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Show stop on Turkish soil, and were here over a week, Then as I said Miss Towi-er wa& here for a week lately, all of which has been very pleasant. Naturally being in a seaport, and easily accessible place you get more visitors, but getting around the whole country here is becoming a much simpler matter, and I notice people are coming to run around the world in a way that would have seemed quite casual once. Whether or not all that means better mutual understandings, better international relationships depends altogether on the way you go at it. People consider travel an educational institution, probably it is, so like other educational institutions you can get out of it a very varying amount. Your diploma and your railroad ticket bear about the same relation to what you have learned. Some folks can get more out of a day in a place than some can out of a year. After which homily I will add that I am expecting to do a little traveling myself next month, when we have the second Bairam vacation, getting as far as Aleppo, and I hope including Amtab and Marash. As I said in my last letter we are all working on the question of the_ organization and efficiency of-the tnii^on tM.« wr>*nfir **•> view of reduced appropriations, and this will give me a chance to see nearly all the stations I nave not seen so far, before annual meeting, and also to get a little visit with Edith S^derson and her new daughter. So I trust my next letter can tell you about that trip, I think you would all be interested in another trip I made lately, a very short one lust across the bay of Smyrna tc our opposite suburb in company with my sociology class to visit the school for the deaf and blind. It is a thoroughly Turkish institution, supported by a small government grant, conducted and inspired by a Turkish doctor. He has had a good deal of European training especially along psychological lines, but nc other outside help or inspiration and almost alone he has built up an exceedingly useful institution. He has about sixty-five students, some pay and some free under government recommendation. They accept children from eight to twelve, but have a very few older pupils who have been accepted later for special reasons. They take both boys and girls, and teach a number of trades, The blind are taught reading in Braille, and because that has not teen adapted to Turkish it involves their learning French and learning to read at the same time, and that with the handicap of blindness usually from infancy. With the blind they make a good deal of music, and it is wonderful what some cf those children can do with violin and piano, what difficult pieces they can play, and with how much expression. There are more trades and handicrafts open to the deaf of course, but he said they were the more difficult to discipline. We asked him what his method was for beginners, and he said he never forced any instruction. He would just take them into the institution, and when they found what the other children were doing they were sure pretty soon to ask him to show them how to do it also, then he would begin teaching. He said the children who had relatives in Smyrna were allowed to go h*me for Fridays, but that often they preferred not to ge, they were so much more conscious •f their handicaps in their homes than in the school. We came away very enthusiastic over the school and have arranged that ail the blind pupils should be invited to the concert this afternoon at the jollege. We are likely to have a pretty full month in June, our commencement comes the 19th, the college commencement the 20th, our Ruth Hitchings and Ralph Allee of the college are planning to be married the 21st and sail for America that day, annual meeting is set to begin in Constantinople the 27th, which means getting a lot cf work out of the way in short time so as to attend, and Miss Hinman leaves for her furlough probably on the 29th, unless possibly she goes earlier. Now if .J!LJ^1(Ll?*_thG Gilding permit put on top of all that it would mean real work. Unless we get the permit though, the rest of the sumrnir" IV likely to be very tranquil so I shall have plenty cf time to write and tell you about June. Ever sincerely, Edith F, Parsons. |