The Devotion of Life — Page 364
364 move to a place which was neither mountainous nor a plain, but somewhere in the middle, and which should be located far from urban areas. This was the only way her health could be restored and her life saved. As a result she took the doctors’ advice, left her husband, said farewell to her relatives and hometown, and moved to a nearby area with the characteristics described by the doctors. This area was backward educationally. In 1916 there was only one man within a fifty mile radius who could sign his name, while others could not. Savagery prevailed, with hundreds murdered every day. The woman could not sit idle and to pass her time she started a school. She collected donations by writing to people in other areas in order to run the school. Now there are other schools in the area, but in 1916 this was the only school there. It has been related that this woman made every pupil promise that if her institution, the community or the nation needed that pupil, then he or she would willingly offer themselves for service. It is written that a pupil who was interested in medicine, and whose medical education was funded by this woman, was offered a job worth one million dollars. The woman wrote to him to return to his home area because there was no doctor there. He declined the lucrative offer and returned. He demanded no large fees and rode on carts through snow-bound roads to tend to patients, who placed five kilos of grain on his cart as payment. This was his fee from his patients and for which he had spurned hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. If this was not