Big up the Jamaican experience

I often get so upset about the crime, the rabid corruption in government and other problems in my country, that sometimes I forget to give thanks for the small mercies here.

So today, I will.

One great blessing in my motherland, is how we as women have personal freedoms and our rights are generally respected.

Be clear though, these rights are not given to us by government or the benevolence of the male population, but by virtue of the region and the period in which we were lucky enough to be born.

Let me start with a trivial example of how it is for some women elsewhere.

I will never forget how perturbed I was at a simple scene I saw in Guyana, which has quite a large Muslim population.

It was an exceptionally hot day and there was couple walking in front of me. It was really annoying to me personally, when the man took off his shirt because of the heat of the boiling sun, while the poor woman beside him was covered from head to toe with only eyes showing, and the garment was black to boot!

In situations like this, I have had to remind myself that it is really none of my business.

That example however, is just the tip of the iceberg, for, in some countries, being born female can be a death sentence or an entire life of misery.

Take China. For years the communist government there had a “one child” policy which led to female babies being murdered at birth, as for some strange reason, families there maintained that boy babies were more valuable/desirable than girls.

This policy was only changed this year to one allowing families to have three children. I am prepared to bet my bottom dollar however, that if a family has three girls, all or most won’t make it past their first birthday!

Look at what happens in India where it is such a widespread practice for young girls, some as young as six years old, to be married off to old grey tone men.  The very thought of that practice gives me the shivers, for that must be such terrible fate for the young girls there.

That is nothing but officially sanctioned pedophilia.

Then there is the widespread practice of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM.

According to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), there are the approximately 200 million females in around 30 countries who have had their genital organs partially or totally removed to prevent them from enjoying sex.

Some of the countries in which this primitive cultural practice still exists are; Yemen, Iraq, and Indonesia and in some places in South America such as Colombia, India, Malaysia, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The practice is also found in pockets of Europe and in Australia and North America.

UNICEF further expounds; "In most of the countries, the majority of girls were cut after the age of five. In Yemen, 85 percent of girls experienced female genital mutilation within their first week of life."

The World Health Organisation (WHO) gives the reasoning behind this evil practice as; “FGM is often motivated by beliefs about what is considered acceptable sexual behaviour. It aims to ensure premarital virginity and marital fidelity. FGM is in many communities believed to reduce a woman's libido and therefore believed to help her resist extramarital sexual acts. When a vaginal opening is covered or narrowed (Type 3), the fear of the pain of opening it, and the fear that this will be found out, is expected to further discourage extramarital sexual intercourse among women with this type of FGM.”

Lord of mercy. Can you believe that girls are still being subjected to this wicked, painful, primitive cultural practice?

I don’t think anything else done to the female surpasses this in wickedness, for many children die or are maimed for life as a result of the insanitary means under which it done.

It was watching a recent demonstration in far-away Afghanistan that really put me on this path of giving thanks for my beautiful country and its civilized cultural practices.

In that newsclip, it showed a small group of women being beaten for simply staging a demonstration to protest the new rules which prohibit girls from going to school and women from returning to work, since the Taliban took back that country.

While the press would have us believe that the Taliban are extreme zealots who are acting against the will of the majority, I beg to differ. For if they didn’t have the support of the masses, how could a group of an estimated 20,000 fighters take over a country of almost 40 million people so easily and without serious resistance?

So maybe in that country, it is just those small groups of demonstrators who pop up from time to time who have a problem with women there being treated as less than equal there, while to the majority, that is how it should be!

Culture can really be deadly.

While I can never endorse some of the disgraceful things that are happening in my country in the name of governance, as a woman, I certainly have to stop and give thanks occasionally, for where I was fortunate enough to have been born.

 

https://youtu.be/I1E9rtbEYMA