Page:The Czechoslovak Review, vol4, 1920.pdf/357
great numbers of helpless children without to exaggerate the national benefit to be proper homes.
The suffering from lack of food has been very grave, the European Children’s Fund fed only the most acutely needy cases yet there were 300,000 in Czechoslovakia to whom a supplemental daily meal was given this year. While the rich harvest of the present summer promises adequate food supplies for the coming winter, it would be a most unfortunate error to imagine that all need of food from this country has ceased. The fresh milk supply is still almost non-existent in Prague, and the little children of that great crowded city will need special supplies of preserved milk.
I believe also that older children, especially those in the early teens who are just beginning to work, should have a liberal diet, not mere sustenance. At the prevailing food prices, they cannot earn enough to buy all they need and unless they are amply nourished during the strain of early adolescence, we may expect that the already large numbers of tuberculous persons will be increased by the early break-down of working children and young persons who have spent already six years on a diet totally inadequate for proper growth.
The stunting of growth from the war underfeeding, is a recognized commonplace. The manager of a factory in Prague where many girls between fourteen and twenty were employed, said: “We have always had some little girls. Now it seems as if they were all little.”
There was something singularly appealing about these slender, almost dwarfed young girls who would soon be marrying and helping to carry on the life of a nation. Can they bestow a vigor they do not possess? How far into the future will the wound be felt of “hunger, the cruellest weapon”? What of the young men and boys no better fed?
My own observation indicates that friends in this country who want to help the children of Czechoslovakia and the future of the land, can aid greatly by sending the food package orders devised by Mr. Hoover. This method sends food into the country, and by so much increasing the actual supply it tends to lower prices and this to help everybody as well as the direct recipients. I believe it is hardly possible derived from generous feeding of the present generation of children.
But though food is the first necessity, there are other imperative needs: The homeless children present a particular problem. No institutions exist to shelter large numbers. So far these children are fairly normal, it appears to me that they will grow up to be most valuable to themselves and to the Republic if they are reared in carefully selected families at government expense and under government supervision, instead of being placed in institutions, even were institutions available. My opinion is not based upon an abstraction but upon personal knowledge of the workings of soldiers’ orphan asylums in the United States, while my confidence in the practicability of boarding-out is based upon the examples of the frugal home-loving people of Scotland and of New South Wales, upon various successful undertakings in the United States and upon the work already begun in Czechoslovakia itself. One incidental advantage of governmental boarding-out at this time is that the conditions laid down as to the care to be given the boarded children will raise or stabilize the standard of living and of behavior for the families and will in many cases enable a mother to maintain her home and keep her childen under her own care by taking one or two others to board.
Institutions are urgently needed for feeble-minded and defective children who have probably increased in number during the last six years. Unquestionably tuberculous and anaemic children are more numerous—and these need sanatorium care if they are to be restored. In many of our states deaf children are taught advantageously to themselves in the public day schools with hearing children, but while this method is practicable in large towns, it will be necessary to continue to provide institutions for rural children, in Czechoslovakia.
These instances are enough to suggest the old and new demands for institutions which must be met by using buildings now existing, since new buildings could hardly be erected in time to meet the needs of the present generation of children. The Survey of Prague made by the Y. M. C. A. secretaries under Miss Ruth Crawford’s direction, showed 2,000 charitable activi-