feminine-genius

Beautiful

Hope Frances Mahon has penned her bittersweet saga of life with an alcoholic father. I can relate to so much -- especially hanging on to the tiniest fragments of feeling loved. Hers involved a gunshot; mine include the smell of diesel and a hockey pin. Grace flows through the darndest things.

The strength behind the smile

My latest column here.

Reminder

I'll be giving a talk in Plymouth Michigan this Friday evening. Information here. To be that close to the real news is exciting -- since the Wings have a chance to clinch it tonight. Talk about a thrill!

Collaboration -- fail

The headline concerning domestic violence caught my eye -- since it noted the large number of male victims. The evidence? Men being asked to do household chores and being denied conjugal rights. This sounds like fall-out from the gender police who hit the African continent with an eye to undoing centuries of mysogynistic damage by empowering women in the classic zero-sum game.

The lobby group released the report on Sunday after an eight-month survey in over 40 Kenyan districts. Progress for Men advocates for men's rights in Kenya. The report said among those who suffer abuse include lawyers, judges and even top politicians. In fact, former and present members of parliament accounted for 39 percent of the number of male victims of domestic violence.

So the source is not traditional men who say that feminists are making their lives hell, but "progressive" men who want the world to know they are suffering in silence. I'm trying to take this seriously, but it's hard, when abuse against women entails violence and rape, and the turnabout is pouting over being asked to wash up after dinner.

There are plenty of men who suffer abuse -- real violence at the hands of aggressive females. They are often uncounted because of the real shame attached to such bullying, but to claim to be progressive and to object to sleeping on the sofa smacks of an odd conglomerate of the neanderthal metrosexual. I don't get it.

Forgive and move forward

An enormous case involving manslaughter, colonialism and the undercurrents of residual racism has been boiling over in Kenya for three years, and only now has a sentence been handed down. Tom Cholmondeley was the grandson of a British aristocrat who carved up the country years ago to give to British settlers, and the racial divide between white and black, rich and poor, native and immigrant has found traction in this sad case. In brief, Tom alleges to have shot at poacher's dog and ended up hitting the man. He offered frantic medical aid, but the man died. (The fact that this was not the first incident of the sort is highly damning, and whatever justice may be warranted was impacted by the long-simmering resentment of the black Kenyans who know that money influences legal outcomes. For those interested in both sides, consider this and this.)

Our interest is not so much in the justice at hand (he was finally given eight months to serve, which seems light except that he has been in jail in the intervening years since the death) but in the words of the widow of his victim. She first adds the context of what the tragedy means to the community:

While his widow insisted she bore no malice, she claimed the confrontation showed how Kenya's white landowners still had a "colonial" attitue towards defending their property.

"Security guards at the Delamere family estate have been chasing and beating us for simply gathering dead wood for firewood in the farm," she said." This has been gong on for as long as I can remember."

"The situation is so skewed, we feel like we're still living in colonial Kenya."

She now faces bringing up her four sons alone, and is waiting to hear whether she will obtain any compensation so that she can give them a good education.

"I expect no favors from the aristocrats," she said. "I've been lonely, hurt and stressed up for three years now and even if they do offer anything to me now, a decent education for my children is what I can accept."

"My husband died a painful death that could be avoided. But people make mistakes. Let's forgive, forget and move forward."

Forgiveness is her sincere message because of her motherly heart. She knows that Tom and his families are victims as well.

"I know how it feels like to lose a loved one. Being a prisoner is halfway similar to being dead," she said.

She added that had Mr Cholmondeley been found guilty of murder, the charge he originally faced, she would not have wanted him to get the death penalty. "I would not want to see a death used to avenge my husband's own," she said.

He said, she said...

Under Islam, the two voices are not equal. A woman's testimony is only worth half of a man's, and a peculiar incident in the life of Muhammad added an onerous burden to women who have been sexually abused -- saying that without four eye witnesses, her charge cannot stand in court. Thus, we have this sad tale:

A 22-year-old unmarried Bangladeshi woman who was caned 39 times for alleging a neighbour was the father of her son is fighting for her life in hospital, police said. Local police chief Moshiur Rahman told AFP that the woman, from Comilla, 70 kilometres (43 miles) east of the capital Dhaka, had angered Islamic clerics when she told friends that a neighbour had fathered her six-year-old son.

They called her and the alleged father to appear before a makeshift Islamic court, but the man denied the paternity claim, Rahman said. "He held a Koran in one hand and swore to the village clerics that he was not the father of the boy. The village court found him not guilty," he said.

"They also issued a fatwa that the woman should be caned 39 times for lying." The woman, seriously injured after the caning, was admitted to a local hospital but was later shifted to the country's largest hospital in Dhaka on the orders of the Prime Minister, Rahman said.

Two of the clerics have been arrested for repression of women, he said, and DNA testing had been arranged to determine the father of the child.

Cane her first; then do a DNA test. Abominable.

Eternity so well begun

A captivating saga that we've taken note of over the last three months is now ended as it began -- in love:

Faith went to Heaven today. We spent the entire morning and some of the afternoon snuggling together in my warm bed. I told her that I loved her many times. I was holding her in my arms when she passed away. It was around 4:40 in the afternoon. I had just finished changing her diaper and I decided to pick her up and wrap a blanket around her. She made a very sweet smiling face and held it for several seconds... I thought it was very cute. I waited for her to take her next breath, but she didn't. She looked up at me and opened her beautiful eyes, and I realized what was happening. I told her to go with Jesus. I told her that I loved her and that it was ok, that I would meet her in Heaven. I held her close and cried tears on her face. I felt her chest and there was no longer a heartbeat. But she still looked so beautiful. And even now, she is still so amazingly beautiful... as I hold her here she is looking like a porcelain doll. Her tube feed is gone. Her lips are still pink and her facial expression looks so happy and peaceful. God is good.

I don't think anyone who has loved a child can pretend that these past weeks haven't been horrifically hard, as well as painfully, beautifully searing -- as only the most intense love can be. Our prayers are with this inspiring mother and I think we can safely rely on Faith's intercession in times of trial.

Dear Faith -- carry your mother now, as she so heroically carried you. Jesus, we entrust them both to Your love, and know You will console the sorrowing.

A Catch-22

The women of Iraq are not benefitting from the $87 million that the US has injected into their health care system because there is the abyss between the female patient and the male doctor that cannot be bridged. Thus pregnant women usually have no health care throughout pregnancy and then deliver alone for want of female nurses and midwives.

That leads to the next element of the problem. How can such nurses and midwives be trained if they cannot spend time with male teachers?

Another obstacle, he said, is the reluctance of husbands to let their wives travel 25 miles to Ramadi to train as nurses. So three months ago, the center in Saqlawiyah was opened. But first al-Hadithy had to persuade the village imams to back the project — or at least not preach against it — and the husbands to let their wives train with him.

Yet another problem is that female nursing is a profession held in low regard by Iraqis, because it requires night work and contact with male patients. "But I knew if I could teach them some basic first aid — how to give a shot or take someone's blood pressure — these women would be accepted," al-Hadithy said.

So female nurses are not to help male patients, and the women are let to die in childbirth rather than be attended by male doctors. The culture is leading to a death spiral without the collaboration that men and women are fully capable of in all chastity.

The nursing shortage is only part of Iraq's hollowed-out health care system, plagued by corruption, mismanagement and a lack of equipment and medicines. Iraqi medical professionals started leaving in the 1990s, during Saddam Hussein's rule. Since the invasion, thousands have fled abroad, while of those who stayed, at least 620 have been killed, among them 134 doctors, some gunned down in their own clinics. Dr. Ahmed Ibrahim Salih, Ramadi's city health director, has escaped three assassination attempts that killed his assistant, five of his co-workers and a bodyguard.

Iraq's violence has ebbed and Anbar is quiet, but Salih still works from a heavily guarded office. Meanwhile, the strengthened tribal mores have brought their own restrictions on females, so much so that women interviewed at Ramadi's Nursing School asked not to be fully identified. They attend classes wearing all-covering dark robes and head scarves.

F.R., one of 10 siblings, is a high school graduate who persuaded her family to let her study nursing, telling them that someday she would have a job and bring in money. "I believe women can work and still be respected," said the 20-year-old. But their teacher, Suad Aziz, says old prejudices run deep, even in urban Ramadi. "It's the attitude that nurses are loose women," said Aziz. She looks at her class with hope, saying: "Once we have them graduate and working, things will change."

Jesus, Mary and Joseph -- can we really rejoice in multi-culturalism when some are built on the notion that ritual purity rules out the assistance of modern medicine?