Unconditional love


I was reading an article (somewhat bizarrely, at KansasCity.com) about one of the less publicised killers in Dakar, and it got me thinking about work and desperation and hunger and ignorance and unconditional love.

And how, for good or evil, we are all linked together.

"First, it took the animals. Goats fell silent and refused to stand up. Chickens died in handfuls, then en masse. Street dogs disappeared.

Then it took the children. Toddlers stopped talking and their legs gave out. Women birthed stillborns. Infants withered and died. Some said the houses were cursed. Others said the families were cursed."

As people all over the developed world become aware of issues of global warming and sustainability, and as we learn to "do the right thing" and recycle, there are unintended consequences. I've handed in my share of old car batteries, but after reading this story, I'm wondering how I may have contributed to this tragedy.

I thought of the mothers who carried that lead-laden ground back to their houses to sift. It must have seemed like a dream come true: money from the ground, and no need to leave the children alone while they worked.

I wonder if they would have taken the chance if they had been made aware of the risks? Somehow I think they may have. On the one hand there is that universal belief that bad things happen to other people. On the other, if you are desperate and hungry, or your children are, you'll do anything.

Imagine the terrible choice faced by parents in Zimbabwe watching their children die of thirst or risking their lives with untreated water scooped from roadside puddles?

Actually, it doesn't take much to imagine it. I know the righteous anger I feel if I think anyone has said anything out of place to one of my sons, or hasn't given them the recognition they deserve. I know how I feel when they have hassles at work, or struggle to find jobs, and I know that I would do and give absolutely anything to see them both happy and fulfilled.

And if it came to their survival? I'd be right there, sifting the lead.

Comments

Lali Fufu said…
That's because you're a great mother! =) The boys are lucky to have a parent like you. I just read the link.. it's horrible. Reminds me the West dumping all their old computers in Kenya.. that's caused a lot of death and tragedy as well.
6 January 2009 at 16:08
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

signs on the way

Image
We saw some fun signs while we were away. Like this one at Letaba Camp in the Kruger Park: here's what a sausage fruit looks like, in case you were wondering. and this one at the God's Window lookout at the Blyde River Canyon was my favourite:
Read more

the writer formerly known as...

Twenty years after I was born a Brooks, I became a Wilson in one of those happy-ever-after fantasies that didn't quite work out the way I had planned. But Wilson was a nice name, and eminently preferable to Brooks (which in Afrikaans means underpants or knickers and led to horrible teasing at school) and I quite enjoyed it. It was one of those anonymous names that everyone could spell and I liked the fact that it was totally normal at first look, but had a secret history. The great grandfather of the Mr Wilson I married had emigrated from somewhere near Moscow to the US and like so many others with unpronouncable or "difficult" names (I think it was Tobinofsky) he was given another one. One of the legends is that Wilson was chosen from the phone book, another is that he particularly admired a Wilson (couldn't have been Harold). So, for the next 25 years or so, I built my name and reputation as the journalist Lynne Wilson ... until I met and married my new happy-ever-a
Read more

Like faded flowers, thrown away: Steve Biko and the Boer women

Image
A Boer woman with her dead child, the last of her children to die, photographed by Emily Hobhouse The women are wonderful. They cry very little and never complain. The very magnitude of their sufferings, their indignities, loss and anxiety seems to lift them beyond tears… only when it cuts afresh at them through their children do their feelings flash out. Some people in town still assert that the Camp is a haven of bliss. I was at the camp to-day, and just in one little corner this is the sort of thing I found – The nurse, underfed and overworked, just sinking on to her bed, hardly able to hold herself up, after coping with some thirty typhoid and other patients, with only the untrained help of two Boer girls–cooking as well as nursing to do herself. Next tent, a six months’ baby gasping its life out on is mother’s knee. Two or three others drooping sick in that tent. Next, a girl of twenty-one lay dying on a stretcher. The father, a big, gentle Boer kneeling beside her; while,
Read more