Belle B. Bass was an experienced American relief worker who joined Near East Relief in 1923 to work in orphanages at Alexandropol (Gyumri), Armenia. Before her Near East Relief service, she had worked with the American Red Cross and the YMCA in France, Siberia, and Czechoslovakia during and after the First World War, and she returned to the United States via Honolulu, where she taught and did Red Cross work.
Alexandropol was the site of Near East Relief’s largest orphanage complex, three former Russian army posts (Kazachi, Seversky, and Polygon) that together held more than 20,000 children at their peak, most of them orphaned by the Armenian Genocide and the flight of refugees into the Caucasus. Bass joined the American staff who fed, housed, and educated those children, the work that gave Alexandropol its name as the “orphan city.”
See more details