took me by surprise, asking: And you, my dear, what is your wish? Why don't you marry?

I grew flustered, and murmured, to her and to myself: Marriage is a new wish I add to the heaps of wishes I carry.

3 — Mrs. Eva Malik lived as the wife of our Foreign Minister for more than ten years far from homeland and family... by reason of the posting of her husband, Dr. Charles Malik, to represent Lebanon in the New World. Hardly had I uttered the word “wish” in her hearing over the telephone when she hastened to answer: My wish was to settle down in my own home, in Lebanon — and the idea dearest to me has come true.

And no sooner had I asked her about a new wish, for the future, than she volunteered: Again, stability — only in a more complete form, so that I may set my life in order: enter my son in school, take up my ties with friends again, and return to the social round.

And when I tried to draw her toward politics, she caught herself with tact, holding fast to “stability,” and said:

Lebanon has passed through grave and turbulent troubles. But it has now overcome them, and all I wish for it is that it too may enjoy stability — spreading order, cooperation, and renaissance, in its cooperation with the other countries.

4 — And although Mrs. Salwa al-Said was absorbed in preparing the “sandwiches” and the molds of “cake,” and the plates and the vegetables... laying an appetizing table, she talked to me of politics... and of the failure of the idea of “the unity of the Arab word.” And when she wishes anew, she wishes for nothing but that the Arab countries should agree upon a single, united political course.

She excused herself, ushering me off to keep me away from the smells of the meats, and the vanilla, and the eggs... So I tossed out my question, asking what the “Baalbeck Festivals Committee” — of which she is a member — had accomplished in the past summer; and she warmed to the tale of the success of the folk dancing introduced into the festivals — in a short time, and with prodigious efforts — and of the birth of the Lebanese theater, the revival of the Arab theater, and the creation of an artistic work of world rank that will draw tourists and spectators from every corner of the earth.

5 — As for Miss “Edma Bayoud,” she has an enormous project: the raising of a building for the Young Women's Christian Association, to bring together the Muslims and the Christians of this country, for brotherhood and united work in the service of Lebanon.

She explained that this building will be a center of high standard to stand against the many cheap clubs we have, and the cafés, and the cabarets... She is hopeful that this club for youth will be the bridge at which the cooperation of all the communities of this country will meet. In Miss Bayoud's view, our women will succeed in wiping out every factional zeal, to unite the ranks.

As for the building, it will rise in the heart of the city.

As for what she accomplished in the past year, Miss Bayoud replies that the Association took part in organizing and administering the training conference

held in the social field, for the women workers in it, in which the countries of the Mediterranean took part, and to which a delegate from among the Association's staff contributed, in “Sweden” and “Geneva.”

There remained to Edma Bayoud one wish unfulfilled in the past. She will fulfill it in the spring of the coming year: the journey to America... So I wished her a voyage fruitful and luminous — like the spring of the coming year.