Those poor kids in Africa

Yeah- when I was a kid we had to feel sorry for the kids in Africa who were starving. Then, it was female circumcision (please don't get me started on that one), then there's the AIDS thing (some people there believe the only way to get rid of the disease is to "give" it to a child) and now this. This just made me cry. And my poor husband, I didn't mean to snap at him.

He calls me into the room to say "hey honey, look what these crazy people are doing on National Geographic, I've never seen this before, have you seen it?" Because it disturbs him. And it should.

What he didn't realize is that I live in a bubble because I am sensitive right now and I protect myself from things that upset me because otherwise I'd be a mess. How can a person have six kids, including a newborn and still maintain a house and do 3 loads of laundry a day and cook and clean and homeschool (4 grade levels) and still see my girl friends 2-3 times a week? The answer is- by blocking out the rest of the world and focusing on what goes on in my house. My bubble. It's a happy place. We watch Hannah Montana.

The rest of the world is big and scary, I don't have control over it, I don't understand it and right now I don't want to. I have no shame in admitting that I'm not sure where we're at with all of this presidential stuff that's going on right now. I vote for whoever my husband tells me to vote for. Go ahead, bash me for it all you want. He is my political advisor. I don't know enough to make my own decisions about the issues at hand (and there are so many; education, social security, the economy, the interest rate, bla bla bla). As long as they're not openly against homeschooling or publicly stating that we need more troops in the middle east; then I'm OK. But the fact is, they're politicians. They don't just SAY where they stand on anything. So you have to study & see how they've voted in the past. You have to watch the debates & see how they argue. You have to listen to the paid commentators argue the significance behind the fact that the camera caught them "glistening" while they responded to a certain question. Does that mean they are harboring thoughts that they're afraid to express? I think it's just because the lights are hot. I believe that in between each shot, they're being powdered. Aren't commercials powder breaks?

Excuse me for going off on that presidential rant but this whole Africa thing has unleashed some thoughts in me that I need to let out.

So apparently in Camaroon (I did investigate) Africa, in order to protect their budding daughters from the advances of men the mothers are ironing their daughter's breasts. I don't know if Nestle has anything to do with it. It seems way too evil for even them. The image I saw on the screen at first was a woman holding a big long (like 12 feet long) stick in the fire, heating it up. I thought it was a cooking thing. My husband likes to call me in to show me cooking things sometimes. So I stepped in further and shushed the kids so I could listen. What kind of cooking was this?

The speaker then starts using words like "girls, daughters, breasts, heat, developing tissue bla bla bla" and My stomach turns over. "Oh my God" I start to think I don't want to see this, I don't want to see this and my heart cries out for all the horrible imaginings that I feared were going to take place. I don't know what was worse, my horrible imaginings that I knew were imaginings or knowing that this was real. The little African girl layed on a cot with her hands bound above her head. They showed a close up of her little face. I left the room. In tears. He didn't see my tears. He still wanted to know if I had heard of this.

I come back into the room after dealing with my thoughts for a minute, and trying to think of a way to tell him that I don't want to see things like this. I protect myself from the news because it causes unhappy feelings in me. I don't want to be desensitized to the evil of the world, I don't want to know about horrible things happening in the world. I am NOT OPRAH. My knowing about these things will not help the issue. I cannot fly to Africa and bring home all the 9-11 yr old girls to keep them from getting their breasts scarred by their own mothers. Similarly, if I were able to send their mothers a memo saying "What the hell are you doing to your daughter?" I couldn't fly to Africa and bring home all the 9-11 yr old girls so that they could develop into women without getting pregnant. I cannot solve the problems of the world. Why must I need to know about them? So that when my girls give me a hard time about not letting them wear makeup I can say "Well, at least you're not a kid in Africa."

I wonder if African women ever tell their daughters "At least you're not living in the U.S.?" You'd have a TV in your house broadcasting all the evils of the world while you slave away at your appliances because you can't just wear banana skins and you wouldn't be able to have children until you finished a course of education and every woman makes an individual dinner for their own family because they don't live in villages with communal cooking areas. Yes, Molobka, in the USA the women only get to see each other for Mom's night out. And in their houses, no one but them is there to help keep the kids from falling down the stairs because all the other women are inside their own houses. They don't work together; they do it all alone. And they dress up fancy and go out pretending life is perfect. They don't even have fires to cook in. And they use dishes instead of leaves, so they have to wash them and use them over and over again. They have no rivers to bathe in. So don't go complaining to me about our breast ironing practice; it could be worse. At least you're not a kid in the USA.




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