But, to return to Mrs. Appasamy, she not only organizes other people for
work, but in the depressed communities of Madras herself carries on the
tasks of social uplift. As supervisor of a Social Service organization,
she has the charge of the work carried on in fifteen outcaste villages.
With the aid of several co-workers frequent visits are made. Night
schools are held for adults who must work during the hours of daylight,
but who gather at night around the light of a smoky kerosene lantern to
struggle with the intricacies of the Tamil alphabet. Ignorant women,
naturally fearful of ulterior motives, are befriended, until trust
takes the place of suspicion. The sick are induced to go to hospitals;
learners are prepared for baptism; during epidemics the dead are buried.
During the great strike in the cotton mills, financial aid was given.
Hull House, Chicago, or a Madras Pariah Cheri--the stage setting shifts,
but the fundamental problems of ignorance and poverty and disease are
the same the world around. The same also is the spirit for service,
whether it shines through the life of Jane Addams or of Mrs. Appasamy.

With the "Blue Triangle."

The autumn of 1906 saw the advent of the first Indian student at Mt.
Holyoke College. Those were the days when Oriental students were still
rare and the entrance of Dora Maya Das among seven hundred American
college girls was a sensation to them as well as an event to her.

It is a far cry from the wide-spreading plains of the Punjab with their
burning heats of summer to the cosy greenness of the Connecticut
valley--a far cry in more senses than geographical distance. Dora had
grown up in a truly Indian home, as one of thirteen children, her father
a new convert to Christianity, her mother a second generation Christian.
The Maya Das family were in close contact with a little circle of
American missionaries. An American child was Dora's playmate and
"intimate friend." In the absence of any nearby school, an American
woman was her teacher, who opened for her the door of English reading,
that door that has led so many Oriental students into a large country.
Later came the desire for college education. To an application to enter
among the men students of Forman Christian College at Lahore came the
principal's reply that she might do so if she could persuade two other
girls to join her. The two were sought for and found, and these three
pioneers of women's education in the Punjab