American University of Beirut
Beirut, SyriaDecember 18, 1932
Dear Miss Turner,
You always write such a satisfying amount when you write that my momentary scrawls compare poorly.
This is by way of becoming quite an adventure. The strange things have been so many, that I have rather clung to the familiar when it has appeared. And now when we have our own home - it is beginning to be fun to look out from its safety and naturalness on the rest of the world.
The job is pretty pleasant but of course can show no results for many a month and year. In the meantime we plug along a day at a time. My new class in Nursing is being put through all the Elementary Procedures and many of the more advanced for fear there will not be time later for the advanced. They tell me with tears in their voices how hard it is to read charts and ask questions about their patients because there is so much to do. They laughed finally when I asked them if they thought I knew something about the difficulties. The thing that slows the wheels is that our head nurses were brought up ignorant and do not realize how much can be taught in passing and our foreign nurses are so anxious to have things right that they turn nothing over to the head nurses and nobody seems to realize that the "teacher" isn't the one to do the teaching. If I went on the wards and did all the bedside teaching everybody would think it an all right system. Even if I had an assistant to do much of the classroom work, they would see no harm in that, but my colleagues - Laddie & Jeanette, and I agree that I have something to offer to the preliminary students and must continue the classroom work. The only answer is somehow to get some action on the wards and a teaching slant. You ve [sic] no idea how many million miles away these native graduates are from a teaching slant.
Laddie struggles with policies and problem students and some classwork, Jeanette struggles with a badly run clinic and unintelligent, illtrained, partisan assistants when she is supposed to be doing public health nursing. I try to find a mutually acceptable method to teach hot packs in a place where three pavilions do it three ways and struggle to get one of our graduates who can massage beautifully to teach that course. Cheer up, she doesn't teach it, and at the 11th hour I practice up & do it myself. Along with that is the job of writing up all the routine procedures in time to have a new book for the February class.
But one graduate has taken a course in Pediatric Nursing, the interne is agreeing to ward clinics, and we may succeed in developing the idea that the nurse is to learn by nursing as well as in the classroom.
And the community looks on and says "What does Miss L. do, Miss L. do, Miss S do, Miss V.Z. do" and think they would understand if we told them. The professor of sociology is advocating giving nurses just a little training for village work. And someone else wonders why we dont teach them how to manage children, but we don't need to have them be educated in all the sciences to do that.
And our poor little nitwit seniors are about to graduate & become head nurses after three years of carefully directed maid service. And our head nurses are getting the first bit of responsibility they have had and rush eagerly to wait on the doctors themselves - never dreaming that a student should be along to learn by doing. And the doctors want a "Frangi" nurse to come along if they are going to look at a finger and the Frangi nurses feel themselves overworked and never deligate a detail and complain of too few nurses and look at me wild eyed when I ask them to ask the student nurse about her patient when she reports off duty.
It is a nice machine - the hospital is beautifully run and immaculately cared for. The patients get the best care in the near East. The little slaveys are good at making beds and can dust elegantly - but it isn't an educated institution yet and it doesn't know it. Even the Frangi doctors don't know it. They don't know whereof we speak. Still they are friendly.
The secretary of the medical school society came the other day and asked me to address their meeting for 15 minutes on the relation of the medical profession to the nursing group. Suffice it to say, I'll not read any speech [smiley face][.] That last January fiasco is amuzing [sic] to me now. I was literally scared to get up and talk and that is funny. I made a 15 minute speech without notes to the Medical Faculty early in the fall and have had some echoes. It wasn't a bad talk.
Laddie & I cross purposes once in a while and I find it important not to quote PH directly too often. It is very easy to indulge in loyalty to good Presbyterian and to recall some things I learned from Miss Young. The dean's way of getting at the significance of a move is an ideal to work toward, but Miss Young's method of making the move is also worth studying.
The local color is pretty grand. We walk a mile to work, meet the French officers on their way to the camp - down our road, - meet the Standard Oil man. An Arab with a donkey with a funny little cart marked in big letters on a red background "Socony", meet the children in black aprons on the way to the French schools, meet the market man - with his little beast under two big baskets, meet the milkman in a handsome closed wagon - he's a University graduate, pass the Egyptian laundry where the laundryman and his white dog sleep on the ironing tables, pass the bakers where the smell of yeast is thick - and the boys with trays of round loaves go up and down with their wares, pass the restaurant with the sign up "Breakfast" and the smell of onions and garlic and strange meat comes forth, meet the community children going to school in high hat manner - feeling the world is theirs, meet the internes coming from the hospital compound on the way to breakfast, look straight ahead & above the city see the white peak of the Surrein [?], look down across the campus to glints of blue behind the buildings & the trees, come at last to the hospital, where the gateman has slept all night, greet him with "Raharok said - kayf halik" and go to work.
Every morning there are new things to see - turbaned men from Jebel Druze, the mountains beyond the Lebanon, some with the periwinkle blue Kafiyyet, a scarf tied onto their heads with a white band, street singers sometimes, business men in their red tarbooshes and strange combination of western business vest & coat and baggy trousers, all kinds and conditions of men - a carpenter shop that always startles me. Yesterday a bearded man - a veritable Joseph of Nazareth was cutting lengths of board and as each was cut his boy carried them and piled them near the wall.
Yesterday I was coming home worn and weary and ill and discouraged and worried about Jeanette who has a badly infected hand and has been in the hospital for a week. Your letter came the night we were their [sic] for the last incision they have made. The sun beat down gloriously, and I came along head down in every sense - by a woman and a child, poorly dressed. As I passed them the woman spoke. "Il fait très beau" she said. I was astonished. The first word that any stranger has said to me in Syria. It brought me back tot he surface and ever since then I keep remembering "il fait très beau!" We talked a little and they went on down the hill to walk by the sea. Today too it is very lovely.
I'm going up to the hospital now to see Jeanette. I'll write again when the book comes. It will be lovely to have it.
As ever
KatharineLater in the evening.
Jeanette's hand is worse. It seems to be a streptococcus. Her white count is up though and 79% polys and she's getting busy with a temperature. We are worried, but everything possible is being done. He incised in several places again tonight but teached only oedematous tissue and no "laudable" pus. So far, there is no indication of a bloodstream infection. It is a bad business, but we must go to bed and sleep and get ready for the morrow. They have a good nurse for her tonight. One of these days I shall turn over the teaching and special her myself if it seems best. Her spirit is good but her nerve is wearing thin. It does no good to write you all this except to me - talking helps. I'll be sending a card in a few days to say things are better.
People are beginning to talk of Bagdad for Easter holiday. I've a leaning toward Jerusalem. I'm glad you feel that way about Germany, for I feel I want to go there and know the Germans. I always have.