Feeding the Hungry, P. C. Hiebert, 1929

form 2 or 3 days of service each month for the good of the community. Thus school houses were repaired, villages were cleaned up, village creamery buildings put in order, etc. Later this whole work requirement was applied to the weaving of cloth. 3. The extreme need for clothing made it necessary to devise some special and practical means of providing for the naked and half-naked Mennonites more adequately than could be done through direct donations of garments. The first step toward alleviating this distressing con- dition was the distribution of the clothing shipment re- ceived by way of the Pacific. Later the Mennonite settle- ments in the Ukraine collected funds, in grateful appre- ciation of what the American Mennonites had done for them, and these funds were given over to the A.M.R. for distribution. Cloth was bought in Moscow and sent to Siberia, but the cost of the manufactured goods was exor- 320 FEEDING THE HUNGRY bitantly high, the factories mostly near Moscow, and freight rates to Siberia prohibitive. We decided therefore to develop the forgotten home industry of cloth making. Most of the women knew how to spin and almost every family had its spinning wheels, but only a few were familiar with the art of weaving. In many of the villages one loom could be found, in some, several were available. The A.M.R. bought the wool locally and secured Russian and Bulgarian weavers to in- struct the Mennonites in weaving. Those families receiving food rations, were required to spin and weave the wool into cloth. Spun cotton was bought and mixed with the homespun wool thread, mak- ing a stronger cloth. Later on, flax was also worked up into thread and woven into coarse linen material. It was permissible to do this work at home, but in order to maintain better control and facilitate careful checking, the spinning and weaving of a village was usually done at one center under the supervision of our village representative. It was on the order of a sewing circle working for the needy of its own village. As soon as this was well organized, the food was distributed only to those villages that took part in the making of cloth, and where necessary, a norm was estab- lished as a weekly or monthly requirement. While doing this work on cloth making, they were being fed by the A.M.R. and the finished cloth was the property of our organization, but was distributed free of cost to the needi- est. As a rule, they were the same ones who had done the work. Thus this cloth output became a fairly reliable index as to the degree of need in the village; and one spring the number of arschins (yards) of cloth woven by each village determined the number of poods (bushels) of seed grain loaned to that village. After the people had become accustomed to the ‘ABP 19}UTA GB UO peydeasojogd Jooyos 24} JO sjtdnd pue saoyorag, QTOHOS“IVULINAD VZALILNOHO OMT MEL dd lla ‘ A SCILOOL IN POKROVKA This school w