Sixty-Three Scholarships for Tehran

The first issue of Volume 2 of the *Star of the West,* dated the 21st of March 1911, carried a report from the Persian-American Educational Society, a Bahá'í body based in Washington, D.C., that supported the Tarbíyat School in Tehran. The report opened with a prayer 'Abdu'l-Bahá had revealed for the Society on the 3rd of April 1910.

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The Society summed up its work since it began, early in 1910, briefly. Seven hundred dollars in cash had been sent to Tehran; sixty-three scholarships had been enrolled; there were nineteen associate members. The latest scholarships came from the assembly in Pasadena, from believers in Buffalo, Los Angeles, New York and Spokane, and from two friends in Bombay. Others were renewed for a second year by donors in Washington, Cincinnati, Kenosha, San Francisco, Ontario and Russia.

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The Society had also forwarded boxes of books to the Tarbíyat School and a library in Tehran. It had collected some 150 catalogues of American machinery and supplies and sent them on to Tehran at the end of each week, and it mailed there the bulletins of several American government departments, suggesting that a board of translators be formed in Tehran to translate them for the public.

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The article then printed a Tablet from 'Abdu'l-Bahá about sending two teachers to the Tarbíyat School. Word had come from Tehran, He wrote, that the school needed a teacher of science and English, for it had no one who was a scientist or linguist:

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> Therefore, consult with the believers of God and select one soon, from > among the American Bahais, who is efficient in science and arts, and send > him to Teheran.

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He asked also for a woman who could serve as principal as well as teacher, with a share of the knowledge of the sciences and skill in such subjects as sewing, hygiene and household economics. The Society invited volunteers to write in. The same article announced that, at 'Abdu'l-Bahá's instruction, a new body, the Orient-Occident Unity, was being formed to carry on the Society's work on a larger scale.

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A few months later the *Star* reported that Lillian Kappes was preparing to go to Tehran. She travelled there with Elizabeth Stewart, and in a letter dated the 19th of December 1911 she wrote that they had arrived safely.

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*A retelling based on the **Star of the West**, Volume 2, No. 1 (March 21, 1911), report of the Persian-American Educational Society, with Volume 2, Nos. 7–8 and 18. For the fuller account, see the original.*

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