When Dina didn’t come home, her father and friends bravely went out to the fields, and there they found her, half dead in the grass. They covered her and carried her back to her home. There was a health center in Kindu, but Dina’s family couldn’t afford to take her there to be treated, so she was cared for only at home. She lay paralyzed in her bed, unable to walk. The stick had broken into her bladder and rectum, causing a fistula, or hole, in the tissues. As a result, urine and feces trickled constantly through her vagina and down her legs. These injuries, rectovaginal and vesicovaginal fistulas, are common in Congo because of sexual violence….[where] everyone knows that rape is routine…it is the troops’ right to rape women.”

This is but one part of one of the stories that come from this book. It will open your eyes, change your mind, and inspire you. Of course most of us here in the West agree violence against women is wrong, even though rape is prevalent in our own society. But this book not only chronicles the stories of extraordinary women, it changes how we see these problems and what solutions are available and achievable. Most require less money in foreign aid, not more.

Here is just a snapshot of a handful of the things I have learned in reading this book:

- The “Girl Effect”: giving women equal rights and access to education can raise GNP and national savings rates as well as cure a whole wealth of social ills from poverty to malnutrition to terrorism. Yes, terrorism. Because security experts have noticed the countries that breed terrorism are also the ones which marginalize women.

- The modern global slave trade is larger in absolute terms than the Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was. (citing Foreign Affairs)

- Rescuing girls is the easy part. Combating poverty and shame is the hard part in keeping girls from seeing they have options other and deserve more than to go back to the brothels. Because it’s not about shame. It’s about basic human rights everyone is entitled to, no matter their past.

- Violence against women has mutated into new forms: hurling acid into the faces of women and girls, burning brides, and throwing chili powder and lit cigarettes into…well, you can imagine where.

- Over and over again, the saving grace? Education. Education in a multitude of ways and for a million different reasons. So women know what their rights are. So women and girls know they are not alone in their suffering. So they know it is possible to speak out and to demand better. So they have the tools they need to achieve better.

- What prevents them from getting an education or having better lives? More often than not, the answer does not lie in sending more money. The answer lies in looking at the individual community or situation and innovating better, more efficient solutions.

- Usually these solutions are stupidly, stupidly simple and cheap. Solutions like putting a girls’ toilet in schools and giving the girls maxi pads so they can privately change and keep clean instead of skipping school for being humiliated one week each moth. Solutions like iodized salt to eradicate health problems associated with iodine deficiency. Solutions like allowing women to work from their homes so they don’t have to face potential rape and violence on the streets of dangerous, war-torn cities.

I think what prevents most of us from acting is the feeling overwhelmed by such huge problems. That we don’t know where to begin and we feel we face forces much larger than ourselves. What this book shows is a different story: solutions aren’t easy, but they’re not so difficult as we might imagine. It’s not about making men the enemy. It’s not about making Islam the enemy. It’s about re-envisioning approaches and showing how easing the oppression off women not only save the life of the individual women, but it can save nations and eradicate problems that affect everyone.

Reading this book will transform you. It’s the only nonfiction book I’ve ever stayed up half the night reading, and I owe my mother-in-law a credit for drawing my attention to it.

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Then you get older and they say a true friend is someone you can always count on, and you begin to really get that. Moving through the trials of life, it becomes important to have friends you can rely on to be there time and again.

Now, when I look on the friendships that really stand the test of time, I see that’s only part of the story. There are a lot of wonderful people in this world. Amazing people who will hold out a hand when you are falling. People who seek you out and shoulder your deepest pains. They will wipe up your tears and tell you what you need to hear. Not always what you want to hear – but what you need to hear. People for whom you might always feel grateful and lucky to have known.

But for me, true friendship comes when that trust goes both ways: when both sides open themselves to vulnerability, when both sides trust each other. True friends are people who stand by your side when the rest of the world turns on you, but they also come to you when the world has turned on them. Not only do they shelter you, but they come to you for shelter too. True friends shield and shepherd each other, coming together no matter which way the rain blows. It begins in a moment, but it’s a thread that can only be woven by the push and pull of each strand across time.

What is friendship to you?

The Rules
I think there is real power in the human voice, as flawed as it may be. And when the voices speak together, when you have a multitude of voices speaking, patterns begin to emerge and there you can begin to understand truth. So in the spirit of the personal narrative, I am hosting a weekly challenge every Tuesday morning, where I will post a topic (ranging from the banal to the intimate) and ask readers to respond. I would love to see everyone’s answers and how similar and different they all are.

You can respond in any way you choose. You can give a fictional response or a true one. You can use words, sentences, and/or photographs. If you have a blog, you can link it with Mr. Linky below. Please be sure to include “Tell It To Me Tuesdays” in the title, and link back to this post. Feel free to use the “Tell It To Me Tuesday” button available to the right. If you don’t have a blog, but want to join in, you can just leave a comment. Please follow the rules. I don’t want to have to delete links. I like links! Don’t make me delete them.

Next week’s challenge: Time

A few days ago, I wrote a blog post expressing my deep sense of helplessness and futility when I look at the government and prominent leaders who are so completely out of touch with the reality of life their people face every day. And I expressed my sense that the real movement is the movement of people. Ordinary citizens started making statements with their words, their actions, and often their dollars, either through donations or financial endorsements. They are choosing to live a different way and reclaiming their right to do so. This was my sense in just looking at the world around me in communities supporting local or urban farming, women reaching out and reinvesting in midwives, mothers deciding to home school, neighbors donating their meager wages to Haiti relief, or people turning away from corporate greed and choosing instead to run their own businesses. My sense was people were taking a moment to look at their lives and ask: what is my legacy? What will I contribute to this world? And in multitudes of different ways, they were choosing a road of progress. This was my sense.

This weekend, I found proof. In New York City this weekend, the Women In the World Conference harnessed the power of women the likes of Sec. Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, Queen Rania of Jordan, Meryl Streep, Christiane Amanpour, Barbara Walters, Christine Lagarde…and oh God, so many more. CEOs and top managers of companies like Morgan Stanley and HP, and so many amazing and inspiring women activists from all around the world who have made enormous contributions ranging from sex strikes to protest civil war and the use of rape as a weapon of war (in countries where 92% of women had been raped or sexually abused), raiding brothels to rescue sex slaves, organizing women’s prisons as sanctuaries from prostitution and gendercide, educating and organizing African villages against the practice of female genital mutilation, and doing everything they can to provide women and communities with the resources they need to gain access to knowledge, information and power. These words have become so cliché to our ears, but when you hear their stories you feel how real this is. How millions of women are gang raped, mutilated, and oppressed every day, often multiple and multiple times a day.

But what came out of the conference is not a sense of powerlessness. These women were living proof that it is possible to reach out to the powerless and emancipate them. And not only could they do it, but we here in the U.S. can too. What came from this conference was the message over and over again that government-to-government solutions are not always the most effective way. Yes, government solutions, laws, and enforcement of those laws help. But often times it is the most simple of ideas and tiniest of investments that reap the biggest dividends.

The Girl Effect
Economists worldwide are finding more and more evidence everywhere they look that educating women has such far-reaching implications as to be the literal saving grace of a state. Indeed, educating women has been the linchpin, the key to East Asia’s most recent economic successes and development. It not only hugely increases the labor force, it also delays marriage and reduces childbearing. The women finance the education of younger relatives (and future generations) and save enough to boost national savings rates. Not only does it combat poverty and reduce instances that come along with poverty (like families selling their children into slavery – a $36 billion a year black market, second only to weapons and drugs), it helps reduce infant mortality, improves societal health and nutrition. And security experts now are suggesting that empowering girls disempowers terrorists. Educating women, helping them participate more, enables them to be a more powerful voice in their households and in their countries. For we find that the countries that nurture terrorism are disproportionately those that marginalize women. (Half the Sky, Kristof and WuDunn)

And the saddest part is that it is often the girls who dreamed, who dreamed they could have a job, bring money home to the family, who had goals in the name of love and marriage and family, who often have that dream betrayed. They are sold, beaten, drugged and pushed into a four-walled room with no doors. When asked what they wanted to do, if they could leave the brothels, if they could do anything else, what would they do…they respond, “Madam, how can we use these hands for something else?” (Kiran Bedi) For if they did leave, they would be so shamed and reviled by their families and communities. They carry such burdens of shame and guilt they DO NOT DESERVE, it often leads to suicide or return to the brothels.

So what are these simple solutions? For one, we can invest in these girls, in their rehabilitation and help them become entrepreneurial members of society. Many have dreams to open shops or salons or to turn a craft skill into a business. Micro-lending and other forms of support – $100 to us, the price of a couple of dinners out or a day shopping, except it gets paid back with interest – can literally be the difference between life and death for these women. Some women are talking about programs in countries life Afghanistan and Pakistan to help women work from home, sewing or doing whatever, but that allows them to support their families both by being home with the kids and bring home money and by keeping them safe from the deadly violence of the streets of Kabul. It also changes the power dynamic in the household, for once a woman starts contributing financially to the household she begins to gain the respect of the men in the home. Individuals and corporations can also make small investments in infrastructure like wells, bus routes, and bathrooms in schools that suddenly make education for girls possible where it was not possible before.

But above all the answer is education. Here the work of so many NGOs provides powerful relief and access to education (though we should be reminded that NGOs cannot be the substitute actors of government – they can help where governments fail, but we must still pressure government into action where we can). And volunteering for or donating to NGOs can be a powerful way to help. But education is critical because it gives women and girls knowledge and know-how for careers, yes. But it also allows them to even just know what their rights are and to learn how to speak up against practices like female genital mutilation and how and why to say no when there is talk of sending their children away to “work”, because sending children away often leads condemns them to abduction into slavery.

This is not just political. This IS personal. In a globalized world such as ours has become, we can no longer pretend that the problems of these women are not our problems. We can no longer pretend that our actions – both the ones we take and the ones we don’t – do not have massive repercussions in the lives of so many people who live on under $2 a day. When the CIA estimates 50,000 slaves are trafficked into the U.S. annually, we cannot pretend the problem is not here at our doorstep.

The question isn’t “Can we afford to help?” or “Do they deserve it?” The question is “In what ways can we innovate to engineer other simple solutions?” If you don’t think the victims of oppression living and dying every day deserve our attention, then at least realize we owe it to the victims and families of victims of 9/11 and troops fighting terrorists every day.

“I realized the price of being silent is higher than the price of doing something.”
– Leymah Gbowee, the woman who organized a sex strike to bring an end to civil war in Liberia, Women in the World Conference 2010

Here are a couple of powerful clips. Click here to see more memorable moments.

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On this occasion, we made blackberry cobbler.

Ok, well we set out to make strawberry rhubarb cobbler, but there was nary a barb of rhu to be found. So we got blackberries instead. But when we got home and pulled out the recipes, the one that was for blackberries called for 3 1/2 cups of sugar…and while I like dessert I do also like my kidneys and pancreas to function. Also it didn’t call for a topping (other than 1 1/2 cups of sugar). I do like my cobblers to have a topping. The one that was for strawberries and rhubarb didn’t seem to call for enough cooking of the fruit, though it did have a topping. But when we saw the flour-to-yummy-goodness ratio, we saw it we more like a pie crust topping. Clearly sub-par.

So we winged it, stealing ideas from both recipes and coming up with our own.

This is what you’ll need:
2 sticks of butter, 2 cups of all-purpose flour, 4 teaspoons baking powder, 2 cups of sugar, 1 1/2 cups milk, 36 oz. of blackberries (or other fruit like blueberries or raspberries, cherries, etc.)

Note: the blackberries are not pictured in the photo above. That’s a ’cause of we ate them all.

For the topping:

4 tablespoons brown sugar, 1/2 teaspoon each: cinnamon, ground ginger, salt, and 1/4 teaspoon of nutmeg.

The ginger addition was inspired, let me tell you.

When you’ve assembled all your goods, set your oven to 325 degrees. Then melt the butter in an 11 x 14 pan. We stuck ours in the oven while it pre-heated and we busied ourselves with drinking beer prepping the rest of it. (Ok, well first step was wash your berries. But you knew that, right?)

Mix the flour, baking powder, 2 cups of sugar (notice a substantial reduction from 3 1/2 cups and the finished product was plenty sweet), and milk. (Truth be told, even the 2 sticks of butter might be a smidge much. I’d say a stick and half would probably do ya just as good…but then V might just slap me for such blasphemy.)

Drop mixture into melted butter (do not stir). Spread the berries over the batter. This is such a beautiful sight. I do wish I had thought to take a photo of it. The berries just melt into the batter. Bloop. Bloop.

To make the topping, just mix the brown sugar, spices and salt together, then sprinkle on top of the cobbler. Did I mention the ginger was a good idea?

Then bake at 325. Ours took about an hour and 15 minutes. And came out looking like this:
And we served ours warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Because, you know, such things should be done right proper.

Like so:
See how the ice cream just oozes joy like rain down the blackberries? Yes, I wax poetic over food. Don’t you?

Did I mention this recipe was so easy it was practically criminal? Because, oh yes. It was EASY.

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Here’s the AP video:

I have no idea what to say about this. My knee-jerk response is to say bleah. Breast milk should go to but one kind of recipient: a nursing child.

Though I’m curious to hear the vegan response to this. I’ve seen some say it’s good since it’s not taking from nonhumans for human consumption, and others take issue with breast milk in general.

(I try to respect such personal choices as much as I can, but I just have to throw in a point here that breast milk has all kinds of important hormones and nutrients, so if you can give your child breast milk, it seems more important than making an ideological point. IMHO. But I’ll shut up now because I don’t know people’s individual circumstances.)

But back to my original point. I had one. I’m pretty sure.

Oh right, my initial reaction is to shudder and say “no thank you!” But then, I wonder why? What is it about breast milk that seems less sanitary and edible than cow’s milk? Breasts aren’t any dirtier than udders. (You hush. I know what you’re thinking.) Probably cleaner in fact. Is it some form of abhorrence to cannibalism maybe? We don’t eat humans, or anything that comes from humans…but why is this different for babies than adults? Or maybe it’s just an ick factor, like being over the age of 10 and not eating your boogers.

Or is it that what is produced by the female body is inherently unsanitary? Am I reacting in a way that reflects centuries-old belief that women are unclean?

If that’s the case, I’ll take my mommy’s milk cheese on a slice of pumpernickel, with a dollop of lingonberry jam, thankyouverymuch.

P.S. My hubby’s reaction to mommy’s milk cheese? “I’d try it. It’s gotta’ be better than balut*.”

*Balut: fetal duck eaten out of the shell. A Filipino delicacy.

I’ve learned that instead it takes much more courage to hope. To take a leap, even when you are standing on the edge of a cliff, knowing there is the swirling mad abyss below.

It takes more courage to stare the darkness in its face and say, “Though I know not where I land or whether I fall, I must try.”

There was a time in my life when I was afraid, oh so afraid. Waking up at night with cold sweats, hands quaking, cannot see straight afraid. My heart had been shattered and the fragile pieces were thrown into the fire. Repeatedly. Phantoms in my head. Danger around every corner. But I dared hope, even when the naysayers feared for me. It wasn’t just hope that got me through, though. It was damn dogged work. Changing how I deal with problems. Smashing boundaries to bits and setting up new foundations. It was determination that above all else, it could work. Even when it didn’t before. And I was lucky. It could easily at any moment have gone another way, were it not for a refusal to let a precious gift die. And that gift, gives every day, and every day, and more and more, in impossible ways. But what really got me through, beyond work, when logic and reason failed, was every morning waking up and making a choice. And choosing one day more to make that leap of faith.

Some days, it took so much courage to leap.

What lessons have resonated with you in life? What have you learned or discovered?

The Rules
I think there is real power in the human voice, as flawed as it may be. And when the voices speak together, when you have a multitude of voices speaking, patterns begin to emerge and there you can begin to understand truth. So in the spirit of the personal narrative, I am hosting a weekly challenge every Tuesday morning, where I will post a topic (ranging from the banal to the intimate) and ask readers to respond. I would love to see everyone’s answers and how similar and different they all are.

You can respond in any way you choose. You can give a fictional response or a true one. You can use words, sentences, and/or photographs. If you have a blog, you can link it with Mr. Linky below. Please be sure to include “Tell It To Me Tuesdays” in the title, and link back to this post. Feel free to use the “Tell It To Me Tuesday” button available to the right. If you don’t have a blog, but want to join in, you can just leave a comment. Please follow the rules. I don’t want to have to delete links. I like links! Don’t make me delete them.

Next week’s challenge: Friendship

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But they can’t. Even before the flagpole begins to peel and splinter, the ground underneath arches and slides forward into its own new destiny. It may bear the marks of boots on its back, but those marks become the possessions of the land. What does Okinawa remember of its fall? Forbidden to make engines of war, Japan made automobiles instead, and won the world. It all moves on.”
– The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver, p. 384.

Our politics today make me tired. I’m so bloody tired of hearing the same old diatribes repeated ad nauseam, over and over like wheels on a tired, creaky, aged wagon. They talk and talk and it’s like buzzing in my ears. For they say nothing new and none of it even applies anymore. It feels like they’re talking about Spaceman Spiff, when the rest of us are staring at moldy cheese in an empty refrigerator. They talk in the language of the Cold War, and the rest of us are sharing DVDs with the Japanese and watching You Tube videos coming out of Iran.

We have real problems and real concerns. And they’re still talking ideology. The world doesn’t operate on ideology. It operates in the handshake between neighbors, the crops grown by farmers, and the earthquakes and hurricanes that steal our homes away. Who cares about ideology when you’re staring down the barrel of a gun?

I hear the noise and it makes me tired. I hear the lies and it makes my bones melt. I hear the anger and I feel sorrow.

But when I turn off the noise and look at people, I see a different story. I see people buying produce from local farmers. I see people biking to work. I see people wringing their empty pockets to give to others in need. I see people ignoring corporations, eschewing industry and taking the path less walked. Home schooling. Midwives. Etsy. Blogs. Project 3/50. Interracial marriage. News, products, food, and information home grown and shared neighbor to neighbor.

We throw the pills that cause atrocious side-effects down the drain and we eat better food. This is not a revolution. This is not the masses rising up in revolt. This is the world moving on, like ants marching steadily out from under the boot through the gaps in the platform of the sole.

So you can have your soapbox. Let the potentates feed the lie. Let the corporations write our politicians’ speeches. We’re not listening anymore. Because while you sit there spouting and playing your chess games and lining your pockets while everyone else suffers, one by one, we take the road less traveled by.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

by: Lewis Carroll

In honor of a glorious Sunday afternoon.

Their Eyes Were Watching God

This is the theme that emerged for me in reading this book: all the ways in which we can become enslaved. We can become enslaved, yes, by the expectations of family or society or by the hand of a ruthless man. Or sometimes we can enslave ourselves, when we allow ourselves to become captives of our own fears. It is so easy to become overwhelmed by them, to become blinded by them, to not even see or know how we do this to ourselves. It can become so hard to emancipate ourselves, especially when we know those fears so well. When they become a cocoon to hide within. When they are justifiable. But no matter how much reason we have to be afraid, those fears prevent us from being free.

And often have the potential to lead us to unjustifiable actions.

It is amazing what humans are capable of doing when they are afraid.