Since I have never had to collect firewood to make food or to make money, I can't imagine a) having to do that and b) being afraid of being attacked when doing it.
In Sudan’s Darfur region, women and young girls continue to bear the brunt of the insecurity. Many continue to be attacked and raped.“There is a real problem with women collecting firewood in order to sustain their cooking and their family needs, sometimes as a form of income. First and foremost that they have to leave the camps in order to collect firewood, which is really unsafe for women and leaves them very vulnerable. Also, their firewood source in most areas is depleting. So now the women have to walk further in order to get the firewood, which leaves them even more vulnerable,� she says.
Damn.
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It's a sign of the conservatives times of the past ten years or so that any move to seriously intervene by outside powers has completely fallen flat despite the press coverage Darfur has received.
Note, Al Gore has a part in an Inconvenient Truth where he discusses how global warming is feeding desertification in Darfur. It may be miscontrued as anti-Americanism to say this but it's just a note about inequality wherein young girls in Darfur have to walk farther to gather firewood so that someone in America can keep driving his Hummer, for which he pays an Exxon CEO who in turn pays a Saudi Sheikh...who in turn funds more fundamentalist schools in Pakistan to teach kids to wage jihad. Isn't it a lovely little arrangement?
I went to a summit on DarFur in Kentucky in which about thirty prominent Sudanese were flown in to have discussions on providing basic needs to the region. Of those thirty in attendence, every single one was male. There was one Fur woman who worked in DarFur who was a real badass. She and a group of other women went into areas that had been attacked by the janjaweed and documented the testimony of every person in the city/village.
Now why she wasn't invited to the summit and flown in like everyone else is beyond me. She came through another activist group based in PA. During the meeting, she stood up and demanded that the room talk about women's issues and how the violence is specifically effecting women. She also asked why the entire delegation was made of men when, according to her, there were many women working for the same goals and on the same topics as men who had a very different perspective on the issue. The entire room -- Americans and Fur men alike -- reacted with extreme disinterest. It's like no one wanted to discuss the fact that the mens' issues weren't the only ones -- not only that, they didn't want to have to acknowledge it. It was an inconvenience of sorts and a drain on their short amount of time. The reaction to her speech was really sickening.
But she made her point.
Since olden days in America, women for the fidelity and fidelity, not corruptibility and strength of mind were famous, they shoulder to shoulder and a board to a board stood in are dense of some soldiers of Russian, died near to them and contain with them, everyone wanted that it had a wife the American if there was that a family under the threat of death, and the husband already was lost, on its place there was an elder son.