Several hundred orphans sit massed in the open. Harpoot, c. 1919-1922.

Item Detail

Near East Relief kept its Harpoot children in orphanage families of about a hundred, each under a mairig, or house mother, and a big sister drawn from the American school. Saturday brought mass physical examinations, Parmelee reported in October 1919. A crowd of several hundred sits and stands close together, most of them small and in coats, caps and head cloths, with adults on open ground above them beside two tall poles joined by a crossbar. The station counted about four thousand five hundred children in October 1920 and five thousand by 1922. In August 1922, Near East Relief started four thousand of them over the mountain passes to northern Syria.

Context

Ruth Azneve Parmelee (1885-1973) was born in Trebizond to American missionary parents and studied with them until the family returned to the United States when she was eleven. She earned her degree at Oberlin and her medical degree at the University of Illinois, then sailed back to Turkey in May 1914 as the first woman physician to settle in the Euphrates Valley. In Harpoot she practiced obstetrics, trained nurses and cared for war orphans, and she was there through the deportations of 1915. She held the post until 1917, resumed it in 1919, and was compelled to leave in January 1922. She reached Salonica that October, opened a maternity hospital under the American Women's Hospitals, and founded Greece's first school of nursing. She stayed in the country, in one post or another, for thirty years.