The American Red Cross Bulletin (Vol. IV, No. 2, April 1909)

by American National Red Cross

CATANIA.

We went ashore, wondering whether we were needed. An hour later we wondered whether it was worth our while to think of going anywhere else. The situation at that time was simply appalling: it is appalling today, five weeks after our visit. Catania and every house in Catania had been swamped with refugees. Three thousand of them lay in the five hospitals; two thousand in the three main refuges—converted barracks or convents; and twenty thousand were scattered over the city. One lady whom we met had sixty in her own house; another, thirty: another, seventeen. The Prefect was spending 20,000 lire daily, a sum barely sufficient to supply bread rations and to keep the hospitals running, but quite insufficient to provide sheets or clothing for the patients. Even the hospitals were short of mattresses; in the refuges the inmates slept on heaps of straw. The little towns in the country districts were as full of refugees as Catania and in still greater distress; at Catania there was at least bread. Red Cross branches, municipal committees of men and women, were working valiantly, but they were struggling with absolute penury—a complete lack of funds. The money received by the Prefect from the Government appeared to be the only cash from the outside which had yet arrived at Catania. It was still only a fortnight since the earthquake. Apparently no one in Italy had yet realized that money was needed immediately in places like Catania. Food and clothing were sent, for instance, but at Catania the food and clothing shops were well stocked. The Bayern after giving away nearly its whole supply of clothes renewed the supply by purchases at Catania for distribution at Reggio. Obviously it would have been more economical to have given the Catanians money to buy the clothes of which they were in want than to send the clothes from Italy. The work of making up the clothes could have been given to the refugees themselves, had there been money to pay them. It is true that at Catania, as elsewhere, we found a general conviction that nothing would make the refugees work. The women, it was said, had their children to look after; the men could think of nothing but returning to Messina to recover their property and the remains of their relatives. All were plunged in a state of morbid apathy which made work out of the question. This view, however plausible under the circumstances, has been completely disproved; wherever the refugees have been given work to do under proper supervision, they have worked. But at Catania the point was not worth arguing. There was no money to buy stuffs and sewing machines, or to pay wages; no rooms which could be used as workshops. A movement might have been organized to employ fifty or a hundred women, perhaps; but with 25,000 refugees to keep from starvation and crime the city could not spare any of its workers to organize an employment agency which, at the best, would benefit only a few persons. Nothing but large sums of ready money could have helped the situation; and ready money was not yet forthcoming. The Bayern had brought a certain amount of money to distribute; and I had funds of the American Red Cross. With what we had we were able to give sums of cash to the committees, the hospitals, the refuges and other charities.

The hospitals of Catania alone took almost all the clothes, blankets and medical stores we had to give. Yet the hospitals were in an enviable situation compared to the refuges. Here the inmates were in a worse plight than when they had escaped, half-naked from the ruins of Messina. A blanket, a heap of straw, and a daily bread ration, was about all the average inmate had received since his arrival. Few of them had changed their clothes or brushed their hair once: all were living in a state of filth, which extended to their persons and their habitations and which was a menace to the health of the town. Let no one think that their plight was the result of neglect. The Catanians showed no neglect or inefficiency. They worked hard and they worked with intelligence, but they had no money.

A curious and by no means reassuring feature of the refuges was the willingness of their inmates to stay where they were, or rather their unwillingness to move. I noticed the same fact at Palermo, where the condition of the refugees was similar, though perhaps less distressing. The inertia induced originally by the complex action of physical and moral shocks on an oriental fatalistic temperament increased rapidly, alarmingly, under the influence of a life without interest, occupation, pleasure or duty. Dependent squalor soon became pleasant, and any return to independence uninviting. The hope of getting a cigar from some visitor was enough to fill the day satisfactorily. Dirt, we know, soon became endurable; as a philosopher once said, “Every man is clean enough for himself.” What had happened already at the time of our visit was that the inmates of the refuges had begun to regard their present life as permanent, and had abandoned even the desire to change it; they had been turned into paupers. Three-quarters of them spent the days in aimless loafing and chatter; the other quarter lay gloomily on the straw, thinking of the dead. Unless these people could be awakened, unless someone should compel them soon to work and to be clean, there were signs that they would become a permanent burden; and, what is more, a permanent menace to the population. Criminals are easily made in Sicily and when they are made they have no difficulty in finding occupation.

Italian Soldiers Disinterring a Corpse in the Ruins of the Old Consulate.

Bearing Corpses Down the Corso Principe Amedeo.

The problem of the refuges, then, was less to make them more comfortable than to abolish them as soon as possible and in the meantime to compel cleanliness and induce work among the inmates. But there was a scarcely less difficult and more elusive problem connected with the thousands of refugees scattered about the town in private houses, living in the garrets and stables. Many of them were skilled laborers of various kinds; not a few belonged to families of merchants or professional men and to the well-to-do classes. Their destitution was as complete, of course, as that of the rest, and the relief awarded to them was the same—a daily loaf of bread. Some of them were rich, if they could only find their evidences of wealth. To enable them to do this, and to support them meanwhile, the Catania business men had formed an association to which we were glad to be able to make a small contribution.

The general impression created by our visit to Catania was that of a problem too vast, too complicated, too closely connected with the habits and temperament of the people for any outsider to solve. To “rehabilitate” these thousands of peasants, artisans, professional men, merchants, landed proprietors, would require a carefully matured plan, which must proceed from the central authorities. But meanwhile, until the plan should be matured, there was ample scope for beneficent foreign intervention, and the most useful way to intervene was also the simplest—by direct money gifts, not indeed to individual refugees, but to the local relief bodies already organized by Italians. It was not necessary or even advisable to make large donations to the central authorities of each place. The system was already rather too much centralized than too little, as the authorities were the first to recognize. Far from being jealous of direct donations to the subordinate or independent institutions, they welcomed anyone who would investigate the various needs, and give help when help was most wanted. It appeared to us that the best way to dispose of American money was to entrust it to an agent on the spot, who should travel up and down the coasts of Sicily and encourage every well-directed movement by immediate money gifts. In time such movements would no doubt receive help from Rome; but in the meantime ready cash from unofficial sources might make the difference between success and failure.