Day 71

This picture was taken a year ago on Magnolia Beach.  It has been 7 long months since we have seen Jess.

Last night it rained, and this morning I ran with heavy legs under a leaden sky.  I wished I could be with the three gulls effortlessly riding the thermal high above the meadow instead.

I ran just over 2 miles in 30 minutes, which is 15 minutes a mile, so instead of trying to lengthen my run, at Tim's suggestion I am going to try to run faster, to shorten my time.

I heard from my friend Mary, one of those things that once you know, you can never clear out of your mind.  An American woman and an Afghan woman have started a few secret shelters for battered women in Afghanistan.  All the women interviewed were beaten on a regular basis, with scars to prove it.  Those who started the shelter reckon that about 15 million women there require help because of abuse.

A 17 year old girl (the same age as Matthew and Nicholas) who had been married off when she was 12, had had her nose and ears cut off by her husband as punishment for running away. I feel such shock at this act, a terrible sympathy for this girl, although I can't even begin to imagine what her life has been.  How can a man do this to a girl?  How could he possibly justify such an act in his own head?

And then immediately, in a purely selfish way, after the altruistic feelings I have had for this girl,  I feel glad that I am not her.  I am so lucky to have been born into a fairly enlightened family, where I was loved and cherished by my mother and my father, where I had the same education as a boy, and where I grew up to become the person I wanted to be.  (Of course at the same time that I was growing up black people were suffering under terrible oppression right next door, but apartheid worked so well that I didn't even know that then.)  I don't mean to demean the suffering of these girls and women, just that it makes you grateful for what you have had.

So here is my second child, and these two are alike in temperament, the younger son (of yesterdays' portrait) and the younger daughter.  This portrait was done in 2000, when Jess was 17 years old, the same age as poor Bebe in Afghanistan, when we still lived in 16 Cross Street, in Grahamstown, in South Africa.