She Taught Them Never To Beg

Between 1915 and 1920, during World War I, Grandma Yepros, an Armenian in war-torn Marash, Ottoman Empire, was left to fend for herself, her sister, and four children, her husband Moses having been stranded in the United States, unable to return to Marash to protect his family because of the war.  Yepros worked in the German Hospital, and her pay, as her son Peter used to tell it, was one loaf of bread a day. The family would share that loaf of bread, as Yepros would take one bite and say, "I'm not hungry."   It was "not by bread alone" that she and her family survived, but by faith and hard work and stubbornness, the stubbornness not to give up.  She forbid her children to go into the missionary "soup" line; she said she would rather have them learn to live with hunger than learn to beg.  (Marash Girl's father for the rest of his life claimed he never felt hunger, even when he hadn't eaten for a full day).