Armenian Orphans from Massacres of 1894-5, in School Supported by Second Evangelical Church of Aintab.
(By Courtesy of the National Geographic Society.)
CALABRIA AND SICILY TWO MONTHS AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE
By Ernest P. Bicknell,
National Director, American Red Cross.
The Italian earthquake occurred on December twenty-eighth and exactly two months later, on February twenty-eighth, 1909, I arrived in Rome. My first duty was to familiarize myself with the working plans of the American Relief Committee. Although Rome is about three hundred and fifty miles from Messina, it was the headquarters of the chief agencies engaged in relief operations. Through the kindness of the American Ambassador, Honorable Lloyd C. Griscom, I was quickly brought into close relations with the American Relief Committee and with the officers at the head of the Italian Relief Organizations. Count Taverna, President of the Italian Red Cross, and Count Somaglia, the Vice-President, showed me every courtesy and gave me all the information possible. The hurried emergency work of the early days had been largely closed at this time. Most of the injured had been discharged from hospitals, the field hospitals had been closed, and the relief operations had settled down to a long, slow struggle to help people of the ruined communities to make a fresh start in life.
Many thousands of sufferers from the calamity had been removed to Naples, Rome, Palermo, Catania and other cities immediately after the earthquake. This made necessary the organization of extensive relief measures in numerous cities which were not themselves sufferers. After two months, this work outside the earthquake zone had been greatly reduced, though still requiring considerable attention. Many public spirited men and women gave important services through these outside organizations without actually going to the scene of the disaster.
At Rome I also met Miss Katherine B. Davis, who had just ended her brilliant relief administration in Syracuse, to which city more than a thousand injured persons had been taken from Messina. Miss Davis had gone to Sicily worn out with hard work as Superintendent of the Reformatory for Women at Bedford, New York, and was looking forward to a long restful vacation. She arrived the day after the earthquake and probably performed the most strenuous and trying work of her life during the following two months. The people everywhere were speaking in terms of highest praise of what she had done, which was not only valuable in itself but which set an example, copied in Palermo. Naples and elsewhere.
Mr. Edmund Billings, of Boston, who, as the representative of the Massachusetts Relief Committee, spent six weeks in Sicily, also reached Rome at this time. Mr. Billings had cultivated close relations with the local relief administrators and in this way had been enabled to apply his relief funds with a personal knowledge of the extent of the need and the method of their distribution in each instance.