"Happy in Spite of Dirt" — Miller's title for this portrait of an Armenian refugee child in Beirut, c. 1921–1923.

Context

Nellie Miller was born in Elkhart, Indiana, in 1897. While studying at Goshen College, she heard of the humanitarian crisis unfolding in the Near East and joined the Mennonite Relief Commission; in 1921, she accepted a two-year posting as secretary to the treasurer of Near East Relief's Beirut headquarters. Her letters home to her fiancé, Cleo Mann, and her family, written across more than two years in the field, document the daily work of NER administration in Beirut and the increasingly desperate refugee situation that followed the French withdrawal from Cilicia in 1921–1922.

Miller visited refugee camps and orphanages throughout her posting and curated a collection of photographs — some taken by herself, others by colleagues or acquired in the course of her work. She was a frequent and beloved visitor at the Birds’ Nest Orphanage at Sidon, where Danish relief worker Maria Jacobsen lived with some four hundred young Armenian children in a Druze palace on the hill above Sidon; the orphanage later relocated to Byblos (Jbeil), where it continues today. Her photographs capture the texture of childhood in that busy household and the broader fabric of NER's relief operations in post-Genocide Lebanon and Syria.

Nellie Miller and Cleo Mann were married in August 1924, after her return from the field. Nellie Miller Mann died in Indiana in 1997 at the age of 99. Her son, David Mann, published her writings and photographs in Letters from Syria, 1921–1923: A Response to the Armenian Tragedy, Including Stories, Travel and Reports (2013).

These photographs document the Armenian refugee influx into Beirut in 1921–1923, following the French withdrawal from Cilicia and the subsequent forced movements out of Aintab, Marash, Adana, and the eastern Anatolian provinces. Near East Relief operated reception camps on the city's periphery (Karantina among others) and ran distribution lines, intake registrations, and emergency shelter for tens of thousands of survivors arriving by sea and overland.