RUSSIA.

Temuka Leader, Issue 10304, 2 March 1922, Page 4

RUSSIA.

STRICKEN EUROPE AND THE RUSSIAN FAMINE. Margaret S. Thorp, relief workerwrites on behalf of the Friends (Quakers): —Our workers have been in Moscow since 1916 with just 15 months interval, and are feeding 160,000 children in and around the city. Wo have our own warehouses, and entire freedom of distribution. Everything that arrives gets straight to the needy people, and as our work is voluntary, very little goes In overhead expenses. I weut down to the famine area with a group of press correspondents from the leading English and American papers in order to investigate conditions first hand. At Samara, we found the most spectacular part of the famine —thousands of human beings lying all over the station, in disused railway trucks, outside the station and all along tho hanks of the Volga—whole communities waiting for days and weeks for trains and boats to take them to move fortunate parts of the country. They were all very clirtv, picking lice off each other iu handfuls. They have no soap they have sold practically everything but' the clothes on their hacks for food. Children were feverishly searching garbage heaps, licking hits of melon rind, eating dirt, anjthing to applease their gnawing hunger. 1 saw one child picked off the lines when a train was coming, it was too sick to move. I opened the door of a waiting room —a child’s dead body was lying on the floor; 40 persons were dying each day at the station, and about the same number at the Volga encampment. The Government can only give them Jib. black bread a day, and little sugar and salt extra for the children. 18.000.000 people are iu a desperate condition of starvation. Seventy per cent of the crops have failed, the other 30 per cent, only yielding 901bs. per acre. 90 per cent, of the little children in the Samara province between tho ages of one and three have died. While I was there, trains with our food cars arrived, supplementing Government rations and accompanied by some of our helpers to clean up and tend the sick. The American Relief Adminstration is feeding 1, 000,000 children; the save-the-child-ven representive arrived in Moscow just before I left. Each organisation will have its distinct geographical area, under Dr. Nansen’s supervision.