Empowering women

February 7th, 2007 | Just thinking

I sponsor a girl in Thailand through World Vision. This allows her to have a better life, I hope, and I expect I will sponsor her until she is grown. I was at a Women of Faith weekend, and they had WV opportunities. As I walked around the table, information about the child I sponsor just about leapt off the table. She looked at the time very much like my youngest, born in China, but there are other reasons why the match seemed like it was mine to assume.

WV sends out a magazine quarterly . I don’t see that any of the articles are available online.

The Spring issue has a cover headline (one of several):

The grim reality for girls; cursed by gender, cast off by culture.

For whatever reason, it has hit me hard, though there was only one thing as I perused it (I couldn’t bear to read it in depth yet) that was new to me.

They featured a young woman in Afghanistan who lit herself on fire (self-immolation). She isn’t sure how old she is, maybe 18, married at 12, with a 3 yo son. No education, living with 20 family members, never leaving home. Hopes she might have a girl one day (now) (waiting for a skin graft) that she would educate. Oh my…before I could get over that one…AIDs in women…genital mutilation…knew about those three…not over that…on to India and temple prostitutes (devadasi).

Who knew, not me, and there isn’t much that I haven’t heard of. The Christian Science Monitor has done a number of exposes in the past dealing with child traffiking and sex abuse, so I learned very early on about some of this, but not about devadasis. I kept the series for a long time, and only just tossed it…or I’d look it up and see if it was mentioned, and I just missed it.

It is outlawed, but it is estimated that 5000 (!!!!!!!) Indian girls become devadasis each year. AIDs there too. Interviewing survivors. This involves secret ‘marriage’ to a ‘patron’ for (some) families who couldn’t afford a conventional marriage for their daughter or for other reasons.

“What was once a socially respectable occupation” [I'm assuming because it might have been like a second wife or a concubine] “degenerated into another variant of today’s oldest profession.”

Honestly, we should kiss the ground that we were born in a culture that values women, if we were. I don’t even know where to begin to make a difference except for in a donation. How can any woman bear the thought of really, really THINKING what our counterparts face around the world. And we would too, but for the circumstances of birth.

Karin

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