American Evangelicals in Egypt by Sharkey Heather J

Author:Sharkey, Heather J.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-02-22T16:00:00+00:00

5.1. Child welfare class, Assiut, c. 1920s. UPCNA Board of Foreign Missions Photographs, Presbyterian Historical Society, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Philadelphia.

Foremost among AUC’s services for the poor was the Child Welfare Clinic, which provided infant and maternal care. In 1928 alone the clinic reportedly treated more than two thousand cases a month.95 Watson regarded the clinic as part of the front line in the struggle against infant mortality and debilitating diseases such as trachoma, which was a leading cause of blindness in Egyptian children.96 Writing in 1934 that there could be “no progress [in Egypt] without higher standards of national health,” he noted that “Egypt has the unenviable distinction of having a greater percentage of its population blind or afflicted with eye trouble than any other nation in the world.” Watson regarded trachoma-induced blindness as something that was not a matter to be left to destiny, since a simple human act—the washing of a newborn’s eyes—could so easily deter it. According to Watson, the challenge for staff at the clinic was to overcome an Egyptian “superstition” that held that it was unlucky to wash a baby until it was forty days old.97 A report from around 1929 suggested that “The best proof of the success of this phase of the Extension work is the fact that the Egyptian government has recently set aside the sum of approximately $150,000 for opening up similar child welfare clinics throughout the city of Cairo. This also illustrates the principle of the University; namely, not to superimpose our Western ideas on an Eastern people, but merely to help the Egyptians help themselves.”98 Later, the Cairo YMCA did its part to publicize the issue by offering lectures with such titles as “How Can We Save the Fourteen Million Egyptians Suffering from Trachoma?”99

AUC’s Extension Program was also active in what it called “Village Work” for the improvement of public health among peasants, and initiated a series of annual Village Health Contests to incorporate students into the program. A report from the mid-1930s showed that the contest aimed to encourage public service in the spirit of noblesse oblige, by drawing in young men who otherwise spent summer vacations puttering around their family estates. The first of these contests was held in 1926–27 “to illustrate the texts ‘Swat the Fly’ and ‘Drink Only Clean Water.’” Later themes included “Keep clean, especially the children,” and “Drink well or filtered water, not canal water.”100 In 1929–30, the program also held an Eye Hygiene Poster contest to illustrate ophthalmic care to villagers. The university invited students from leading government schools and from al-Azhar to participate in these contests and held a formal prize-giving ceremony, to which government officials and journalists were invited. According to the report for 1929–30, the “Under-Secretary of Public Health, Dr. Shaheen Pasha, wrote an open letter to the Minister of Education urging that this plan be made general in all government schools.”101

Watson took pride in believing that AUC could function as “the servant of its community.”102 In 1937, addressing

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