Nellie Miller Mann, Letters from Syria, 1921–1923

Item Detail

Published volume of Nellie Miller Mann’s 1921–1923 letters from Beirut, where she served as secretary to the treasurer of Near East Relief, with her photographs of the refugee camps and the Birds’ Nest orphanage at Sidon.

Context

Nellie Miller (1897–1982) of Elkhart, Indiana, a Goshen College graduate and devout Mennonite, joined the Mennonite Relief Commission and took a two-year post as secretary to the treasurer of Near East Relief’s headquarters in Beirut, then in French-Mandate Syria (now Lebanon). She was one of only two Mennonite women sent to the Near East through the Commission between 1919 and 1923.

Her letters home to her fiancé Cleo Mann and to her family record the daily work of the Beirut office and the deepening refugee crisis she saw on visits to the camps and orphanages, including the Birds’ Nest at Sidon, where the Danish worker Maria Jacobsen cared for some 400 of the youngest children. Mann kept her field letters all her life; with her photographs, they describe a relief worker’s Beirut with candor, warmth, and humor.