Sophia Small Moultrie

Sophia W. Small worked as a social worker in Minneapolis before joining Near East Relief. She sailed from New York on October 18, 1919, aboard the S.S. Canada, in the organization's twelfth contingent, a party of nineteen bound for Constantinople by way of the Piraeus. The Near East Relief News Bulletin that listed the contingent gave her as "Mrs. Sophie W. Small of Minneapolis" and noted that she "has also been a social worker." In the same party was the Rev. L. G. Moultrie of Valley City, North Dakota, an Oxford graduate who, like her, went out for "general relief or orphanage work."

They married in the field. By February 4, 1921, when the Near East Relief newsletter described the orphanage at Ghazir in the hills above Beirut, the children there were "under the direction of Mr. and Mrs. Moultrie of the Near East Relief." Ghazir held 750 children in the buildings of a former monastery and several rented houses, in the strongly Maronite region of northern Lebanon, and the newsletter recorded that "Christians, Moslems, and Druzes mingle here in school classes and industries with the greatest harmony." Bayard Dodge photographed both Moultries there in the summer of 1922, her husband in relief uniform and Sophia in her own quarters at tea, a prayer rug hung over the divan behind her and a small dog asleep on it.

The Moultries returned to the United States late in 1922 or early in 1923, and this portrait was made at Minneapolis during that furlough. The Near East Relief organization list for Syria and Palestine of April 28, 1923 records them as due back in the field in early May, posted to the Beirut Boys Industrial Center. Ghazir passed to Mrs. Pearl Gannaway and then, later in 1923, to the Swiss missionaries Jakob and Elizabeth Künzler.