Perhaps I can not illustrate the degraded condition of the
people in Persia better than by referring to the condition of
women, because the key to the condition of the entire people
is the condition occupied by their women. I will illustrate
it by describing the manner of cultivating rice in northern
Persia, in that portion bordering on the Caspian Sea. Among
the people there, the planter as a rule marries as many women
as he needs for the cultivation of his rice. They prepare the
fields and sow broadcast in a seed-plot. These fields are not
very large usually. The women further prepare it for cultivation
by flooding the fields with water and then by plowing and
cross-plowing under the water, standing in the great pools
knee-deep or more. When the rice has grown to the height of
six inches or more, the women go out in the early dawn and
often they work with their babes strapt on their backs. It is
necessary for them to transplant the little blades that have
come up in the seed-plot; so they pull the rice plants up by the
handful and transplant them, a few plants at a time, working
steadily all day long until the evening twilight deepens and it
is too dark to work any more, when they take refuge on a little
elevation that may or may not be protected by a booth. There
they remain during the night and are ready to start work again
at the dawn. This they do, day after day. And when the harvest
has come, and the crops have been gathered and safely placed in
the storehouses, these women are probably divorced and turned
out to live lives of misery and shame and degradation, until
they may be so fortunate, as they would consider it, as to
become the wives of other planters.
I will give you another illustration of their condition.
Not long ago I was sitting in my study when a department
representative came to me and said that, lying out in the open,
behind the Legation, was a poor old sick woman; and he thought
perhaps I might be able to do something for her, as she needed
attention very badly. I went and investigated the case and found
a poor, decrepit old woman. I say old woman, for tho she was
only about thirty-five years of age, at thirty-five in Persia
they become broken down and decrepit. I investigated her case,
and my investigation revealed this story. She had been the
wife of a certain man and had gradually been getting blind.
She had also fallen and broken her hip-joint, and, being no
longer able to do his work, he had carried her out in the open
desert and left her to die there. We took her in our hospital,
where our doctor cared for her; and when they washed her in
order to dress her wounds, they found that she had maggoted
bed-sores on her body. We did everything we could for her, and
God in His mercy relieved her of her physical sufferings. It
was His mercy that placed her in our hands for the last few
days of her life, in order that she might hear the story of the
love of Christ.--LEWIS F. ESSELST, “Student Volunteer
Movement,” 1906.
(2342)