I've Been Shot!!

I got my IRB proposal turned in today, and I've been shot!! Twice. In the arm. With influenza and hepatitis A. I also get to take typhoid pills for the next week. Woohoo! The joys of international travel.

As I was reading Cry, the Beloved Country this week, I made it through the part where Kumalo meets the mother of his coming grandchild for the first time. One line clunked me on the head about how the girl didn't expect anything from her seventy years of life, and that her lot in life was just to be used and abused by men and then left to take care of the children that result. I know a lot of people here in the states where AIDS is not really a problem feel that most people who have AIDS deserve it. I will admit, I used to be one of them. But what I didn't understand and what most people who feel that way don't understand, is that social expectations are not the same in South Africa as they are here. Women do not have the same rights in South Africa that they have in the United States. They live in a place where many of them can reasonably expect to live 70 miserable years used and abused and hung out to dry. And that is not fair. Nobody deserves to have to suffer such a terrible fate because of someone else's bad choices, especially not on such a wide and accepted basis. This is not ok, and needs to be changed.

I hope that while I am in South Africa people don't feel like I am pushing this opinion on them, but I do hope my beliefs are apparent in the way I treat others. This goes back to serving instead of helping. I hope that as I serve people with my whole self, I will be able to leave them better than I found them and empower them to expect more from their lives than 70 miserable years to endure and then gladly leave behind.