Lua Getsinger's Letter from India

Lua Moore Getsinger had been called by 'Abdu'l-Bahá the *Mother Teacher of the West.* By 1914 she had already given the better part of two decades to the service of the Cause — first in California, then on long teaching tours across the United States, then in several pilgrimages to 'Akká, and finally in the journey she herself called the great commitment: a teaching tour through the East, beginning with Egypt and reaching, by the spring of 1914, the great port city of Bombay on the western coast of British India.

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The *Star of the West,* in its issue dated the seventeenth of May 1914, printed an extract of a letter she had written home from Bombay. The editors framed the extract briefly and then let Lua speak in her own voice.

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> I am here in His Name and for His sake.

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The sentence carried, for the friends who read it in Chicago and New York and San Francisco, more weight than its eight short words might at first suggest. India was not, in 1914, an easy destination for an American woman travelling without a husband or an organization behind her. Lua had no salary, no missionary society, no fixed itinerary. What she had was the love of 'Abdu'l-Bahá and the conviction that He had sent her, and that the small Bahá'í community of India, scattered across Bombay, Karachi, Poona and a few other cities, needed visiting.

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The letter went on to describe her meetings — gatherings in private homes, talks in small public halls, contact with the leading Parsis and Hindus of Bombay who were already curious about the Faith. She named some of the believers, with their addresses, so that other Americans considering the Indian field might write to them directly. She asked for prayers. She did not ask for money.

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The *Star of the West* placed the letter beside other reports from Burma, from Russian Turkistan, from China — the editorial gesture of saying to the American friends: *the work you sent your sister to perform is being performed; here is the sound of it from the field.* Within a year of the letter Lua would be in Egypt, where she would die, in May 1916, in a hotel in Cairo without family near her.

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Her grave is in the Bahá'í cemetery there. The letter from Bombay, printed in the *Star of the West,* is one of the small written records that survive of the woman whose service across two continents 'Abdu'l-Bahá would mark by giving her the name *Mother Teacher.*

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