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Strollerderby
In Afghanistan, boys have much more freedom than girls
If you think it’s challenging to raise girls in this country, you might spare a thought for parents of daughters in Afghanistan, where giving birth to a daughter, rather than a son, is — sadly, terribly, horribly — considered a failure on her parents’ part, and where girls are deprived of many of the freedoms granted to boys.
A fascinating piece in Tuesday’s New York Times examines a startling practice that has grown out of this sad state of affairs: parents who dress their girls as boys, passing them off as sons for years until they reach puberty. Continue reading »
“Don’t you think it’s a little irresponsible to be pregnant in a war zone?” an intelligence officer asked Elizabeth Rubin as they rode along in the black Afghanistan night in the back of a Humvee. Ironically, just a moment earlier he’d asked her — if they ran into trouble — to load the bullets into the machine gun.
Rubin balked. Four months pregnant, she hadn’t disclosed her pregnancy to anyone. That move gave her a few more precious months out in the field, but it also earned her a brisk refusal of her next embed assignment by a female colonel.
“How could a woman, particularly in the military, not understand why I would have kept my pregnancy to myself?” Rubin writes in an article for the Guardian. “Is it true that the toughest adversary for women is still other women?”
So begins her intriguing story, one that starts with her asking her doctor for pregnancy-safe antibiotics to take to Afghanistan with her and follows her to a middle of the night raid where several of the men she traveled with for two months are killed. And one that ends with her realizing that though all along she’d though a baby would put an end to the adventure in her life, the baby really was the adventure she’d wanted all along.
No matter how loyal one is to the military, there’s not a parent alive who can’t sympathize with the predicament of Alexis Hutchinson, a 21-year-old single mother and army cook who refused to deploy to Afghanistan because she had no one to care for her son. Hutchinson is currently confined to Hunter Army Field in Georgia and may face criminal charges, depending on what the Army’s investigators turn up. Continue reading »
Want to be a suicide bomber when you grow up? Why wait? The Taliban is now recruiting kids as young as 5 to fight. Some are being trained for suicide missions.
Last week a teenager between the ages of 12 and 14 blew himself up in a busy square, killing at least 40 people. Earlier this year, a 6-year-old approached a group of American soldiers wearing a suicide vest armed with explosives. The boy could not remember what he was supposed to do with the bombs, and was disarmed. Continue reading »
In case you (like me) missed last night’s PBS documentary about the difficulties many children face in getting a basic education, Jezebel has a great synopsis, with clips, that is well worth a read. Time for School is a 12-year documentary project that follows seven children from around the world as they struggle to complete their studies; the third episode, which follows an Aghan teenager, aired last night and will continue on September 12. Continue reading »
Joslyn Gray 
Amber Doty 
Julianna Miner 
Monica Bielanko 
Sierra Black 
Meredith Carroll 
Carolyn Castiglia 
Sunny Chanel 
Madeline Holler 
Wendy Michaels 
Rebecca Odes 
Danielle Smith 
Danielle Sullivan 
Katherine Stone 
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