■"He Ain't Heavy . . .: One family's choices—and ours," op-ed by Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times, 20 October 2004, p. A27.
Vonne Mei Ling Barnett, named Zou Yong Ling by her orphanage in Yongfeng, Jiangxi China, probably never would have been born if her mother had had access to an ultrasound, the preferred way of determining a fetus' sex in the provinces of both China and India. But she must have avoided that fate, and given the escape value of international adoption, she slept in my arms last night (bit of head butter, she).
I think of kids throughout the Gap every time I hold my fourth child, my second daughter, my little brown-eyed girl.
You want to know why everyone should feel bad about what's going on in Darfur Sudan right now? Read Nick Kristof's latest appeal to our collective conscience:
Allow me to introduce Abdelrahim Khamis Ghani and his little brother Muhammad . . . in their mostly abandoned Darfur village, where the murderous Janjaweed militia, backed by the Sudanese government, has already killed seven members of their family. The boys have been hiding for months here in the war zone, hungry and frightened and hunted like wild beasts . . .
For Abdelrahim's family members, the choice is whether to let adults and older siblings try to hike to safety in Chad—it's a six-day walk. They could leave one adult behind to try to keep Abdelrahim and Muhammad alive. Or should the whole family stay, putting more people at risk but increasing the change that the boys can be saved?
The family has elected for now to stay here together, surviving by gathering wild seeds to eat. Apart from starvation, the danger is that the Janjaweed or Sudanese troops will return to kill the men and rape and disfigure—and sometimes kill—the women and girls.
Of course, it's that killing pattern that leaves young boys orphaned and abandoned throughout Darfur. The men are killed, the females used up, and the boys left to wander and survive like wild animals.
When I talk about my Sys Admin forces working the Gap, I think of boys like these deserving a better life. You can call it imperialism, or a global police state or anything you like.
I really don't care.
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