About 25 years ago I visited an orphanage in south Egypt. The orphanage was situated in an impoverished part of the Assiut governorate, but inside it was clean and orderly.
This orphanage was the life’s work of an American woman from a Quaker family, who almost a century ago had a calling.
The orphanage that Lillian Trasher started in 1910 was Egypt’s first institution of the type. Leafing through the memoirs of Mama Lillian, as she was known to hundreds of children, one discovers a tale of unusual courage.
Born in Florida on 27 September 1887, the woman who was to be nicknamed the Nile Mother, had developed an early passion for religious studies. Lillian had her first job in the Faith Orphanage in Marion, North Carolina, where she honed her basic skills in child care, which involved a lot of sewing, washing and cooking.
The job didn’t pay much, and Lillian was so poor that she took to wearing men’s shoes donated to the church.
A brief engagement to a churchman named Tom Jordan ended abruptly when he refused to go with her to Africa, where she felt impelled to travel, because of this verse in the Bible: I have indeed seen the oppression of my people in Egypt. I have heard their groaning and have come down to set them free. Now come, I will send you back to Egypt. (Acts 7:34)
While attending a missionary convention in Pittsburgh, Lillian met Pastor Perlsford, who had a mission in Assiut. Soon afterward, she travelled to Egypt with her sister Jenny.
The two sisters disembarked in Alexandria and travelled by train to Cairo then southward by boat. They arrived in Assiut on 26 October 1910.
They went straight to the Pentecostal Church run by Perlsford.
Lillian fell in love with the Egyptian countryside, and immersed itself into the charity work of the church. Then something happened that made her strike it on her own.
Only three months into her stay in Egypt, with barely any command of Arabic, she was called to recite the last rites for a dying woman.
Lillian took a translator with her and went to the woman’s house, and there she found a malnourished infant girl, the daughter of the dying woman. She was told by an acquaintance of the family that the impoverished family had no money to feed the child.
Lillian took the child to the mission and tended to her, with the help of her sister, but the constant crying of the baby was too much for the mission. After 12 days of the baby interrupting church work, Lillian was told to “take the baby away”.
Not knowing what to do, she quit her work at the church, and started taking care of the child at home.
She took the child to her house on 10 February 1911. From then on, she was on her own.
Lillian had to beg for money to help with the child’s expenses. The first donation she received was seven piastres, enough to buy food for a day, from the telegraph man.
Lillian, who arrived in Cairo with $100, had only about $60 left when she left the church service. This was the money used to rent a small house and buy a stove and some furniture.
Penniless but undaunted, Lillian took to roaming the countryside on a donkey to ask the people for donations to her start-up orphanage. She was met with suspicion at first, for the concept of a foreign woman dedicating her life to taking care of little orphans wasn’t an easy one to comprehend. Some of the locals thought perhaps she intended to abduct the children and take them back to America.
Mostly, government officials left her alone, but there was one time when the mayor admonished her for riding a donkey, saying that it was unbecoming for a young and beautiful woman to do so. If the donkey was good enough for Mary, mother of Jesus, it is good enough for me, came Lillian’s answer.
Often in her travels, Lillian was unable to return to the orphanage at night. And if no one offers her a place to stay, she would go to the nearest police station and spend the night there.
Does the heat bother you? This was the question she was often asked as she travelled in the countryside during the scorching heat of Assiut. Lillian would shrug off the question, and keep collecting donations for her charity.
Sometimes she received assistance from her church, clothes and sometimes money. But Lillian’s main dependence was on donations from neighbours and acquaintances.
By 1916, she had about 50 children in her care and needed a bigger place to accommodate them. She recalls that the children helped her build the new structure and made the bricks themselves.
By 1923, she had 300 orphans in her orphanage.
She recalls one incident from WWII. At one point, the Egyptians rose against the British occupiers, and she had to transfer the children from the orphanage to a safe area. When she counted them, she discovered that two were missing. Despite the protests of her staff, she crawled back to the orphanage, found the two frightened children, carried them one under each arm and started on her way back.
Suddenly, the road ahead was blocked by fighting, and she had to climb down into a ditch, where she found a dead soldier. Terrified, she stifled her screams, and began to sing a soothing hymn to the children.
Eventually she earned the confidence of Egyptian and American churches. But her charity fell on hard times when donations dried up because of the Great Depression.
She prayed for cash to pay for the hundreds of meals she has to prepare every week. But the only thing that her prayers brought was 40 more orphans to the institution. Then real help came.
A Scottish benefactor, Lord Maclay, visited the orphanage and donated a much-needed $100. In February 1935, Lillian received a telegraph from Lord Maclay asking her to come immediately to Cairo, where he gave her $5,000.
In February 1937, Lord Maclay and his daughter spent the night in the orphanage and donated $20,000.
Despite the financial respite, there were other problems. In 1947, the country was hit by cholera, and Lillian prayed for the children to be spared. Some got sick, but none died.
When Egypt’s first president Major General Mohamed Naguib visited Lillian’s orphanage, he wrote this in the visitors’ book: “Nothing made me happier than seeing this humanitarian paradise.”
Gamal Abdel-Nasser, his successor, later on wrote this in the same book, “I want you to know that your work with the orphans is appreciated by all citizens of this country.”
After Lillian’s death on 17 December 1961, Kamal Al-Mallakh eulogised her in Al-Ahram with these words, “a beautiful stranger who came from afar has left us.”
Lillian had no children of her own, but by the time she died she had 1,200 orphans in her care.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 9 January, 2014 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
Tags
Youth