Children of Persia

by Mrs. Napier Malcolm

It is evident, however, that there is a great and crying need for dispensaries and hospitals in Persia. So in the north the American Presbyterians, and in the south the Church Missionary Society, have founded them in a number of towns.

As a rule a dispensary is started first, to which out-patients can come to get medicines and have their hurts attended to. Later a hospital is opened. Generally the first hospital is a very poor affair, but as the work grows money is collected, and nice, clean, convenient hospitals are built and furnished. Armenian and Persian boys and girls are trained as nurses and assistants, the boys for the men’s hospital, the girls for the women’s and children’s.

Here Hasan and ‘Ali, Fātimeh and Rubābeh, and a great many other little Persian children are made as comfortable as their illness allows, and are kept clean and happy in comfortable beds, and well fed and cared for.

A MISSION HOSPITAL

Morning and evening they hear prayers read, and soon they too venture to join in the “Our Father.” And every day someone reads and explains in the ward something about the Lord Jesus Christ, and His love and His teaching, and they learn that He knows and loves each little Akbar or Sakīneh and wants them for His own, and they learn to love Him because He first loved them. They learn hymns too, and love to sing them, the same hymns that you know so well, “Whiter than snow,” “Simply trusting,” “Here we suffer grief and pain,” and many others.

The last recalls the story of little Bāgum, the child-wife, who was deliberately and cruelly burnt by her husband, and was brought to the mission hospital. There was no hope of recovery, but all was done that was possible to relieve her pain and brighten her last days.

She had heard something of the Gospel story from a missionary who had paid a visit to her native village, and she had been so interested that she had asked two Persian children to teach her more. When she was brought to the hospital even the terrible pain she was suffering did not make her forget the wonderful story, and she begged to be told more and more. And resting in the love of Christ and trusting wholly in Him and His salvation, she loved to sing of the joy to which He was going to take her and kept begging for “Here we suffer grief and pain,” and repeating over and over the refrain, “Shādī, Shādī,” (joy, joy), until even the Muhammadan women would sit beside her and sing the hymn that comforted her so much.

In a small village in another part of Persia lived a little lame girl. She could not walk at all, and her leg was drawn up so that she could not straighten it, and she suffered very much. She was a good deal of trouble to her parents, and they got tired of taking care of her, and neglected her a good deal, till at last her father heard of the mission hospital in the neighbouring town, seventeen miles off, and took her there to see if the Ferangis (Europeans) could cure her. She was taken in, washed, and dressed in clean clothes and put to bed. At first she used to scream when her leg was touched, but it was operated on, and gradually, very gradually, the pain grew less, and the leg grew straighter. But still, as the months went on, the recovery was very slow, and when the weather grew so hot that the hospital had to be closed and her father took her home, though free from pain while she lay still in bed, the pain was so great when she tried to stand that she could not walk a step. But as she lay alone on her bed at home she thought over all she had heard at the hospital, and one day a new thought struck her. Surely the Khānums had told her that the Lord Jesus Christ, Who used to cure people so wonderfully, was alive still and could hear when anyone spoke to Him. Why had she never asked Him to make her leg well? And then and there, in her ignorance and simple faith, she asked Him, Who in the old Gospel days had made the lame to walk, to make her walk, and, confident in His love and power, she “arose and walked.”

When the hospital was reopened she came back again still lame, still in pain, but able to walk about with a stick. And she loved more than ever to hear of Him who had not only done so much for the sick Jews of old times, but had done so much too for her.