An extradordinary post on Blue Girl, Red State describes the experience of a volunteer aid worker in Darfur, who posts on Kevin Drum’s blog under the name “Shameless Hussy.”
What she dealt with daily goes beyond the pale…beyond the nightmares of most people; Children with all four limbs hacked off right above the knee or below the elbow. Twelve year olds who died in childbirth after being gang-raped by the Janjaweed. Women who gave birth to rape-babies who were then cast out by their families for shaming the family name, leaving only one avenue of survival for themselves and their children after the camps: Prostitution.
What is fucking her up is the desperation, and the fact that she worked herself to death for over a month, and she still didn’t really save anyone. Now that she’s gone, it’s like she was never there. Even the ones she helped keep alive, she didn’t save. You try dealing with that reality.
And women are the preponderance of victims. Men do not leave the villages to go to the countryside to gather firewood and other necessary items of sustenance. Women venture out, even though every time they leave their villages, they are at horrific risk of being beaten and raped and disfigured. The reason they go instead of the men? The women are only attacked, the men are killed.
Blue Girl’s posts has more details, and also a number of links if you’d like to donate money – if you leave a post there, Blue Girl will make sure Shameless Hussy finds out about your donation.
The absolute moral bankruptcy of this world…there are no words. Thanks for the link.
In some parts of the world, the worst thing that can happen to you is to be born a girl.
Horrifying, just horrifying. Here in the comfort of western civ, it is very easy to forget how abysmally low the baseline for human behavior is.
Here in the comfort of western civ, it is very easy to forget how abysmally low the baseline for human behavior is.
Perhaps for some people it is.
Isn’t it Darfur? (Your header says “Dalfur”.)