Woman and Her Saviour in Persia By a Returned Missionary by Laurie, Thomas, 1821-1897

The influence of such family arrangements, even in the more favored villages of the plain, on manners and morality, need not be told. It is equally evident that in such circumstances personal tidiness is impossible, though few in our favored land have any idea of the extent of such untidiness. If the truth must be told, vermin abound in most of these houses; the inmates are covered not only with fleas, but from head to foot they are infested with the third plague of Egypt. (Ex. viii. 16-19). This last is a constant annoyance in many parts of Turkey as well as Persia. If one lodges in the native houses, there is no refuge from them, and only an entire change of clothing affords relief when he returns to his own home; even there the divans have to be sedulously examined after the departure of visitors, that the plague do not spread. The writer has known daughters of New England, ready for almost any self-denial, burst into tears when first brought into contact with this.

At first, the teachers of the Female Seminary in Oroomiah had to cleanse their pupils very thoroughly, and were glad thus to purify the outside, while beseeching Christ to cleanse the heart. Each one, on her first arrival, had to be separately cared for, lest the enemy should recover ground from which he had already been driven with much labor. Missionary publications do not usually tell of such trials, but those who drew the lambs from the deep pit, loved them all the more tenderly for having gone down into it themselves, that thence they might bring them to Jesus. Such trials are less common now, for it is generally understood that a degree of personal cleanliness is an indispensable requisite for admission to the Seminary; but such a demand, at that time, would have rendered the commencement of the school impossible.

The pupils became much improved in personal appearance, and some of their simple-hearted mothers really thought their children had grown very pretty under their teachers' care. So, as many of them were strangers to the cleansing properties of water, they would ask again and again, "How do you make them so white?"

But if such houses were comfortless abodes for those in health, what were they for the sick? Think of one in a burning fever, perhaps delirious, lying in such a crowd. In winter, there they must remain, for there is no other place, and in summer, they are often laid under a tree in the day time, and carried up to the flat roof, with the rest of the family, at night.

Dr. Perkins, in the early part of his missionary life, tells us that in a village the family room was given up to him for the night, and in the morning he found a little son had been born in the stable. He supposed that he had been the unwitting cause of such an event occurring there; but longer acquaintance with the people shows that woman almost invariably resorts to that place in her hour of sorrow, and there she often dies. The number who meet death in this form is very large.