Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1907-04-07
ON THE TRAIL OF THE
AMERICAN MISSIONARY

noticed 1t in the case of two out of three
persons met in the rural parts of Kiangpeh
Is the peculiar famine pallor-a lividness, a
business, and tenseneSS which ever
spreads the features. This is the signature
of starva ton
At the end of January the famine deaths
are only beginning, although from the
corpses I have seen, and the poor, hasty
grave mounds and the little rag of white
on women's heads, in lieu Of full mourning,
l should imagine that the grim reaper had
been having a rare harvest.
With a calm certainty that is horrible.
the missionaries assure you that nothing
now can prevent the people from dying by
tens of thousands during the next few
months. They expect this and plan for it.
Already, like rats in their holes, the peas
ants are dying in their homes
The horror of it comes over one in the
concentration camps, where a host of more
pursuing famine. have gathered outside the
walls of several cities. The world may
have seen worse spectacles Of misery than
these but If SO I have never heard of
them. The people have built themselves
straw huts, in no instance large enough to
hold a man standing erect and in most
cases scarcely more than waiSt-high. In
these. on the bare ground. whole families
huddle together The f1imsy shelters they
have erected serve to keep out the fiercest
of the wintry blasts and the direct deluge
of the rains. But at the best there is
misery beyond words, especially when 1t is
remembered that they are only spots upon
which to sit and wait for food or death.
Mrs. Sydenstricker a missionary at Chin
kiang, was going through a refugee camp
a few days ago when she came across the
dead body of a woman in one of the shacks.
Three children too small to know that
they were motherless, had been sitting be-
side the cold, unanswering corpse for TWEEN
ty-four hours, wondering why their only
friend did not heed them Worse, to the
point of nerve shattering, have been some
of the scenes 1 have had to witness of
women wailing beside their uncoffined dead.
I fear l can never forget the picture of one
woman, standing despairinsly beside her
husbands body which lay in the street,
from which she was too weak to lift it.
The restitution here is really unto DEATH
and penny day would keep a man alive.
One of the missionary problems precipi-
tated by the famine is what to do about
the children that are constantly being Of
fered for sale, or gifts to the mission
aries, by parents eager to prolong the lives
of their little ones. Up until the present
no mission has felt equal to the task of ac-
ceptng any waits of starting a home
for them. The pleas of the parents are
pitiful to the last degree. The lengths to
which mother love will go were illustrated
by the answer of one Chinese woman when
her child complained that he was dying of
hunger Il know it, my child, and 1 would
give you my arm to eat if it had any meat
on it, One woman succeeded in selling
her baby to a missionary's next-door neigh
Dor for ten cash (half a cent? and she was
SO grateful that she got down and knocked
her head on the ground. l have had sew
eral fine specimens of Chinese childhood Of
fered to me.
The sale of children provides prosperous
families with slave girls, adopted sons and
prospective daughters-in-law. 1t also. alas,
recruits the brothels of the orient. Shang-
hairs traffickers in human flesh are said
already to have gone to the famine field.
Missionaries in the same city are likewise
taking steps to establish an orphanage
home for such children the parents are
disposing of. Many infants and invalids
as we'll, are being cast on the roadside to
die, or else being thrown into the canal.
The homeless refugees are frantic with dis
tress, for countless homes (as well as sew
eral native Christian churches) were washed
away by the flood which caused the famine.
90 A stream of relief is on it's way to
the famine district, and it must be main
tanned for five months. The missionaries
are buster far with enlsting helpers from
other parts of northern China, with han
ding freight boats, wheelbarrow trains
carrying coolies distributing stations and
other methods of getting food to the hun
cry. than they with preaching. But
their work is elementally Christian, even
If it bears no denomina tional or missionary
label. China and the world will remember
the missionaries part in this famine.