an american girl who saves the skins and souls of little albanians
(From Literary Digest, August 1921) - In a low, white-washed town of mud-brick walls and cypresses, under the shadow of the blue Albanian mountains, there is a young unnamed American girl who wears a tweed suit and a velvet "tam," with knee boots to defy the muddy walking in the narrow, winding, unpaved streets. She has only been two years in Tirana, but she is said to "chatter the old Aryan language, with its more-than-Latin declensions, as tho it were her mother tongue."

How she happened to be in Albania is a little romance all by itself. She was in Switzerland when the earthquake of war began to shake Europe. Without any hesitation she borrowed enough money to buy a motor-ambulance, and joined one of the first ambulance corps. She drove her car straight through the war, just behind the front lines. She was under fire, shelled, wounded, decorated - and went right back and continued to drive her ambulance, to carry stretchers under fire, and to bring in the wounded. And then, when the war was over, she went to Paris, volunteered for further Red-Cross work, and was sent to Albania in charge of motor transport. The motor transport, she found on landing at Durazzo, consisted of one aged machine without spare parts or extra tires, but, writes Rose Wilder Lane in The Red Cross Bulletin (Washington):

She drove it over trails meant for ox-carts till there were no inner tubes left. Then she stuffed the tires with pieces of her own clothing - there is no smallest rag in Albania not used for clothing - until she wore the tires odd. After that she ran the car on the rims, still bringing in relief supplies, until the rims wore out, and the car quit, and there was no motor transport. Being without a job, she then went out into the street and gathered together a dozen homeless, wretched children. She borrowed more money - the Red Cross was doing only relief work - and rented a house and hired a teacher. She bathed the children, clothed them, and saw that they were fed and taught. Slowly they began to be normal children again.

But Tirana was full of wandering orphans, living like the hungry dogs in the streets. They besieged the home of the "Red-Cross lady": she took in a dozen, twenty, forty. She borrowed more money and rented a larger house. She had a thriving school; she started kindergarten work, she brought in equipment for a little museum and a laboratory, she taught drawing and English and manners and morals. She kept the children clean and happy; she hired other Albanian teachers and supervised their work. She had on her hands a large institution, manufacturing sturdy, intelligent human beings from the waste material left by war.

And then Captain Crawley came to Albania as Red-Cross Director, and took the school over as a Red-Cross activity. The tremendous need for it had been too overpowering – it was like a raft to the shipwrecked – and children were over-crowding it until no one person could keep it from sinking. Red-Cross help made it a ship, large enough for them all. It is now the largest school in Tirana, a many-roomed building, humming all day lone like any American school, and, continues Mrs. Lane:

The "Red-Cross lady" still manages it, superintends it, and fills it with her own spirit of cheerful, undaunted achievement. Four Albanian teachers are all day in the classrooms; the "Red-Cross lady" still teaches her special subjects. In the courtyard she has started gardens which the pupils enthusiastically cultivate, not realizing that they are learning modern agricultural methods to take back with them to the peasant villages in the mountains. There is a room for silkworm culture; there are open-air dormitories and leacture-rooms. There is a class in botany and one in bird-lore. Three hundred children – who otherwise would have died or more tragically lived to be broken spirits and distorted minds – are learning here the beauty and richness of a world in which they will take useful places.

The "Red-Cross lady" had still a little energy left over. The way Tirana boys spent their idle time troubled her. They had no sports, no amusements, no knowledge of out-of-doors. They sat in dark, windowless rooms, in the fumes from charcoal braziers, smoking cigarets, drinking Turkish coffee, and absorbing the evil of idle men's talk. She went out one day and organized an Albanian Boy Scouts. One week she had a dozen boys taking long walks with her after school hours, bathing once a day, and once a day doing a kind deed. They thought it fun. Next week there were forty. Then she sent to Italy and with her own money bought forty uniforms. Mohammedans can not wear hats with brims that shade their eyes from Allah, so she designed a cap in red and black – black mourning for Scanderbeg, the hero whose death dyed all Albanian jackets black, and red for the blood Albanians have shed to keep their people free. The third week the boys marched through Tirana in their uniforms, and the people in the market-place rose and cheered them. In the fourth week four other Albanian towns sent in requests for a Boy-Scout organization; two Albanian men who had been scoutmasters in Italy and Switzerland came forward to help; the people contributed 30,000 kronen to carry on the work, and the Albanian Government took it over.

The incident of the Boy Scouts helps to complete the picture of one of the girls who in Europe carry a power-of-attorney from the American people. She herself will perhaps forgive me if I add another personal bit. She has recently received a legacy that repaid all the money she borrowed to spend in saving lives in France and in Albania; this winter she goes to America to work her way through a last year of college so that she can come back to her work in Albania.

"Because really, you know, I’m very stupid. I’ve just done what I could, she said to me.

- posted by pioneergirl at 12:01 AM