In these chapters, author Warren St. John writes how events over one hundred years in the past affect the lives of people today. Tribal rivalries are one of the biggest obstacles in the development of African countries. Just like on the American continent before the arrival of Europeans, Africa was comprised of hundreds of tribes. Each tribe had an area that they controlled and neighboring tribes, with whom, they competed with for land and resources. Over the course of time and space, these tribes evolved into separate and distinct ethnicities. An ethnicity is more than race. Race is a person's genetic/biological make up. It is an important part of identity but unlike places like North America and Europe where there is great racial diversity, Africa has very subtle racial differences. Ethnicity is a what divides people there. Language and religion are the two main elements of ethnicity. Scholars disagree over exactly how many languages there are in Africa. It is safe to say that there are over 1,000 separate languages and 7,000 dialects. Later this year you will learn more about how languages change, but suffice it to say that if culture is a body, language is the blood. People can't form a sense of national identity (American, Mexican, French) unless they understand each other. It is hard to understand a person if you don't speak the same language.
Europeans came to Africa for the same reasons they went to the Americas: god, glory and gold (but mostly gold or resources). Since natural resources was their main goal, European countries rushed to carve out boundaries that would secure these resources for themselves and water transportation routes to get those resources to the ocean where they could be transported back to Europe. Tribal boundaries were not taken into consideration. If they were tribes like the Tutsi and Hutu would not have ended up fighting for control over Rwanda (have you seen the movie Hotel Rwanda?), Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda. Chapter 7 tells the story of Generose Ntwari (mother of Bienvenue), a Tutsi like Paula Balegamite who was forced to flee when, in 1993, a democratically elected leader was assisinated, inciting genocide by Hutus against Tutsis. In the course of one year 100,000 people died. In all 300,000 lost their lives with causing millions like Generose to flee to Tanzania and Mozambique.
The books Things Fall Apart and Heart of Darkness were written to detail the problems that resulted from European rule of Africa. Why is Europe, which also had a history of conflict is now peaceful because the boundaries of almost all European countries are now based on language and Ethnicity rather than on artificial boundaries. The exception is the Balkan Peninsula in southern Europe where fighting also occurred over control over areas by competing ethnic groups.
Outcasts United talks about how over one hundred years after Belgium's colonization of the Congo Basin, Paula Belagamite had to leave the country with her children while her husband was in prison for being a member of the minority Tutsi tribe. In 1884, King Leopold created the Congo Free State as a corporation in order to exploit the Congo Basin for its rubber, ivory and other resources. After enslaving the people and killing between 5 and 10 million people for refusing to work, attempting to escape or simply working them to death he was forced to yield the colony to the state of Belgium. While I said earlier that, in Africa, race was not as important as ethnicity, Europeans who didn't understand the ethnic differences between tribes, used race to bestow favor upon the Tutsi tribe whose skin was lighter and features more narrow than the more numerous Hutu tribe. The Tutsi, were given positions of power and authority to help the Belgians rule.
In the blog post for chapter 3, I talked about how supranationalism is an important movement among countries to cooperate with each other in solving problems. I cited the United Nations as an example. An opposite force is also occurring around the world. It is called devolution. Devolution is the break up of large regions into smaller ones. There are many reasons why a country will break up into smaller political bodies. For Belgium in Africa, it was part of a larger movement of European countries to give colonies their independence. 1960 was actually quite late for Belgium to give up rule. In countries where there is a lot of ethnic diversity, fighting usually occurs when different ethnic groups compete for control of land. I explained above how this happened in southern Europe. It also happened in India after the British left and it continues in Iraq after the U.S. removed Saddam Hussein from power.
So now you understand that the Tutsi who were favored by the Belgians now found themselves persecuted by rulers like Joseph Mobutu and Laurent Kabila.
As stated in the book, dictators often incite ethnic conflict to distract people from the corruption that is rampant within their governments. Mobutu owned yachts, jets and mansions. He diverted millions of dollars into Swiss banks. He used the military to scare civilians into submission. He was able to use these tactics to keep control. It was this country the he renamed Zaire, where the famous fight between Muhammed Ali and George Foreman known as "The Rumble in the Jungle" took place. Ultimately, enough people were unhappy with his rule and in 1996 he was overthrown by Laurent Kabila and the country was renamed The Democratic Republic of the Congo. This change did not however, lead to peace. It was the turmoil following Kabila's assasination and the retribution sought by his son that got Paula Balegamite's husband thrown into prison and cause her to flee the country for safety. The war known as the second Congo war is also refered to as the African World War because it involved nine African nations, resulting in more deaths (6 million) since World War II. Millions of refugees also fled the countries where conflict erupted.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Monday, July 30, 2012
Outcasts United: Chapter 3
Chapter 3 of Outcasts United explains many of the factors that brought so many refugees to the small town of Clarkston, Georgia. I will review some of the factors explained in the book and explain some new concepts as explained from a human geography perspective.
explains the change in Clarkston from a small town of 7,200 mostly white residents to a muli-ethnic community with over one-third of the population being foriegn born, represented by over 50 different nationalities. Specifically, the confluence of improvements in transportation and cheap housing are responsible for the changes. Transportation of all types has led to increasing urbanization of the United States. First, in the 1948 the Federal Aid Highway Act created the freeways such as I-15, I-80 and I-84 that run, in most cases,run border to border from north to south and east to west. This freeway system made it possible for Americans to live further away from where they worked but get to their jobs relatively quickly. This change is shown in the Disney movie Cars. The movie laments the demise of small towns in the U.S. that were connected by state roads. The most famous of these was Route 66. Route 66 was a lot like our own Highway 40 that runs through main street in Heber City and connects to I-80. Interstate highways bypassed these small towns, thereby taking much needed business away from small towns. As many small towns shrank in size, suburbs popped up all around big cities. The ability to drive 65 miles per hour (or faster) with no required stops allowed people to live fifty or sixty ( in my wife's case 70 miles) from where they work. Thus, places like Clarkston that are only 13 miles from Atlanta became destinations for people who worked in Atlanta but wanted to live in a smaller community. Ironically, it was the airplane and communications that had the biggest impact on Atlanta. In the 1970's Atlanta became an international airport. International airports are also important hubs for connecting to domestic flights (Salt Lake City is also an important hub. Althogh it is not mentioned in the book, in the 1980's Ted Turner established a communications/media company that includes CNN and TNT in Atlanta.
Both transportation and communications are basic industries. A basic industry is one that provides jobs for people who make something or provide a service for people who don't live in the area where they live. The more basic industries a place has, the more jobs are created. People move to these places for these jobs. All of these new people create a demand for more new services in these places. Services such as hospitals, schools, gas stations, restaurants etc. These jobs are called non-basic industries because they are dependent on some basic industry. Since Atlanta was adding basic industries, it also created a lot of jobs in non-basic industries. Thus, the population grew.
As more people moved to Atlanta, the population spread further and further out from Atlanta. Places that were formerly part of a county became incorporated as independent cities. You can see this around Salt Lake City. When we think of Salt Lake City, we usually think of the whole valley from the oil refineries in the north end of the valley, to the state prison at the south end of the valley and from Kennecott Copper in the west to the Wasatch Mountains on the east. Actually, Salt Lake City is much smaller than that. The valley just described includes places like Draper, Sandy, Murray, Holiday, West Jordan, West Valley, Magna, North Salt Lake and more. These were all once part of Salt Lake County. A place usually chooses to incorporate to keep their tax dollars close to home rather than being used in other parts of the county. Someday, maybe the resdients east of Heber City, the entire area east of Mill Road will want to incorporate as a separate city so that their tax dollars will work to create a separate police, fire, water and parks district that will serve just the people on the east half of the valley rather than go to residents of Wallsberg, Jordanelle, Daniel, Charleston and other parts of Wasatch County. Even though it is not an example of the incorporation of a city, Park City created a school district separate from the rest of Summit County so that their tax dollars would only go to Park City schools instead of students in Kamas, Oakley and Coalville. The process that I just described happened over and over again in the Altanta metropolitan area.
Clarkston was already incorporated as a city before all the growth started in Atlanta. Originally it was a place where middle class whites moved to get away from the hustle and bustle of Atlanta. When a beltway (a freeway that goes around the outside of the city) was added around Atlanta (simialr to I-215) this created more growth around the off-ramps of the belt-way. These new cities (called edge cities) were further out from Atlanta than Clarkston. As these suburbs appeared, white middle-class residents with cars moved further out from Atlanta, leaving vacancies in homes and apartment buildings that needed to be filled. The move of middle and upper middle-class whites is known as "white flight." Landlords who wanted to fill these vacancies dropped rents to make them more affordable but also cut the money they formerly spent on maintainence. This brought in low-income minorities to Clarkston. The reduction in maintainence led to the deterioration of the apartments. This is a simple explanation of urban decay (aka ghettoization).
At this point, there still weren't many refugees in Clarkston. While cheap rent was something that international organizations that found homes for refugees looked for places they could afford, they also needed to be able to get to work without a car. As mentioned in the book, refugees were given enough money to get started in a new place. After that, they were on their own. They almost never had enough money for a car. So, one of the factors that relief agencies looked for was easy access to cheap transportation into Atlanta's central business district where there were many jobs working as maids, cooks and janitors in hotels, restaurants and as workers in factories and agriculture. So, when MARTA made Clarkston the end of the rail line that connected the outlying area to Atlanta, this was the factor that made Clarekston an ideal location for a refugee. Clarkston, is obviously not the only place the refugees are sent. Clarkston was one of several places in the Atlanta area where some 19,000 refugees were sent. There were obviously many other places around the U.S. and the world where refugees migrate. You may be aware that just recently, dozens of refugees from Myanmar (aka Burma) recently arrived in Heber from a refugee camp in Thailand where they had been living for many years.
Needless to say, refugees in far-away places such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Liberia, Congo, Burundi, Sudan, Somalia or Ethiopia have no idea about the best places to make a new start in a new country. None of this would have been possible without the assistance of international organizations. The increasing importance international organizations is covered in chapter 8 of our textbook. Any organization that works beyond the borders of any one country is called a supranational organization. The book talks a lot about how refugees begin the process of moving to a new country by applying for refugee status with the United Nations High Commisioner for Refugees. The United Nations is confederation of countries that seeks to solve many of the world's problems through the cooperation of its members. In the case of refugees, the United Nations will have representatives at refugee camps. People will apply for refugee status. The United Nations will verify that the person/family was indeed forced to leave their home and then work with member nations to get permission for them to enter their borders. The U.S. office of refugees is the organization that would approve the application and work with other organization to find a place for a refugee to live. The International Rescue Committee, World Relief and Lutheran Family Services are some of the non-profit organization mentioned in the book that help refugees get settled and offer support after they are established. Because of the many organizations involved in this process is the reason it could take so long from the time a family first arrived at a refugee camp until they actually made the move to a new country. People who work for these organizations are the ones that worked with the families described in this book. Without their help, all of the people in the book would either still be living in refugee camps or dead. As the world becomes increasingly globalized, the need for international organizations to help coordinate the efforts of countries, corporations and other supranational organizations working in nearly every aspect of human life immaginable will surely increase.
explains the change in Clarkston from a small town of 7,200 mostly white residents to a muli-ethnic community with over one-third of the population being foriegn born, represented by over 50 different nationalities. Specifically, the confluence of improvements in transportation and cheap housing are responsible for the changes. Transportation of all types has led to increasing urbanization of the United States. First, in the 1948 the Federal Aid Highway Act created the freeways such as I-15, I-80 and I-84 that run, in most cases,run border to border from north to south and east to west. This freeway system made it possible for Americans to live further away from where they worked but get to their jobs relatively quickly. This change is shown in the Disney movie Cars. The movie laments the demise of small towns in the U.S. that were connected by state roads. The most famous of these was Route 66. Route 66 was a lot like our own Highway 40 that runs through main street in Heber City and connects to I-80. Interstate highways bypassed these small towns, thereby taking much needed business away from small towns. As many small towns shrank in size, suburbs popped up all around big cities. The ability to drive 65 miles per hour (or faster) with no required stops allowed people to live fifty or sixty ( in my wife's case 70 miles) from where they work. Thus, places like Clarkston that are only 13 miles from Atlanta became destinations for people who worked in Atlanta but wanted to live in a smaller community. Ironically, it was the airplane and communications that had the biggest impact on Atlanta. In the 1970's Atlanta became an international airport. International airports are also important hubs for connecting to domestic flights (Salt Lake City is also an important hub. Althogh it is not mentioned in the book, in the 1980's Ted Turner established a communications/media company that includes CNN and TNT in Atlanta.
Both transportation and communications are basic industries. A basic industry is one that provides jobs for people who make something or provide a service for people who don't live in the area where they live. The more basic industries a place has, the more jobs are created. People move to these places for these jobs. All of these new people create a demand for more new services in these places. Services such as hospitals, schools, gas stations, restaurants etc. These jobs are called non-basic industries because they are dependent on some basic industry. Since Atlanta was adding basic industries, it also created a lot of jobs in non-basic industries. Thus, the population grew.
As more people moved to Atlanta, the population spread further and further out from Atlanta. Places that were formerly part of a county became incorporated as independent cities. You can see this around Salt Lake City. When we think of Salt Lake City, we usually think of the whole valley from the oil refineries in the north end of the valley, to the state prison at the south end of the valley and from Kennecott Copper in the west to the Wasatch Mountains on the east. Actually, Salt Lake City is much smaller than that. The valley just described includes places like Draper, Sandy, Murray, Holiday, West Jordan, West Valley, Magna, North Salt Lake and more. These were all once part of Salt Lake County. A place usually chooses to incorporate to keep their tax dollars close to home rather than being used in other parts of the county. Someday, maybe the resdients east of Heber City, the entire area east of Mill Road will want to incorporate as a separate city so that their tax dollars will work to create a separate police, fire, water and parks district that will serve just the people on the east half of the valley rather than go to residents of Wallsberg, Jordanelle, Daniel, Charleston and other parts of Wasatch County. Even though it is not an example of the incorporation of a city, Park City created a school district separate from the rest of Summit County so that their tax dollars would only go to Park City schools instead of students in Kamas, Oakley and Coalville. The process that I just described happened over and over again in the Altanta metropolitan area.
Clarkston was already incorporated as a city before all the growth started in Atlanta. Originally it was a place where middle class whites moved to get away from the hustle and bustle of Atlanta. When a beltway (a freeway that goes around the outside of the city) was added around Atlanta (simialr to I-215) this created more growth around the off-ramps of the belt-way. These new cities (called edge cities) were further out from Atlanta than Clarkston. As these suburbs appeared, white middle-class residents with cars moved further out from Atlanta, leaving vacancies in homes and apartment buildings that needed to be filled. The move of middle and upper middle-class whites is known as "white flight." Landlords who wanted to fill these vacancies dropped rents to make them more affordable but also cut the money they formerly spent on maintainence. This brought in low-income minorities to Clarkston. The reduction in maintainence led to the deterioration of the apartments. This is a simple explanation of urban decay (aka ghettoization).
At this point, there still weren't many refugees in Clarkston. While cheap rent was something that international organizations that found homes for refugees looked for places they could afford, they also needed to be able to get to work without a car. As mentioned in the book, refugees were given enough money to get started in a new place. After that, they were on their own. They almost never had enough money for a car. So, one of the factors that relief agencies looked for was easy access to cheap transportation into Atlanta's central business district where there were many jobs working as maids, cooks and janitors in hotels, restaurants and as workers in factories and agriculture. So, when MARTA made Clarkston the end of the rail line that connected the outlying area to Atlanta, this was the factor that made Clarekston an ideal location for a refugee. Clarkston, is obviously not the only place the refugees are sent. Clarkston was one of several places in the Atlanta area where some 19,000 refugees were sent. There were obviously many other places around the U.S. and the world where refugees migrate. You may be aware that just recently, dozens of refugees from Myanmar (aka Burma) recently arrived in Heber from a refugee camp in Thailand where they had been living for many years.
Needless to say, refugees in far-away places such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Liberia, Congo, Burundi, Sudan, Somalia or Ethiopia have no idea about the best places to make a new start in a new country. None of this would have been possible without the assistance of international organizations. The increasing importance international organizations is covered in chapter 8 of our textbook. Any organization that works beyond the borders of any one country is called a supranational organization. The book talks a lot about how refugees begin the process of moving to a new country by applying for refugee status with the United Nations High Commisioner for Refugees. The United Nations is confederation of countries that seeks to solve many of the world's problems through the cooperation of its members. In the case of refugees, the United Nations will have representatives at refugee camps. People will apply for refugee status. The United Nations will verify that the person/family was indeed forced to leave their home and then work with member nations to get permission for them to enter their borders. The U.S. office of refugees is the organization that would approve the application and work with other organization to find a place for a refugee to live. The International Rescue Committee, World Relief and Lutheran Family Services are some of the non-profit organization mentioned in the book that help refugees get settled and offer support after they are established. Because of the many organizations involved in this process is the reason it could take so long from the time a family first arrived at a refugee camp until they actually made the move to a new country. People who work for these organizations are the ones that worked with the families described in this book. Without their help, all of the people in the book would either still be living in refugee camps or dead. As the world becomes increasingly globalized, the need for international organizations to help coordinate the efforts of countries, corporations and other supranational organizations working in nearly every aspect of human life immaginable will surely increase.
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Outcasts United: Chapter 2
Chapter two of Outcasts United is about a woman named Beatrice Ziaty and her family. The chapter helps build background for players on the Fugees soccer team. In this case, Beatrice's two sons Jeremiah and Mandela, became members of the Fugees. This is the story of how they became refugees. This chapter contains two concepts that we will study more in depth later this year. The first is migration found in chapter 3 and the other is ethnicity; the topic of chapter 7.
Migration involves the movement of people. They could be coming (immigration) or going (emigration). If the migration is inter-national, then people are both going (leaving their home country) and coming (entering another country). Whenever people leave a place there are said to be push factors that motivate them to leave. These push factors could be economic, environmental or cultural. In the case of Beatrice Ziaty, her move was a cultural push. Is was cultural because it was a cultural factor that led to her move. Cultural factors include race, ethnicity, religion and language. As stated in Outcasts United, Beatrice and her husband were members of the Krahn tribe. The Krahn, while just four percent of the population of Liberia, gained power and privilege when Samuel Doe led a revolution that killed Liberia's president. As usually happens in corrupt governments, the ruling class favors certain groups of people. When Doe favored members of his own tribe, those who belonged to the majority Gio and Mano tribes became more and more upset. When Charles Taylor overthrew Doe, he sought to channel people's frustration into seeking revenge against members of the Krahn tribe. This is tactic unites people and gives them someone to blame for the problems of the country. It also removes competition by making the unpopular tribe into a scapegoat. This happened to the Jews in Germany, the Muslims on the Balkan Peninsula and many, many more instances. It is particularly severe, however, on the continent of Africa. It is one of the biggest reasons why Africa is the poorest, least developed continent in the world. I will explain why ethnicity is such a big problem in future blog posts.
Cultural push factors are not the only factors that can make someone a refugee. A refugee can also be pushed out of a place because of environmental factors such as in Hurricane Katrina, the earthquake/tsunami in Japan or any other natural disaster. Economic push factors are not, however, considered to be the kinds of push factors that lead to forced migration. When someone leaves a place, they might have hundreds of places they could go but they can obviously choose only one. The factors that bring a person or people to a specific place are called pull factors. Pull factors are the same as push factors: economic, cultural and environmental. Beatrice ended up in the United States primarily because of cultural pull factors. There are laws the govern immigration into the United States. The U.S. gives preference to people who already have family in the U.S. and people who also possess valuable knowledge and skills. A small percentage of immigrants gain entrance into the U.S. by having the named pulled randomly from the names of all people in a country that want to come to the U.S. Last, anyone who can get to the United States and prove they are a refugee (they were forced from their home by cultural or environmental factors) is admitted into the United States.
For people in countries that are relatively close to the United States, this is still difficult but, as in the case of Cuba (cultural push) or Haiti (environmental push/earthquake), it can still be done even by someone who is really poor. Since refugees are almost always poor, they don't have the means to get to the United States. So how do refugees like Beatrice get to the United States and end up in a place like Clarkston, Georgia? That is the subject of the next blog post.
Migration involves the movement of people. They could be coming (immigration) or going (emigration). If the migration is inter-national, then people are both going (leaving their home country) and coming (entering another country). Whenever people leave a place there are said to be push factors that motivate them to leave. These push factors could be economic, environmental or cultural. In the case of Beatrice Ziaty, her move was a cultural push. Is was cultural because it was a cultural factor that led to her move. Cultural factors include race, ethnicity, religion and language. As stated in Outcasts United, Beatrice and her husband were members of the Krahn tribe. The Krahn, while just four percent of the population of Liberia, gained power and privilege when Samuel Doe led a revolution that killed Liberia's president. As usually happens in corrupt governments, the ruling class favors certain groups of people. When Doe favored members of his own tribe, those who belonged to the majority Gio and Mano tribes became more and more upset. When Charles Taylor overthrew Doe, he sought to channel people's frustration into seeking revenge against members of the Krahn tribe. This is tactic unites people and gives them someone to blame for the problems of the country. It also removes competition by making the unpopular tribe into a scapegoat. This happened to the Jews in Germany, the Muslims on the Balkan Peninsula and many, many more instances. It is particularly severe, however, on the continent of Africa. It is one of the biggest reasons why Africa is the poorest, least developed continent in the world. I will explain why ethnicity is such a big problem in future blog posts.
Cultural push factors are not the only factors that can make someone a refugee. A refugee can also be pushed out of a place because of environmental factors such as in Hurricane Katrina, the earthquake/tsunami in Japan or any other natural disaster. Economic push factors are not, however, considered to be the kinds of push factors that lead to forced migration. When someone leaves a place, they might have hundreds of places they could go but they can obviously choose only one. The factors that bring a person or people to a specific place are called pull factors. Pull factors are the same as push factors: economic, cultural and environmental. Beatrice ended up in the United States primarily because of cultural pull factors. There are laws the govern immigration into the United States. The U.S. gives preference to people who already have family in the U.S. and people who also possess valuable knowledge and skills. A small percentage of immigrants gain entrance into the U.S. by having the named pulled randomly from the names of all people in a country that want to come to the U.S. Last, anyone who can get to the United States and prove they are a refugee (they were forced from their home by cultural or environmental factors) is admitted into the United States.
For people in countries that are relatively close to the United States, this is still difficult but, as in the case of Cuba (cultural push) or Haiti (environmental push/earthquake), it can still be done even by someone who is really poor. Since refugees are almost always poor, they don't have the means to get to the United States. So how do refugees like Beatrice get to the United States and end up in a place like Clarkston, Georgia? That is the subject of the next blog post.
Sunday, July 8, 2012
Outcasts United: Chapter 1
Chapter one of Outcasts United tells the story of how Luma al-Mufleh came to coach a group of refugees from all around the world. The theme that came through in this chapter was gender empowerment. Gender empowerment is addressed briefly in chapters 2 and 9 of the textbook we will study in the fall. The title of chapter 2 is "Population." The title of chapter 9 is "Development."
Gender empowerment is the opportunity for women to develop their own unique gifts and abilities. It is easy to take for granted that females have the same opportunities to participate in school, sports and work as boys. As seen in this chapter, this is not the case everywhere in the world. Luma grew up in Aman, Jordan (see map of Jordan by clicking the accompanying link)http://mapsnworld.com/political-world-map/middle-east-political-map.jpg. Jordan is one of the most liberal countries in the Middle East. Many of Jordan's neighbors are/were dictatorships that use a combination of military might and Islamic law as a means to control and manipulate their citizens. In order to justify their rule, dictators believe that the people are too stupid to make good decisions. They believe that if the people are given a choice the country will end up in chaos. Ironically, because people are easier to control when they are poor and stupid, dictators often make it difficult to get an education. Almost all dictatorships are also male dominant societies. By allowing men to limite the progress of women, it also helps the dictator accomplish his goal; control people through force and coersion. In contrast, in all of the most developed countries more women graduate from high school, college and graduate schools than men.
On the other hand, education levels among women in the Middle East are some of the lowest in the world. Here is a list of countries in the Middle East and the percentage of the women that have at least some secondary education (7th grade on) Jordan 57%, Lebanon32%, Iraq 22% and in Afghanistan only 5% of women attend any type of secondary school. Education is related to other indicators of empowerment. For every year in school, a woman can expect to make an additional 15% more money during her lifetime. She will also live longer and have fewer children (that is why gender empowerment is part of the chapter on population). As mentioned in the book many of Jordan's laws are based on Sharia law-that is, laws are based on parts of the Koran (Islam's Bible). In Jordan the testimony of two women equalled that of one man. A woman had to get permission from her husband to get a passport and honor killings (where a man kills a woman for being unfaithful or for bringing shame on the family) were given a great deal of leniency. In the book Under the Sky it talks about how it is common for a young man to rape a girl he wants to marry because it will bring down the price of her dowry. (A dowry is the amount of money a man has to pay the father of the bride. Johnny Lingo and his 8 cows is real!)
Family honor is a big deal in Muslim countries. Family honor has a lot to do with the proper behavior of women. Before marriage a woman should always have a chapperone when with a young man. That is why Luma's grandmother made such a big deal when she was playing soccer with men she didn't know. In Saudi Arabia it is even more severe. An unmarried woman can be killed for being caught alone with a man.
So, even though Luma had the good fortune of attending the best high school in Jordan and going to college in America, she felt that all of her education would be lost if she stayed in Jordan. While she would have had a life of ease and comfort, she would not have had the freedom to develop her talents and have the freedom she had in America. Can you imagine having to decide whether to take the easy road and please your family or follow your heart and risk being cut off completely from your family. Luma chose the latter and was indeed cut off from her family. I hope in your case, choosing the harder road and taking AP classes will make you a stornger person and thereby make you a better son, daughter, brother or sister.
Gender empowerment is the opportunity for women to develop their own unique gifts and abilities. It is easy to take for granted that females have the same opportunities to participate in school, sports and work as boys. As seen in this chapter, this is not the case everywhere in the world. Luma grew up in Aman, Jordan (see map of Jordan by clicking the accompanying link)http://mapsnworld.com/political-world-map/middle-east-political-map.jpg. Jordan is one of the most liberal countries in the Middle East. Many of Jordan's neighbors are/were dictatorships that use a combination of military might and Islamic law as a means to control and manipulate their citizens. In order to justify their rule, dictators believe that the people are too stupid to make good decisions. They believe that if the people are given a choice the country will end up in chaos. Ironically, because people are easier to control when they are poor and stupid, dictators often make it difficult to get an education. Almost all dictatorships are also male dominant societies. By allowing men to limite the progress of women, it also helps the dictator accomplish his goal; control people through force and coersion. In contrast, in all of the most developed countries more women graduate from high school, college and graduate schools than men.
On the other hand, education levels among women in the Middle East are some of the lowest in the world. Here is a list of countries in the Middle East and the percentage of the women that have at least some secondary education (7th grade on) Jordan 57%, Lebanon32%, Iraq 22% and in Afghanistan only 5% of women attend any type of secondary school. Education is related to other indicators of empowerment. For every year in school, a woman can expect to make an additional 15% more money during her lifetime. She will also live longer and have fewer children (that is why gender empowerment is part of the chapter on population). As mentioned in the book many of Jordan's laws are based on Sharia law-that is, laws are based on parts of the Koran (Islam's Bible). In Jordan the testimony of two women equalled that of one man. A woman had to get permission from her husband to get a passport and honor killings (where a man kills a woman for being unfaithful or for bringing shame on the family) were given a great deal of leniency. In the book Under the Sky it talks about how it is common for a young man to rape a girl he wants to marry because it will bring down the price of her dowry. (A dowry is the amount of money a man has to pay the father of the bride. Johnny Lingo and his 8 cows is real!)
Family honor is a big deal in Muslim countries. Family honor has a lot to do with the proper behavior of women. Before marriage a woman should always have a chapperone when with a young man. That is why Luma's grandmother made such a big deal when she was playing soccer with men she didn't know. In Saudi Arabia it is even more severe. An unmarried woman can be killed for being caught alone with a man.
So, even though Luma had the good fortune of attending the best high school in Jordan and going to college in America, she felt that all of her education would be lost if she stayed in Jordan. While she would have had a life of ease and comfort, she would not have had the freedom to develop her talents and have the freedom she had in America. Can you imagine having to decide whether to take the easy road and please your family or follow your heart and risk being cut off completely from your family. Luma chose the latter and was indeed cut off from her family. I hope in your case, choosing the harder road and taking AP classes will make you a stornger person and thereby make you a better son, daughter, brother or sister.
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