Today is a wet, shivery, snowy day, the first wintry day we've had, and in every one of the score or more of villages round about us are thousands of shivering, naked children huddled close together in dark, airless cellars, in stables, in partly enclosed balcony-like places, grateful for a scrap of dry bread. Hundreds are still lying sick with this same dry bread as their only nourishment, and these miserable holes as their only homes; until we who have seen so much of it all through this awful year have almost ceased to feel even a pang at the sight of the long rows of graves in the village cemeteries. Personally, I feel it a cause of thanksgiving that there are several thousands less of children than there were last New Year to suffer the miseries of hunger, cold, sickness and exile.

-- Letter from a missionary written from Urmia in January, 1916.