“For a few weeks this eating room will also be the schoolroom, and the schoolroom will become a workshop for making clothes and shoes. Some of you will be helping with that work. If you are not on the list, don’t worry. The rest of you will have other jobs.”
She took a piece of paper out of the bag she always carried with her and read the names of girls and boys who would go immediately to the schoolroom. Samira’s name was on the list. She walked over to the schoolroom with the three other girls who were to become seamstresses.
“She looks at you with that look and decides that you can sew,” one girl grumbled. “I can patch a hole in a shirt but I can’t make anything.”
“We’ll have to learn,” said another. “We have to do what she says.”
“It might save us from kitchen duty for a while,” said Samira.
The other girls brightened up. Kitchen duty meant chopping endless onions and stirring rice so it wouldn’t burn and scrubbing out pots. The girls didn’t like it and the boys hated it, but now that Miss Shedd was in charge everyone had to take a turn unless they were doing some other urgent task.
When the girls entered the schoolroom they stopped and stared. The shelves of books, the blackboard and the mats where the children sat to do their lessons were gone. At one end of the room three women stood behind a big table heaped with cloth. The sewing machines were lined up and ready to go. At the other end of the room two men were sorting through tools and pieces of canvas cut into squares.
Samira went over to the women. One was old with gray hair. The other two were not old, though they were thin and worn. They all looked very happy.
“You will be helping us make new clothes for everyone,” said the gray-haired woman. “I am Hanna, this is Zora and this is Britha. We are refugees like you but we have been in Hamadan all this time living on the little the British gave us. Miss Shedd has blessed us by giving us some work.”
Zora was looking at the dress Samira was wearing. She shook her head.
“You won’t live through the winter in that,” she said. “It gets cold here, you know. You need a nice thick skirt and a blouse and a warm jacket.”
Samira believed her. She was wearing the dress that had been made for the heat of Baghdad. Her other dress was warmer, but the cloth was getting thin at the elbows. It had been somebody else’s dress for a long time before it was given to her in Kermanshah. As for her warm jacket, she had mended it so often it was hard to put a patch on it anymore.
“Warm clothes will be wonderful,” she said. “Will we have new shoes, too?”
“Yes, the men down at the other end are shoemakers,” said Britha. “Some boys will work with them and every one of you will have the shoes and clothes you need if we just get to work.”
Hanna laughed. “We’ll all work,” she said. “Susan Shedd won’t rest until every last child is properly dressed.”
Samira was surprised. “Do you know Miss Shedd? She hasn’t been here very long.”
“I knew her when she was a girl, living with her family in Urmieh,” said Hanna. “She was just as determined then as she is now. She asked for a horse so she could explore outside the city walls. Of course she was never allowed to go unless her father or some other man could go with her but she never gave up asking.”
“She told us she went to America when she was fifteen,” said Samira.
“Yes, people who came from America to work in the mission always sent their children back there to go to school when they were old enough to live so far away from their families. Susan Shedd hated to leave Urmieh, but she had no choice. Of course, being in America meant that she missed the war, so maybe she was lucky. I never thought I’d see her again but I should have known she would come back and do something useful. And now that she’s here she’ll expect us to be working, not talking. Let’s get started.”
They got to work. Samira remembered watching the women in Baghdad make the green dresses on sewing machines, but she had not used the machines herself.
“Look,” said Hanna. “You turn the wheel with your right hand so that the needle goes up and down. You guide the cloth under the needle with your left hand.”
Samira found that sewing on a machine wasn’t hard as long as she kept her eye on the line of stitches. It had to be straight. If the seam was crooked she had to rip it out and stitch it again.
Anna was not sewing. She was learning how to take care of babies. It seemed that there were some Assyrian orphans in Hamadan, most of them very young. They would be coming from the nursery in Hamadan to live at the orphanage soon.
“But these babies weren’t even born until after the war was over,” Samira said. “How did they come to be orphans?”
“Miss Shedd says it’s been very hard here,” Anna replied. “Some people were weak and sick when they came and they didn’t survive. Like Elias’s mother. Miss Shedd says we have to do our best to give these babies a good life.”
Samira felt a little jealous of Anna. Taking care of orphan babies was surely more important than sewing clothes. Then one afternoon Miss Shedd came to the sewing room.
“Without warm clothes and sturdy shoes children will be cold. Some might get sick,” she said. “So I’m counting on you to do your work well.” She smiled. “I would even say that what you are making is essential to the children’s survival, at least to their healthy survival.”
Essential to our survival. Samira liked those words. She repeated them and wiggled her toes inside her new flannel-lined shoes as she watched the sewing-machine needle go up and down. She was making a pair of blue trousers for a little boy. When she came to the end of the seam she held them up. They were thick and warm and the seams were straight.
“These trousers would fit Elias,” she thought. “Maybe they would even help him survive.” She decided to sew a pocket on each side so that the little boy who wore them could keep his hands warm, too.
Benyamin and Ashur had been given the task of weighing each load of wood, charcoal and wheat brought to the orphanage on mules. The mule drivers unloaded the bundles or bags and the boys weighed them in a big scale that dangled from a post in the yard.
Miss Shedd was there to record the weight of every load so she could pay the men exactly the right amount. Some of them argued with her, wanting more money, but she never gave in. She pointed to the figures she had written down. The men stared at the numbers. None of them could read, but they shook their heads and argued some more. Then she told them that the orphanage could only deal with honest suppliers. If they wanted more business they should take their payment and go.
“She never shouts but she never backs down,” Benyamin told Samira. “And she’s a woman. The men are very surprised.” He shook his head. Samira thought he was surprised, too.
The boys stacked the wood and charcoal and covered the stacks with canvas. They carried sacks of wheat into the schoolroom and piled them between the sewing and the shoemaking. Then they put big trays on the floor and emptied grain onto each one. Eight women came to clean the grain and each had one of the younger children working next to her. They had quick fingers and sharp eyes, Miss Shedd said.
Their job was to look through the grain and pick out pebbles and chunks of mud. Once in a while one of the children forgot and tossed a pebble at another child, only to have his
hand slapped by the woman beside him.
When the grain was clean, the boys poured it back into the sacks and took it to the storage building, where it stayed until it was taken to the mill to be ground into flour.
One afternoon after Samira had been sewing for several hours, Hanna said, “You’ve done enough for today. I brought some almond cakes. Take one for yourself and one for your brother, too.”
Samira took the small golden cakes and thanked Hanna. This was a real treat. Something a little sweet with the rich taste of almonds. She nibbled on her cake and went in search of Benyamin.
He wasn’t hard to find. He was sweeping loose dirt out the door of the little storage building and was happy to stop.
“This floor isn’t just dirt,” he said. “I’ve found a part that’s made of wood.”
Samira handed him the almond cake and went to look. Houses never had wood floors.
She bent over the place where Benyamin had swept away a thick layer of dirt. The wood underneath was old and splintered. With her fingertips she scraped away more dirt and found a small round hole that might have been made by a nail.
“Benyamin, come and look! I think there was a handle here. This isn’t a floor. It could be the door to an umbar.”
Benyamin came and squatted down. His fingers found three more holes.
“You’re right,” he said. “The handle is long gone but it’s definitely a door.”
“Can we open it?”
“Not by ourselves. It will have to be pried up. I’ll go and tell Miss Shedd.”
Miss Shedd came at once.
“An umbar! I hope you’re right, Samira. We need more space for our winter food supplies.” She stopped for a moment, looking at nothing in particular. “I remember going into the umbar at the mission with my mother and sneaking some almonds while she scooped wheat from the big sack.” She gave her head a little shake. “Go and tell the men who are unloading wood for the window frames that we need them to come with a crowbar and a lantern.”
When the door was pried up, Miss Shedd lit the lantern and held it over the hole in the floor. They could all see stairs leading down into darkness.
“We have to go down,” she said. “I’ll go first to be sure it’s safe.”
In a few moments they heard her voice echoing beneath them.
“It’s an umbar, all right. A big one,” she said. “It has an earth ledge around the sides and there are some old clay jars. Empty, of course.”
She came back up the stairs. “Someone must have lived in this house long ago. The Hindu soldiers never knew. But now we know and we have plenty of things to store in an umbar. Do you want to take a look? After all, you found it.”
Samira followed Benyamin carefully down the steps that were cut into the earth. She remembered how high each step was in the umbar at home and how her mother held the lamp so she wouldn’t stumble. These steps were much lower.
No, she was much taller, and it was Benyamin holding the light.
“Don’t be disappointed,” he said. “There’s nothing here.”
Samira knew he was thinking of all the dried fruit and grain and oil that had been in their umbar when they had to leave the village.
“The people who lived here were lucky,” she said. “They took everything with them.”
Benyamin swung the beam of the lantern around the room. A round shape caught Samira’s eye. Something was buried in the earthen floor.
“Bring the light over here,” she said and knelt to look closely. The thing she had found was small, no bigger across than the palm of her hand, and made of dull metal.
“It’s not a golden treasure,” said Benyamin. She scrabbled in the dirt and finally dug up a shallow metal cup. It was badly dented, but Samira knew what it was.
“It’s a measure,” she said. “For measuring out something like pepper or cloves.” She held its round shape in her hand. She could imagine a woman coming down into the umbar and scooping out spices. Then one day she dropped the measure and never came back to get it.
Samira turned back to the stairs and was glad to get up into the light.
Miss Shedd looked carefully at the metal cup. “I agree with you. It’s a measure. Would you like to keep it? It should be yours.”
“Yes,” said Samira. She took the little cup and held it carefully in her hand.
Miss Shedd set the wooden door over the stairs. “We’ll fill this umbar with the food we need for the winter,” she said. “And I promise you that when we leave we’ll take everything with us. The umbar will be left empty for someone else to use.”
Samira stared at her. “Leave? Are we going to leave? Will we have to go to another orphanage?”
Miss Shedd frowned a little. “We’ll only leave when I’ve figured out a way to get you home.”
“I want to go home,” said Samira slowly. “But I saw ruined villages along the road when we came here. Our house might be falling down and we are orphans. How can we go home?”
Now Miss Shedd really looked at Samira and at Benyamin standing behind her.
“I know that your parents are gone,” she said gently. “But I’m sure that most of you have relatives or even family friends who would be glad take you into their families, maybe in a nearby village. That’s the way the Assyrian people are. I just have to figure out how you can get there.”
Miss Shedd went on, but now she seemed to be talking to herself. “The problem is I could never get enough horses and wagons to carry everyone. Or even mules.”
Benyamin took a step forward. “Miss Shedd, we don’t need wagons.” Then he said again what he had said to Samira when they were leaving Kermanshah. “Most of us walked from beyond Lake Urmieh to Hamadan four years ago when we had to run from our villages.” He took a deep breath. “None of us want to make a journey like that one again, but we walked all the way.”
Miss Shedd looked at Benyamin for a long time. She nodded once.
Then she said, “Yes. You walked. I won’t forget.”
LIFE IN THE HAMADAN Orphanage went on as if the children would be there forever. Every child was busy learning to read, practicing writing, stitching clothes, making shoes, storing food and doing the regular chores of cooking and cleaning.
Carpenters from the city had finished making frames for windows in the dormitories and were ready to put them into the openings. Samira was hoping for glass windows. She had never seen one until she went to the orphanage in Baghdad. But the day the windows went in she saw that the Hamadan orphanage would have to make do with thin fabric stretched tightly inside the window frames.
“At least the cloth is white,” she said to Anna. “It lets some light through and it will keep out the worst of the cold wind.”
Next, eight women from the city took over the sewing space and began to stitch rolls of wool batting into thick warm quilts. They could sew much faster than the girls, and winter would not wait. Quilts piled up at one end of the room. At the other the shoemakers kept making more and more shoes.
“Why so many shoes?” said Anna one day. “Every one of us has a new pair already.”
“There are more than one hundred pairs sitting there,” said Samira. “I counted. I’m very sure Miss Shedd has a plan for those shoes.”
One morning after lessons Miss Shedd told them
who would wear the shoes. “All of you children came from the Baqubah camp,” she said. “Now one hundred and fifty children from other camps will be joining us here. Because of all our hard work we’re prepared for them. The rooms in the empty dormitories are ready and we have plenty of food stored. Fortunately these children already have new clothing so we didn’t have to make extra.”
“And we have shoes waiting for them,” Samira whispered to Anna.
Miss Shedd heard her. “You’re very observant. We made extra shoes for the new children. But there is one thing we don’t have. Our schoolroom is not big enough to hold all of you plus the new children. So starting tomorrow if you are ten years old or older you will go the Assyrian school in the city. You’ll walk down the hill in the morning and up the hill at night. Girls on one side of the road and boys on the other. Mr. Althius, who will be teaching the boys, will go with you. I count on all of you to behave well and study hard. I also expect you to welcome the new children to Hamadan Orphanage when they arrive in four or five days. Please make them feel at home and help them get settled here.”
She pointed to a big piece of brown wrapping paper she had tacked to the wall.
“There’s one more job to be done. With the new people coming I think we need some rules written down so that they will know what’s expected of them. If you think of a good rule, write it here.” She stopped and smiled. “Now, for the very first time since I have been your director, I can say, ‘There’s no work to be done. Go outside and play!’”
Before they went out, Samira and Anna and Benyamin and Ashur looked at the big piece of paper.
“There’s room for a lot of rules,” said Anna. “Why does she want us to make up rules, anyway? Teachers and people like that make up rules.”
“Miss Shedd wants us to think,” said Samira. “If we just hear the rules or read them we won’t think about them.”
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