Two Suitcases and a Typewriter

A retelling for children, based on the account of Martha Root in Bahá'í Chronicles.

Picture a small, quiet woman standing on the deck of a ship, the wind off the sea pulling at her coat. She is not famous. She is not rich. Beside her sit her only traveling companions: two suitcases and a typewriter. The ship is pulling away from the shore, and ahead of her is an ocean, and beyond the ocean a country she has never seen, full of people she has never met.

Her name was Martha Root, and this was how she chose to spend her whole life.

Martha was born in 1872 in a little town in Ohio, and she grew up in the quiet countryside of western Pennsylvania. She went to school, studied hard, and became a newspaper writer for the papers in the city of Pittsburgh. She was good at her work — she knew how to ask questions, how to talk to anyone, and how to put a story into words that people wanted to read.

Then, when she was already grown up and nearly forty years old, Martha went to hear some talks about the Bahá'í Faith. What she heard changed everything. She believed it with her whole heart, and once she believed, she never turned back. From that day on, she decided that the most important thing she could do with her life was to travel and tell others the good news she had found.

Now, most people who feel that way might tell their neighbors, or the people in their own town. Martha decided to tell the world.

Her first big journey took her all the way to South America in 1919. And once she started traveling, she found she could hardly stop. Over the next twenty years, Martha went around the entire globe — not once, not twice, but four whole times.

Think about how hard that was. There were no fast jet planes in those days. She traveled by slow ships and by train, country after country, often all by herself. She paid for the trips with the money she earned writing newspaper stories along the way. She did not have a big team or a pile of money. She had her two suitcases, her typewriter, and her courage.

And where did she go? Almost everywhere you can think of. China and Japan. India and Iran. Burma and Indonesia. Australia and the islands of the Pacific. All across Europe, and Turkey, and Egypt. Every single country in South and Central America. Much of Africa, too.

Martha was clever about it. Before she even arrived somewhere, she would write letters ahead of time to arrange places to speak. So when she stepped off the ship in a new land, people were already waiting to hear her — newspaper offices, women's clubs, churches and religious groups, and big gatherings at universities.

She spoke to ordinary village teachers. And she spoke to kings and queens and presidents, too. The most famous of all was Queen Marie of Romania. Martha visited her and gently told her about the Faith — and the queen was so moved that she wrote down her own words of praise for the Bahá'í teachings for everyone to read. No other king or queen in all of Europe had ever said such a thing so publicly.

Wherever Martha was in the world, she never stopped writing. She mailed news articles back to the American papers. She sent telegrams to Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Faith, to keep him posted. And she wrote long, kind letters to small groups of believers in faraway places, telling them how the Faith was growing in countries they would never get to visit themselves. She helped people who were thousands of miles apart feel like one family.

Shoghi Effendi wrote back to Martha over the years with great warmth and care. He saw how much she was giving, and how far she was reaching.

Martha never married, and she never retired to rest. She kept going and going until she became very sick, and at last she had to stop and lie down in her bed on the islands of Hawaii. She passed away there in 1939, far from the town where she was born, in yet one more corner of the world she had come to love.

By then, Martha had traveled more than a quarter of a million miles in the service of the Faith — that is like going all the way around the Earth ten times. When she died, Shoghi Effendi gave her a special honor. He named her the foremost Hand of the Cause of the whole Western world of her time — his way of saying that no one in her generation had taught the Faith so far and so faithfully.

Here is the wonderful thing to remember about Martha Root. She was not powerful or rich or important in the way the world usually counts those things. She was one small, quiet woman with two suitcases and a typewriter. But because she was brave, and because she never gave up, she showed everyone something amazing: that even a single faithful person, traveling from country to country, can help bring the whole world a little closer together. You do not have to be big to do something big.

This is a retelling for children. For the fuller account, see "Martha Root: The Leading Ambassadress of the Faith".

editors, B. C.. *Bahá'í Chronicles*. https://bahaichronicles.org/martha-root/