Less frivolous

Today at Spero News, two articles (among others) caught my eye. One describes the sickening, but horrifically un-extraordinary, violence inflicted on a young girl, a rape victim in Guatemala. "Rape victim" doesn't even begin to cover it. So lovely to be reminded that there are women even worse off than Mukhtaran Bibi (although her case is frightening enough, and getting more so).

The other article is about China's plans for dealing with the seemingly inevitable electric-power shortages it will encounter during the hot summer. A Singaporean executive made the following comment, which ordinarily would seem fairly reasonable to me, but now it strikes a horrible chord:

"There's always a concern that if the government introduces some sort of dramatic economic change, such as raising power prices across the board, that that will raise questions about the stability of the government," Feer said.

"How much will people accept and how much can people afford to pay before they will have been pushed too far?"

How much, indeed? And how much can women be made to pay for being women, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or related to the wrong people? And, of course, this sort of violence isn't restricted to the fairer sex. How long can men be made to pay for being of the wrong family, or any of the rest of it?

Thank goodness there are people responding with much better solutions than my current slackjawed horror. Take, for example, one of nature's more awful injuries, the obstetric fistula. A group of beautiful, talented women, led by a particularly beautiful and talented surgeon Mamitu Gashe, are helping dozens of others recover from these injuries and regain their lives. Ms. Mamitu herself has only just begun to learn to read, but she has been supplying practical training for other surgeons for years.

Update: By the way, thanks to the sidebar headlines at Feminist Mormon Housewives and to Julie D. at Happy Catholic for pointing me in the direction of all these stories.