Look at the faces of people whom you meet. Each one has an incredible story behind their face. A story that you could never fully fathom. Not only their own story, but the story of their ancestors."
-Gratitude TED Talk
She arrived in Macedonia at the ready age of 23, to help, to serve, to adventure. It's a story that starts out similar to our stories as Peace Corps Volunteers, but the realities of her experience are beyond our wildest imaginations.
“She will go down in history as one of the heroines standing by the women of that country in the midst of peril when she might have gone to safety leaving them in need,” according to Dr. J.L. Barton from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (1919).
Born in Ohio and a graduate of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts (class of 1885), Mary Louisa Matthews set out as a missionary in 1888 to work in the first American Girls School in Monastir (present-day Bitola) at a time when Macedonia’s borders stretched east into Bulgaria, west into Albania and south all the way down to Salonica (Thessaloniki). She sailed first from the United States to Constantinople (Istanbul), and from there to Ottoman occupied Macedonia.
Little did she know this adventure would take her through World War I, Balkan War I, Balkan War II, the Young Turk Revolution, the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, and the kidnapping of Ms. Ellen Stone (the first instance of an American being held as hostage by terrorists in the modern age). The name of the country governing Monastir changed three times in just one year during her thirty-two years of service.
I was first introduced to the intriguing adventures of Miss Matthews this past May, when her grand-niece Peggy Hanson arrived in Bitola to re-trace the steps of her great-aunt...
Click HERE to continue reading this article in the Summer 2013 issue of Pauza Magazine - Peace Corps Macedonia's quarterly online publication. The article begins on page 18.
lots of LOVE,
HT
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