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
