Today in a coffee shop, alone and enjoying cup of caffeine and a moment before work started, I felt something that I hope to remember and feel on a more regular basis.
Extreme gratitude and humble thanks.
Not for a good-hair day, or a particularly well-made coffee, pay day or even spending time with friends.
But for being alive and unoppressed.
For not being in fear when I walk the streets.
For being able to choose who I may one day marry. Or if I will at all.
For the fact that Australian women, while sometimes underpaid and not yet enjoying complete equality, are not discriminated against en masse.
This has all been spurred on by the fact that I’m reading A Thousand Splendid Suns…and today the story got real.
For those who have not read it, I won’t describe events here…suffice to say that being a woman in Afghanistan under Taliban rule was akin to being a cockroach in any modern home.
That a society would discriminate and persecute another group has not been what’s shocked me about this book. Of course, that such discrimination exists is beyond me…but as it has been a recurring theme in human history, it’s not a new concept. Rather, the shock has come from the fact that such harsh persecution would be inflicted against 50% of the population, in this case, against women. What benefit can be gained from reducing half the population to the status of house rats, unable to access health services, think, fend for, or express themselves in any possible way?
I was amazed in Hosseini’s The Kite Runner at the descriptions of Afghanistan pre-turmoil. A place where fields teemed with crops, bowls with dates, and people lived. The conflicts began when I was very small and have continued until so recently, that my image of Afghanistan was never wide enough to encompass the notion that it could ever have been a place nearing normalcy. And through the eyes of the media during the past years, I never grasped how life would have been for women, children, husbands and families.
The brilliance and atrocities the human race is capable of are astounding.
But I live in Australia. I’ll be able to direct my own life and I am not far off in supposing that my greatest concerns will be earning enough to afford to collect the adventures I hope to.
And today, I remembered that this is a pretty awesome situation to be in.
Happy.
