Feeding the Hungry, P. C. Hiebert, 1929

mise of a crop, but the rains gradually decreased, and hot winds in June cut the yield far below the amount that May had promised. The Molotschna suffered the most that season. The amount of live-stock possessed by the colonies decreased very much during the war and the unsettled times that followed. The drought of 1921 made a still greater inroad. There was so little feed that the stock went into winter quarters in bad condition, and what was left by spring came out in much worse condition. Many a horse, the last his owner had, became too weak to leave the stall, dropping where he stood. The cows that were kept alive produced little milk until in the summer. Tue Foop SiruaTIon IN 1921 The Mennonite colonies saw during the summer of 1921 that conditions were going to be bad in the follow- ing winter and spring, but they did not realize how bad. Many of the villages divided their small grain crop of 1921, equally among all of the people in the village—in most cases this was three or four bushels to the person —-enough to last as many months if economically used. What they would do then, they did not know. Many families put themselves on rations at once. Others with less foresight were soon out of bread, and begging. And not only from the poor and shiftless in the Mennonite villages, but also from the surrounding Lutheran and Russian villages the beggars came, trudging from house to ORGANIZING FEEDING OPERATIONS 207 house, knocking at the doors or tapping on the windows, asking for “‘chleb” (bread). What should the people do? If they gave to all of the beggars who came they would soon be out of food and begging themselves! One family that started out one morning to give a piece of bread to every beggar that came, found that in the course of several hours they had given away forty pieces. Conditions were made infinitely worse by the presence in the villages of thousands of refugees from outlying villages and estates, that had been plundered and de- stroyed during the restless times, and also from the Volga and from the Terek, where the pinch of famine had already earlier driven the people to seek food elsewhere. In Chortitza Volost a typhus epidemic in 1919-20, an after- math of the Machnow bandits, carried away about one-tenth of the population, a large percentage of the fatal cases being men between forty and fifty, which meant that there were a large number of widows with families to support. In the village of Einlage, with a population of 1633, there were seventy widows. By November, 1921, the famine was really on. When the people had no more bread their only recourse was to exchange some of their clothing, their furniture or their farming implements for food. Everything imaginable was carried to the ‘““Toltchok” (the “jostling-plate” in the village bazaar, where people exchanged or sold personal belongings). The market was soon glutted with such things, so that beds and dressers