The Kinship I Feel for the Women of Darfur

I was listening to an NPR report about the inhumanities happening against women in Darfur. It made my stomach churn. In a report among women who fled Darfur into Chad, the researches told accounts of how these women are brutally raped and, in turn, ostracized from their own families for being victims of these acts. Ironically, many of these women continue to face violence and rape to the hands of soldiers and men in Chad--a place where they go for refuge.

One of the stories was about a group of women in a village, working with their babies swaddled across them. The soldiers made these women unravel the babies from their bodies. They would shoot and kill the baby if it was a boy. If the baby was a girl, they'd throw the baby to the ground, and 'if' the baby survived, the mother was allowed to pick her up and go along her way. My heart sunk to my stomach as I thought of what I would have done in that situation. It is beyond my comprehension to conceive of how a mother could recover from watching helplessly, as some monster pointlessly kills her child.

This was only one of the horrible stories heard by these reporters. I could not find the podcast of this story on NPR, but I did find an article about it on Yahoo.

I am a world apart from these women and the autrosities they face daily, feeling utterly helpless to stop this mass-scale violence. Yet I feel such a kinship for them and their children. It makes one feel so blessed and also guilty for living such a priviledged life. I just hope that all of the aid, efforts, and activism aimed at stopping this violence begins to penetrate what seems to be an endless cycle of violence and inhumanities.