Tag Archives: Civil rights
Words from a Granary: An Anthology of Short Stories by Ugandan Women Writers edited by Violet Barungi
Considered together, this collection of 15 stories is a welcome statement of women’s literary empowerment. The second anthology published by FEMRITE, the Uganda Women Writers’ Association founded by novelist/short story writer/playwright-turned Ugandan Cabinet member Mary Karoro Okurut and officially launched in 1996, is testimony that “Ugandan women writers refuse to be discouraged by the appalling lack of a reading culture in the country,” insists editor Violet Barungi in the introduction. “They keep wielding their pens, churning out more and more reading material in the hope that one day, our people will realise that reading is the backbone of intellectual empowerment and an integral part of development.”
With respect and admiration for such commendable intentions, Words – examined as individual stories – is an uneven mix ranging from disappointing amateur efforts to memorable glimpses into even stronger writing to come. The majority of the 15 here understandably reflect Uganda’s turbulent history since its independence in 1962; the gruesome, all-too-common violence against women is undeniably prevalent in these pages, as is the constant struggle for survival amidst unfair, unjust conditions.
“Chained” by Monica Arac de Nyeko is perhaps the most terrifying of all, about a student forced to betray her entire convent school and witness their heinous massacre by a rebel gang, then herself commit an unthinkable act in order to buy her freedom. Just as disturbing and tragic is a silenced, almost casual violence against women, as documented in a wedding-day rape in “Esteri’s Secret” by Winnie Gashumba Munyarugerero, incestuous rape in “Out of the Trap” by Ayeta Anne Wangusa, workplace rape in “Hard Truth” by Lillian Tindyebwa, and random multiple rapes during a bus raid in “End of a Journey” by Waltraud Ndagijimana.
Among the anthology’s 15, two stories prove most resonating. The collection’s first, “I Watch You My Sister” by Goretti Kyomuhendo examines a homeless woman from afar as she fights to be noticed in order to stay alive; the repetition of the phrase “I watch you, my sister …” is a strangely lulling refrain against the tragedy playing out from paragraph to paragraph. Closer to the end, “Stepdaughter” by Deborah Etoori is the only happy tale, capturing the developing relationship between two students and their eventual decision to become a true family.
“The anthology is the outcome of a three-year programme of training workshops geared towards equipping creative women writers with writing skills,” explains editor Barungi. In the decade since the collection’s original publication, a number of the authors included here have continued to hone those skills … as I continue my own multi-culti literary education, I’m planning to explore some of those efforts here on BookDragon. Do join me!
Readers: Adult
Published: 2001 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Short Stories, African
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo
Remember the title of Katherine Boo’s new book Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, because you will see it on upcoming nominee lists for the next round of Very Important Literary Prizes. That Boo won the Pulitzer in 2000, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2002, became a staff writer for The New Yorker in 2003 (contributor since 2001) after 10 years with The Washington Post, and is just now publishing her debut title, will guarantee media coverage. That Beautiful is an unforgettable true story, meticulously researched with unblinking honesty, will make Boo’s next awards well-deserved.
From November 2007 to March 2011, Boo became a regular fixture in Annawadi, “the sumpy plug of slum” next to the constantly-modernizing international Mumbai airport, and home to 3,000 inhabitants “packed into, or on top of 355 huts.” Settled in 1991 by Tamil Nadu laborers from southern India hired to repair an airport runway, 21st-century Annawadi sits “where New India collided with old India and made new India late.” Encircling Annawadi are “five extravagant hotels,” luxurious evidence of India’s growing global presence: “’Everything around us is roses,’” describes an Annawadian, “’And we’re the sh*t in between.’” In this fetid microcosm, everyday dramas range from petty jealousies to explosive violence fueled by religion, caste, and gender.
At the center of Boo’s story is garbage trafficker Abdul, the oldest son and prime earner of the 11-member Husain family who comprise almost one-third of Annawadi’s three-dozen Muslim population. Thoughtful, quiet Abdul, who is 16 or 19 – “his parents were hopeless with dates” – his ill father, and his older sister stand accused of beating their crippled neighbor One Leg and setting her on fire. For three years, the family is victimized by a labyrinthine legal system controlled by open palms constantly demanding payment.
Life continues in Annawadi: Asha, a lowly-paid kindergarten teacher, works her growing political connections toward escaping the slum, determined her daughter Manju will become Annawadi’s first college graduate. Manju’s best friend Meena wants something more than to be a trapped, arranged teenage bride: “Everything on television announced a new and better India for women,” but “marrying into a village family was like time-traveling backward.”
The toilet cleaner Mr. Kamble is literally dying to raise enough money for a new heart valve so he can continue to shovel sewage and feed his family. The tiny scavenger-turned-thief Sunil (first introduced to Western readers in Boo’s February 2009 New Yorker article) worries that he will remain forever stunted, but at least he’s not a “baldie” like his taller, younger sister whose rat bites have become “boils [that] erupted with worms.” Meanwhile, thieving Kalu recreates the latest Bollywood films with his talented impersonations, entertaining slum kids who will never witness such marvels themselves.
Mumbai, for its marvelous rebirth, remains the largest city in an India that, in spite of being “an increasingly affluent and powerful nation … still housed one-third of the poverty, and one-quarter of the hunger, on the planet.” With the wealth of India’s top 100-richest equaling almost a quarter of the country’s GDP, today’s gap between top and bottom is virtually unfathomable.
Having built her lauded career on capturing the experiences of those living in some of America’s poorest communities, Boo moves “beyond [her] so-called expertise” to her husband’s country of origin, ready to “compensate for my limitations the same way I do in unfamiliar American territory: by time spent, attention paid, documentation secured, accounts cross-checked.” Once the Annawadians accepted the novelty of her foreign presence, “they went more or less about their business as I chronicled their lives” on the page, on film, on audiotape, in photos.
Throughout such careful documentation, the one element missing – very much to her credit – is Boo herself. Beautiful is by no means a personal memoir; it is not a socioeconomic study on poverty, nor a political treatise on widespread corruption. Beautiful is pure, astonishing reportage with as unbiased a lens as possible about specific individuals who populate a clearly demarcated section of ever-changing Mumbai.
The details of Boo’s process – with a glimpse into her experiences – are added in the “Author’s Note” at book’s end. Further details about Boo follow in “A Conversation with Katherine Boo” conducted by Random House power editor Kate Medina. Before ever “meeting” Kate Boo, readers thoroughly experience Annawadi with Abdul, One Leg, Manju, Sunil, and so many memorable others. Boo’s presence as the silent reporter remains so discreet throughout that she virtually disappears as you journey deeper and deeper, unable to turn away.
Review: Christian Science Monitor, January 26, 2012
Readers: Adult
Published: 2012 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Nonfiction, Indian, Nonethnic-specific
Beneath the Lion’s Gaze by Maaza Mengiste + Author Interview
Maaza Mengiste‘s voice, delivered by telephone many thousands of miles away, sounds impossibly young and happy. She’s easy to talk to, easy to laugh with. She’s in Rome for another few months, enjoying the spring sun, sipping another cup of tea in a nearby café, and watching the many American tourists wandering by.
Her idyllic life for the moment seems at odds with her own early past — filled with uncertainty, inexplicable violence, and constant fear. Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Maaza was just 3 years old when the 1974 Ethiopian revolution broke out, ousting a 3,000-year-old monarchy and replacing it with the brutal Derg regime that destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives before its collapse in 1991. Maaza was too young to understand what was happening, but perceptive enough to retain shattering images of that horrific time that have stayed with her through the years. Decades later, Maaza pieced together those memories to write her award-winning, critically acclaimed debut novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, published in early 2010.
At the core of Maaza’s searing work are one family’s hellish experiences during the 1974 revolution. The family’s patriarch — the good doctor Hailu — is a prominent, proud man highly trained to alleviate pain, cure illness, and save the dying. And yet he can do nothing for his beloved wife who lies in a hospital bed, shriveled, exhausted, and ready to pass on. Hailu’s elder son Yonas gravely tries to hold his family together, but is himself helpless when his young daughter becomes seriously ill and his wife Sara is crushed by the fear of potential loss.
Unlike the controlled, watchful Yonas, Hailu’s younger son Dawit is still idealistic, still fueled by a rash temper that once put a fellow student in the hospital when Dawit, too young to understand rape, witnessed that student committing a vicious crime against a family servant. Dawit is devoted to his dying mother, emotionally dependent on his sister-in-law Sara, and in love with a headstrong young woman. He looks on in anguish and disgust as the new regime claims his childhood best friend, who uses complicity as a way to escape his deprived past spent in a mud shack adjacent to the luxury of Hailu’s two-story home.
The revolution shatters the family’s lives: Hailu’s humanity, Yonas’ responsibility, Dawit’s ideals will all be tested. As if working pieces of an intricate puzzle, Maaza presents an epic historical moment too few of us know of, laying the most atrocious acts next to radiantly tender moments and juxtaposing utter cowardice with utmost bravery. The result proves unforgettable.
Based on the strength of that single novel, Maaza was chosen by the 10×10 team to write the Ethiopian chapter of the 10×10 documentary film. Her enthusiasm about the project is palpable, and she admits she is most excited about connecting to the Ethiopian girls. Almost shyly, she reveals her own experiences when, at age 7, she left the comfort of her family to escape the growing danger of remaining in Ethiopia and traveled alone to the United States as a tiny refugee. For over a decade, she grew up in a group home run by a Christian couple in a small town in Colorado: “No one has ever heard of it; it’s on the border with Kansas,” she says. She remained there, living with a revolving group of other refugees, until she graduated high school and left for college.
Maaza softly admits to her isolated youth as “difficult, and I wouldn’t want to wish it on anyone.” She adds, “maybe that’s why I feel so connected to the plight of children.” [... click here for more: author interview appears on pages 5-11]
Author interview: 10×10: Educate Girls, Change the World Book Club Kit, April 2011, pages 5-11
Readers: Adult
Published: 2010 Continue reading
Beneath the Lion’s Gaze by Maaza Mengiste
Decades ago, I went to college with one of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie’s grandsons. Beyond the seemingly ubiquitous images back then of Ethiopia’s barren natural disasters and widespread starvation, that worldly, quiet, thoughtful young man was my first real encounter with Ethiopia … at least the diaspora. Even then, I was instantly struck by the vast divide between those distant tragedies and the life of royal descendants, a memorable early lesson between the haves and the have-nots.
That divide looms large in Maaza Mengiste‘s searing debut novel that chronicles one family’s hellish experiences during the 1974 revolution in Ethiopia that ousted a 3,000-year-old monarchy, replacing it with the brutal Derg regime which destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives until its collapse in 1991.
At the family’s head is the good doctor Hailu, a prominent, proud man highly trained to alleviate pain, cure illness, save the dying. And yet he can do nothing more for his beloved wife who lies in a hospital bed, shriveled, exhausted, and ready to pass on, even as her family cannot let her go. Hailu’s elder son Yonas gravely tries to hold his family together, helpless when his young daughter becomes seriously ill and his wife Sara is crushed by the fear of potential loss.
Unlike the controlled, watchful Yonas, Hailu’s younger son Dawit is still idealistic, still fueled by a rash temper that once put a fellow student in the hospital when Dawit, too young to understand rape, knew a vicious wrong was being committed between student and family servant. Dawit is devoted to his dying mother, emotionally dependent on his sister-in-law Sara, in love with a headstrong young woman. He looks on in anguish and disgust as the new regime claims his childhood best friend, who uses complicity as a way to escape his deprived past spent in a mud shack adjacent to the luxury of Hailu’s two-story home.
The horrific revolution is about to shatter the Hailu family’s lives: the father’s humanity, the elder son’s responsibility, the younger son’s ideals will all be tested. As if working pieces of an intricate puzzle, Mengiste presents an epic historical moment too few of us know of, laying the most atrocious acts next to radiantly tender moments, next to utter cowardice and utmost bravery. The result proves unforgettable.
Tidbit: Make sure to check out the comprehensive 10×10 Book Club Kit for Beneath the Lion’s Gaze.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2010 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, African, African American
Saving CeeCee Honeycutt by Beth Hoffman
Perhaps because Beth Hoffman‘s debut is read so charmingly by Jenna Lamia, who also narrated Kathryn Stockett‘s bestseller The Help, I couldn’t help making endless comparisons … both Hoffman and Stockett write of the racially divided South a few generations past, populated by strong feisty women, and of course the requisite wise caregiver who must of course be African American. Line the two books up, and Stockett wins hands down with the better read; that said, she’s currently being sued by her brother’s maid for stealing both name and personal story. Uh-oh.
So back to Hoffman’s bevy of women who revolve around one 12-year-old Cecilia Rose Honeycutt, otherwise called CeeCee. Only 12, CeeCee has spent most of her young life caring for her mother Camille, who like her flowering southern namesake couldn’t survive being transplanted to the harsher Yankee North climate. The 1951 Vidalia Onion Queen of Georgia never regains her glory, and by the summer of 1967, she’s barely hanging on to her sanity. Longing to return home to the South, Camille finds a different route out of her misery, leaving a shocked and bereft little girl behind.
Enter great-aunt Tallulah Caldwell, who whisks CeeCee away and generously welcomes her into a new life of sudden privilege and wealth in Savannah. And while she’s busy with her society friends and saving landmark homes, CeeCee is fed, scolded, hugged, regaled, bolstered, and unconditionally loved by Tootie’s longtime cook Oletta … who will, of course, be the one to open CeeCee’s eyes to the racial divide and share with her a world beyond the posh ladies-who-lunch.
Why it took 12 years to rescue this neglected child, or even check on her prodigal mother (Tootie apparently visited just once), makes Tootie’s deus ex machina-arrival a bit too convenient. Mammy-like Oletta is ultimately another flat caricature, complete with her eternal gratitude to Tootie and her late husband for how well they have always treated her. As caring as Tootie seems to be, she remains encased in her white privilege – sending a gift in the name of southern hospitality to her injured neighbor in spite of that neighbor’s vile treatment of African Americans is more important than considering Oletta’s feelings when Oletta herself has to bake the gift!
Most of what I’ve heard about Hoffman’s debut has been about its fluffy enjoyment factor, a good ol’ Southern (gothic) read complete with the eccentric and insane. But I found myself more disturbed than charmed, perplexed than entertained. Where Stockett succeeds is her ability to take potentially stock (pun not intended, really!) characters and imbue them with unique self-determination. In spite of vast potential (racially motivated crime, inherited mental illness), Hoffman disappointedly never moves beyond a single dimension; some might find that satisfying enough for a beach read (or listen, in my case), but 20/20 hindsight tells me those 10+ hours of audible investment would have proved more memorable elsewhere.
Readers: Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2010 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, ..Young Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, Nonethnic-specific
Little Princes: One Man’s Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal by Conor Grennan
Two warnings: 1. Don’t read Little Princes: One Man’s Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal in public unless you enjoy making a spectacle of yourself, wiping your eyes and blowing your nose every few pages; 2. Skip the middle photo insert until you’ve read the final page. My sole quibble with this book would be that the pictures – thoroughly appreciated! – need to appear at story’s end so as not to reveal too much too soon. Other than that, get ready to be mesmerized by a wildly emotional thrill ride.
At age 29, Conor Grennan quit his international public policy job with peripatetic intentions, ready to invest his “entire net worth on a trip around the world.” His first stop was a three-month volunteer stint in an orphanage in Nepal. He readily confesses that his lofty decision originated in earning bragging rights, as well as combating any forthcoming criticism about the “unrepentantly self-indulgent” nature of such a trip. He even formulated the perfect “selfless” response: “Well frankly, Mom, I didn’t peg you for somebody who hates orphans.”
Although Grennan learns that Nepal is in the middle of an endless civil war, he reasons that that’s just an exaggeration: “No organization was going to send volunteers into a conflict zone.” He knows next to nothing about the Nepalese language, history, customs, food. And, ironically, he lacks even “a single skill that … would be applicable to working with kids” when he arrives in November 2004 at Little Princes Children’s Home (named after Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince by its French founder) in Godavari, a bus ride – and a world – outside Nepal’s capital of Katmandu.
For three months, Grennan lives with, takes care of, teaches, and comes to deeply admire and love the 18 Little Princes – 16 boys and two girls. Eventually, he makes a shocking discovery: The children are not orphans. They are from the isolated northwest province of Humla – a stronghold of the Maoists, Nepal’s most extreme rebel army – and were taken from their parents by a human trafficker.
With a never-ending civil war, Maoist insurgents resorted to abducting even the youngest children to repopulate their depleted forces. Desperate parents sold whatever they could to pay virtual strangers who promised to protect and educate their children away from war. Too often these strangers were child traffickers, selling the boys as domestic slaves, shipping the girls to brothels; Little Princes’s founder had rescued the 18 children from a powerful trafficker virtually above the law.Grennan can’t imagine the horrors and tragedies these children – who are so quick to laugh and smile – must have survived. Soon they become “my” and “our” children. Their resilience, determination, and boundless love change the direction of Grennan’s life.
When he leaves for the rest of his world tour in January 2005 he promises to return. One year later, he eagerly lands back with his Little Princes for another three months. The joy of witnessing two of his Princes reunite with their mother is dampened by the discovery of seven additional trafficked, starving children in need of rescuing. But by now it’s April 2007 and Nepal is exploding in political turmoil. The country is not safe for foreigners and Grennan must leave. But before he goes he makes arrangements for the seven children to be moved to safety.
Three weeks later, while job hunting from his mother’s New Jersey home, Grennan receives “the e-mail … that changed everything”: “The seven children were gone.”
If you’ve never believed in miracles, this book could convince you otherwise. By September 2006 – with the matched determination of a fellow Little Princes volunteer, Farid Anit-Mansour – Grennan establishes his own nonprofit, Next Generation Nepal, named for “the lost generation of kids.” He raises enough funds to get back to Nepal and support his own children’s home. Not only will he search for his “seven needles in a haystack,” he will eventually risk life and limb to reunite his trafficked children with their faraway families. He’ll also somehow manage to find his soul mate, whom he woos, 21st-century e-style, from thousands of miles away.
Like the children he writes about, Grennan has boundless resilience and determination, in addition to self-effacing humor and tunnel-vision devotion. He’s also a good writer – considerably better than Greg Mortenson’s co-writer David Oliver Relin who penned runaway bestseller Three Cups of Tea. That’s promising news for Grennan’s beloved children, because a portion of the proceeds from the book’s hopefully spectacular sales will be donated to Next Generation Nepal.
Go buy multiple copies… invest in a miracle or two or more.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Memoir, .Nonfiction, Nepali
The Lives of Rain by Nathalie Handal, foreword by Carolyn Forché
I am the first to admit I missed having the poetry function installed when my limited brain got assembled. So when I DO actually GET poetry, I feel a true sense of gratitude to the writer, not to mention a few outbursts of gleeful accomplishment.
Nathalie Handal‘s three-part collection is a peripatetic wonder. She opens with “The Doors of Exile” – ” … stuck between two doors / waiting to leave to enter …” and takes the reader on a diasporic journey through language (Arabic, French, Spanish, in addition to English) by creating both an intimacy of the wanderer’s instant recognition of another traveler, and the displacement of a being other in an unfamiliar landscape both literal and imagined.
In Part I, Handal traverses the Middle East, giving voice to uprooted soul still searching in a lost and missing homeland. In Part II, she touches what seems to be a little piece of everywhere, from Marrakech to Paris to the Dalmatian Coast to Nueva York and briefly settles in Latin America where she visits relatives in “a little ciudad in México,” where the polylingual multicultural ask, “Habibti, que tal?”
Part III is a single, long piece which announces Handal’s journey’s end in the eight-part odyssey of “Amrika.” To mar Handal’s words with paraphrasing would be a literary crime … her finale clearly cannot, should not, will not to be distorted. Here, for now … Handal’s worldly peregrinations coalesce and settle:
” …I wear my jeans, tennis shoes,
walk Broadway, pass Columbia,
read Said and Twain,
wonder why we are obsessed with difference,
our need to change the other?
I wait for the noise to stop
but it never does
so I go to the tip of the Hudson River
recide a verse by Ibn Arabi
and between subway rides,
to that place I now call home,
listen to Abdel Halim and Nina Simone
hunt for the small things
I have lost inside of myself –
and at the corner of Bleeker and Mercer
through a window of faded Arabic letters
see a New York debke …
It is later than it was while ago
and I haven’t moved a bit,
my voice still breaking into tiny pieces
when I introduce myself to someone new
and imagine I have found my way home.”
Readers: Adult
Published: 2005 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Poetry, Palestinian American
By the Lake of Sleeping Children: The Secret Life of the Mexican Border by Luis Alberto Urrea, photographs by John Lueders-Booth
Once I opened this second volume in Luis Alberto Urrea‘s Border Trilogy, I simply couldn’t stop. So here’s the best thing I can say about Lake after reading his first border title, Across the Wire: Lake is more of the same … it’s another riveting must-read.
Urrea begins his “Introductory Matters” by debunking an American myth: ”In spite of what the anti-immigration proponents will tell you, Tijuana is NOT “a teeming staging area for a massive assault on America, [and] you might be surprised at how many people have no intention of ever crossing the border,” he insists. “No matter what anyone tells you, a population of more than a million people, living in one of the top money-making cities in Mexico, and the most visited city, and the most reviled city, and the most Disneyfied city, are not going to crunch through the fabulous fence we have erected. They aren’t going anywhere.”
Urrea reports how “young Mexican intellectuals with a slightly revolutionary bent have coined a pet name for Tijuana. They call it Palestijuas, Tijuana-Palestine.” The resemblance does not go unnoticed: the looming fence, the circling helicopters, the hordes of cramped people on one side, the threat of armed Border Patrols on the other. Even the land – as Tijuana’s citizens see it from thousands of miles away on salvaged televisions running on diverted electricity – is cause for “amazed” recognition: “the West Bank! Why, it looks exactly like Tijuana,” the crowds exclaim.
Amidst these teeming multitudes, Urrea shares the often unbearable stories of those who stay: “It’s a forum for the voiceless,” he describes his book, the fulfillment of a promise he made to a garbage dump dweller who insisted, “‘And nobody will ever know that I lived. So tell them about me. Tell them I was here.’”
Here the body count is gruesome … and high. Here Urrea exposes the sudden appearance of ‘a lake of sleeping children’ after a spontaneous flood, the tragic fate of four young boys deserted overnight by their parents, a disturbing glimpse into a less-than-well-run orphanage, and a heartfelt introduction to a beer-drinking nun who isn’t above ignoring ridiculous laws in order to protect orphan children. His most unforgettable piece examines 24 wrenching hours in the lives of three dump families trying to survive another day.
Urrea has a whole chapter to teach you how to curse, Tijuana style. He doesn’t flinch (although he warns you in case you might flinch, or worse …) when he recounts some of the mind-boggling horrors he’s witnessed against innocent animals; that chapter, “The Bald Monkey and Other Atrocities,” when first published in a newspaper, earned him not a few death threats. Ironic the lengths strangers will go to to express rage at abused animals … and yet what about the children … and the people …?
Once again, as in Wire, Urrea openly, honestly presents the overlooked humanity of voiceless lives … once more, his writing demands humane consideration and unflinching attention. You, we, all of us … should not, must not turn away.
Readers: Adult
Published: 1996 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Memoir, .Nonfiction, Hapa, Latino/a
This Child, Every Child: A Book about the World’s Children by David J. Smith, illustrated by Shelagh Armstrong
The award-winning team that brought you the fascinating bite-sized statistics of If America Were a Village and If the World Were a Village delves into the lives of children all around the world. The statistics here might surprise you (“children make up about one-third of the world’s population”) and make you think (27 of the 30 countries with the lowest percentage of children are in Europe; 25 of the 30 highest-percentage countries are in Africa). The numbers will certainly disturb you (“nearly 80 million children do not go to school” and “nearly 220 million children between the ages of 5 and 17 work at full-time jobs”) while others will break your heart (over 100 million of the world’s children are homeless).
Globe-trotting educational consultant David J. Smith uses the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child to “explore the world’s children – where they live, how they live, and what their families and lives are like.” [Only two countries did not agree to these fundamental rights for children: Somalia because they don't have a government able to give approval, and our own United States, although apparently, formal approval is expected "soon" – uh, what's taking so long??!!]
From home to school, health to gender inequality, work to play, war to the children’s future, Smith uses actual Articles from the UN Rights to show how today’s children are faring: “Children do not choose to be exploited, to be forced to work or to fight in wars, to be separated from family and friends or to lose their homes, their health, property, security and safety, and yet millions of children around the world are routinely denied their basic rights.”
Smith enhances his staggering statistics with the imagined lives of individual children. He urges readers, “As you read, look for connections,” as he introduces Ada of Niger who is lucky to go to school, Ystad of Sweden who is an only child while Mamadou of Mali is one of six, Ling of Hong Kong who lives on a houseboat, Hakim of Ethiopia whose village has just one flushing toilet, Chun Hei of Korea who was adopted by an American couple, Sara of India who cannot go to school like her brother but is already engaged to married at just age 9, and so many more.
This Child is the newest addition to Kids Can Press‘ thoughtful CitizenKid series – ”A collection of books that inform children about the world and inspire them to be better global citizens.” The book is also in generous cahoots with ONEXONE, donating a portion of the book’s sales to support “a range of programs that address children’s fundamental needs for clean water, health care, education, play and adequate food.”
Think how easy this (very) creative team has made it for anyone, everyone to help … just by buying this book! What a worthy investment: your child, this book can nurture that child, every child, and make good change happen, one story at a time.
Readers: All
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border by Luis Alberto Urrea, photographs by John Lueders-Booth
Thanks to a sudden snowstorm and ensuing power outage, I had every excuse to strap on my headband flashlight and read the first of Luis Alberto Urrea‘s Border Trilogy without pause. Given the sheer gawk-factor of these pages, any excuses were negligible: This is definitely a riveting, shocking must-read. Realizing that the book was published almost two decades old (!) and not nearly enough has changed is the biggest jaw-dropping, head-shaking, gawk-inducer of all.
Born in Tijuana just south of the California/Mexico border – Urrea is hapa: Mexican on his father’s side and U.S.-American on his mother’s side – Urrea never really left, even when living elsewhere. Check his blog: his entry for December 8th, 2010 has him back in Tijuana, reliving an experience almost straight out of Across the Wire. “Tijuana is Mexico’s cast-off child,” Urrea writes of his birthplace, where the tragedies, brutal crimes, murders, addictions, and the unimaginably difficult everyday lives in this collection take place.
In 1978, Urrea met “a remarkable preacher known as Pastor Von,” a 30-year-veteran of “slogging through the Borderlands mud”; this book is simply dedicated “For Von.” Into the bottomless depths of Tijuana’s poverty, Urrea followed Von to the garbage dumps and shanty villages, bearing food, water, medicine, building materials, and sometimes just a willingness to listen.
In the dumps, the Cheese Lady drags him to meet a newly arrived woman named Jesus and her large family, whose 13-year-old daughter must hide in the family shack as howling men circle trying to “break though the doors and walls to get to her.” He meets Pacha, a young mother of too many who loses another child, and Mrs. Serrano, a woman literally desiccated from lack of food and water, who miraculously delivers a healthy baby.
He meets and loses Negra, a little girl who will haunt him for years. He recalls the reed-thin, glue-sniffing addicts, a fire-blinded kitten whose gratitude lasts through its final purr, the careless inhumanity of a Tijuana policeman who insists he’s “‘a cop, not a monster,’” and his father’s own mysterious and violent death. He is remarkable in his ability to be unflinching at the horrors he witnesses, and yet never so distanced as to ever not be achingly, powerfully humane.
With the latest round of whose-side-of-the-border-are-you-on-headlines, sharing Urrea’s memories couldn’t be more timely. Beyond the “ambassadors of poverty” – as Urrea refers to scourges like lice and scabies, neverending diseases from diarrhea to chronic hernia, even madness and “‘demon possession’” – Urrea captures life just 20 minutes from and yet clearly a whole world away from San Diego. He repeatedly reminds us that these are our neighbors, no matter how easy to ignore and forget, invisible from San Diego’s sparkling skyline, which for most of the bordertown’s survivors remains forever out of reach.
Readers: Adult
Published: 1993 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Memoir, .Nonfiction, Hapa, Latino/a
Facebook
Twitter
Subscribe to RSS
