Mad world

This breaks my heart…

In Grip of Cold, Afghan Family Buries 8th Child

By Rod Nordland/The New York Times

February 08, 2012

KABUL, Afghanistan — The war refugee Sayid Mohammad lost his last son on Wednesday, three-month-old Khan, who became the 24th child to die of exposure in camps here in the past month.

“After we had dinner he was crying all night of the cold,” Mr. Mohammad said. The family had no wood and was husbanding a small portion of paper and plastic that his daughter had scavenged that day. He said the boy had seemed healthy and was breast-feeding normally, though the family’s dinner consisted only of tea and bread. But he kept crying. “Finally we started a fire but it wasn’t enough,” Mr. Mohammad said. By 1 a.m. the boy was stiff and lifeless, he said.

Even by the standards of destitution in these camps, Mr. Mohammad’s story is a hard-luck one; Khan was the eighth of his nine children to die. Back home in Gereshk District of Helmand Province, six died of disease, he said. Three years ago they fled the fighting in that area for the Nasaji Bagrami Camp here, where a three-year-old son froze to death last winter, he said. Like most of Kabul’s 35,000 internal refugees, he fled the country’s war zones only to find a life of squalor sometimes as deadly, even in the capital of a country that has received more than $60 billion in non-military aid over ten years.

Later Wednesday morning, Mr. Mohammad’s sole surviving child, his daughter, Feroza, 10, stared saucer-eyed at her brother’s tiny body as it lay in the middle of the family’s hybrid dwelling, part mud hut, part tent, with United Nations-branded canvas for a roof.

Leaders of this camp say that 16 children aged five or younger have died in the unseasonably cold weather and heavy snow that set in about a month ago, keeping nighttime temperatures in the mid-teens Fahrenheit. Eight other children have died similarly in another Kabul camp, Charahi Qambar, according to camp representatives, religious leaders and families.

Government officials have expressed skepticism that the children could all have died of cold, saying the deaths were unregistered and not reviewed by medical personnel, while at the same time blaming the international aid providers for not sending more supplies.

Private Afghan companies and businessmen and some charitable groups have begun to distribute food, fuel, winter clothing and blankets, tents and cash support in the camps but so far the effort has been sporadic and incomplete.

Other relief groups and Afghan government ministries are still in the process of surveying needs in the camp. As one relief worker said: “Starting an aid program even in a month would be fast work, and by then winter will be mostly over.”

The Nasaji Bagrami camp counts 315 families who fled from war-torn southern provinces like Kandahar and Helmand. Some of their rough shelters had wood to burn in stoves, while others, like Mr. Mohammad’s, had no substantial heat sources at all.

Mohammad Ibrahim, chosen by camp residents as their representative, held up his hand in a visual parable of the realities of inequitable resources. “See my fingers?” he said. “They are five, but none are equal.”

The Mohammad family had two large blankets to share, plus the baby boy’s blanket, a velveteen comforter with designs of teddy bears and bunny rabbits on it. “We didn’t even have enough wood to make breakfast today,” Mr. Mohammad said. A neighbor gave a small packet of potato chips to Feroza, whose name means turquoise, the gemstone.

In the bitter cold, relatives and friends gathered and meticulously followed the prescribed rituals for the dead. Hot water was brought in pitchers from neighbors’ huts. The boy’s body was laid on a plank in the hut’s mud-walled yard, and washed five times with the hot water and soap — a pink bar of Safeguard. A ditch was dug so that the washwater would drain away and no one would step in it accidentally, which they viewed as potential sacrilege. Khan was so small that the hand of the man who washed him covered half of his body.

His mother, Lailuma, peeked from the door of the hut to watch, but otherwise the women stayed inside and apart. But Feroza, in a purple headscarf, slipped unnoticed past the men close to Khan’s washing place, pressed into a crevice in the wall and watched wordlessly.

A clean white cotton bedsheet served as his burial shroud. The available scissors were too dull to cut it, so the men ripped it into pieces with their gloveless hands. After tying the sheet around Khan, they sprayed his shrouded form with perfume, and then they wrapped him again in his teddy and bunny blanket.

For prayers, performed on mats outside, the men removed their shoes — many had no socks. Then they carried Khan, bundled in one man’s arms, in silent procession to a graveyard.

The camp mullah, Walid Khan, pronounced the final prayers. Khan was laid in the grave with his face toward Mecca, and each of the mourners dropped in three handfuls of the hard earth.

Mr. Mohammad had not slept. His eyes were bloodshot. The septum of his nose had cracked from the cold, bleeding a little, and leaving a small red icicle. Feroza stood just to his side and behind him a little, clutching his coat. She coughed deeply and her father started. “Now she is sick too,” he said.

From my table to yours: Londonport roast beef sandwich

Sandwich heaven.

I love sandwiches no matter what time of day. I could eat one for breakfast (sometimes I’ll even throw in a fried egg); of course at lunchtime (no brainer); and even one for dinner with a hearty soup. For this particular one, I married roast beef with arugula and it was a match made in sandwich heaven! Accompanied by a creamy mushroom-potato-leek soup and now we’re talkin'.

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this little piggy ate roast beef sandwich

What you’ll need:

• deli-sliced roast beef (I recommend Boar’s Head Londonport   roast beef)
• arugula
• red onion
• Provolone cheese
• French baguette
• Worcestershire sauce

For horsey-mayo:

• 1 part mayonnaise
• 1 part horseradish

What to do:

• Slice your bread (for a five-star experience, you MUST use freshly-baked French bread); I like to slice it length-wise.
• Spread horsey-mayo on both sides.
• Stack roast beef slices (add a sprinkling of Worcestershire sauce in between slices) and Provolone cheese, then add arugula and thinly-sliced red onions. Yum!

Mushroom Potato Leek Soup
(semi-homemade)

What you’ll need:

• 1-quart carton of potato-leek soup (I like the organic creamy potato leek soup from Imagine Foods)
• 1 cup assorted mushrooms (button, cremini, etc.)
• 1 clove garlic

What to do:

• In soup pot, sautee minced garlic and sliced mushrooms (using 2 tbsp of extra virgin olive oil). 
• Cook for about 5-6 minutes, or until mushrooms are soft. 
• Add soup. Simmer over low heat. More yum!

What kind of parent are you?

What kind of parent are you? Permissive, authoritarian or authoritative?

Who Says American Parents Are Inferior?

By RANDYE HODER/The New York Times

February 6, 2012

Enough already.

A year ago, The Wall Street Journal published an excerpt from Amy Chua’s book, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” under the provocative headline “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.” Now, in an article adapted from Pamela Druckerman’s soon-to-be-published “Bringing Up Bébé,” the Journal sets out to tell us “Why French Parents Are Superior.”

In both cases, the message is clear: Americans are terrible parents. Our children are overindulged. They misbehave, they’re rude and they have poor eating and sleeping habits. As moms and dads, we are anxious, we shout too much and if that weren’t enough, Ms. Druckerman asserts, French mothers are even skinnier and sexier than their Yankee counterparts (and they never wear pajama bottoms when dropping their kids off at school).

But what is an “American” style of parenting? Can anyone legitimately say there is such a thing in a society as heterogeneous as ours?

American parents are Anglo, African-American, Asian and Hispanic. They are Christian, Jewish, Muslim and much more. They are rich, middle-class and poor. They are urban, suburban and rural. And as numerous academic studies have shown, different cultures and different socioeconomic groups in our country tend to parent their children in different ways. A quick trip to your local playground or to Chuck E. Cheese will reveal all kinds of parents interacting with children in all kinds of ways: some laissez-faire, some more strict, some frenzied, some cool, some by the book and some by the seat of their pants. Within my own circle in Los Angeles, there are parents who more or less fit Ms. Druckerman’s stereotype, but many others who defy it.

The clinical psychologist Diana Baumrind in the mid-1960s came up with what are still widely considered the three prototypical parenting styles. The “permissive parent” consults with children about family decisions and makes few demands of them. The “authoritarian parent,” by contrast, sets a strict standard of conduct, often theologically motivated. The “authoritative parent” provides the best balance, encouraging give and take with children but exerting firm control when it’s needed.

From reading the Journal excerpt of Ms. Druckerman’s book, one could easily conclude that practically all American parents are pathetically permissive, while most French families operate under a superior authoritative model. Ms. Druckerman writes:

After a while, it struck me that most French descriptions of American kids include this phrase “n’importe quoi,” meaning “whatever” or “anything they like.” It suggests that the American kids don’t have firm boundaries, that their parents lack authority, and that anything goes. It’s the antithesis of the French ideal of the cadre, or frame, that French parents often talk about. Cadre means that kids have very firm limits about certain things — that’s the frame — and that the parents strictly enforce these. But inside the cadre, French parents entrust their kids with quite a lot of freedom and autonomy.

In truth, it’s not nearly so simple — at least not when it comes to the American side of the equation (where about 16 percent of the population is Hispanic, 13 percent is black and 5 percent is Asian).

Indeed, numerous analyses have suggested that African-American and Asian-American parents typically aren’t permissive; rather, they tend to be mostly authoritarian in their parenting practices (albeit in different ways). At the same time, the literature also makes clear that painting with too broad a brush is dangerous. Within racial and ethnic communities, all three types of parenting styles — permissive, authoritarian and authoritative — can be seen. As a team from Marquette University wrote in a study published in the Journal of Social Psychology: “Hispanic parents, rather than being characterized by one dominant parenting style, demonstrated a variety of styles depending on their acculturation, education background and income level.”

Other factors also affect how American children are raised. For instance, it has been found that parents are more likely to employ an authoritarian style with boys than with girls. What’s more, “the levels of warmth, conflict and permissiveness children experienced is directly affected by family structure,” noted a 2007 study by researchers from the University of North Carolina and University of Chicago.

In the end, though, I don’t need a bunch of academics to convince me that a work like Ms. Druckerman’s is full of overgeneralizing, about both American and, I suspect, French parents. My husband and I are more authoritative than permissive. And while they weren’t perfect, my own two children (now in their teens) never engaged in the kind of bad behavior that Ms. Druckerman describes as commonplace among young American kids, like throwing their food. My son and daughter have both always eaten their vegetables, and they’ve never had a problem looking adults in the eye, just like French children supposedly do.

And for the record, I’ve never once dropped off my kids at school while wearing my pajamas.

Happy birthday to you

Fierce creature.

This girl is the most beautiful, sweet, angelic, and fierce creature I have ever met. Happy 2nd Birthday to my little warrior princess! I love you. --Mommy.

Shattering the lingerie ceiling

More signs of a sea change in the Middle East. Thanks to bras and panties.

Saudi Women Shatter the Lingerie Ceiling
By Thomas W. Lippman
The New York Times/January 21, 2012


A social revolution began in Saudi Arabia this month, and it has little if anything to do with the Arab Spring. Women are going to work in lingerie shops.

The Ministry of Labor is enforcing a royal decree issued last summer ordering that sales personnel in shops selling garments and other goods, like cosmetics, that are only for women must be female. More than 28,000 women applied for the jobs, the ministry said. Anywhere else in the world, it would not be news that sales assistants in shops selling panties and bras were female. In Saudi Arabia, where women have always been excluded from the public work force, it is a critical breakthrough. This is not just about intimate garments; this is a milestone on the arduous path to employment equality for women in a country where they are systematically excluded from retail activity.

Saudi Arabia’s economic planners recognize that if women are going to be educated at public expense, as they now are in increasing numbers, they will expect to work and the country will need their economic output. Society has increasingly accepted the idea that women will work outside the home. They have long been employed in medicine and education. Retail commerce, however, has generally remained closed because such work usually requires interaction with men, which is prohibited. The lingerie shops are breaking that taboo.

One of the oddest sights in Saudi Arabia is that of fully veiled women, hidden from others by their enveloping garments, going into the Saudi equivalent of Victoria’s Secret stores in the many upscale malls and being greeted and assisted exclusively by male sales clerks, most of whom are from South Asia. This absurd situation so embarrassed many women that they waited until they were out of the country to buy their underwear and nightgowns.

The campaign to change the rules began several years ago, and was led by Reem Asaad, a fashion-conscious financial adviser who speaks flawless English and is comfortable with the Western media. It appeared to have succeeded in 2006 when the government ordered that the sales jobs be transferred to women. But social conservatives and the religious establishment objected, arguing that Islam prohibited women from working outside the home and that putting women in retail shops would expose them to the view of any passing stranger. If the sales clerks were female, the shop windows would have to be covered, the opponents said.

Shop owners objected, too, saying that no women were trained to do such work. In addition, the 2006 decree failed to address the transportation problem: if women were going to work in those shops, they would need a man to drive them because they are prohibited from driving. Saudi cities have virtually no public transportation. So the decree was never enforced. Ms. Asaad then used Facebook to organize a boycott of the shops, and arranged for some women to be trained in retail work.

This time, King Abdullah has put his personal authority behind the new decree. Last year he also installed a new minister of labor, Adel Fakieh, who had embraced the idea of employing women at a supermarket chain owned by his holding company. Under the new rules, the country’s thousands of lingerie and cosmetics shops have until June to replace their male employees with women. The feared religious police, who are really the behavior police, have been ordered to cooperate.

King Abdullah generally supported an expansion of opportunities for women, but steps in this direction can’t be traced to any burst of enlightenment within the royal family. They are happening because the kingdom’s women need and want jobs and are learning how to make themselves heard — and because, in an increasingly expensive country, their husbands often want them to work.

Over the coming generation, this is likely to be the farthest-reaching transformation in Saudi society. While women are still constrained by law, religion and custom, more and more are likely to enter the work force. They will be better educated than their predecessors, will marry later and will have fewer children. The range of jobs and professions open to them will expand. The Ministry of Labor is already compiling a list of jobs women will be permitted to hold. It won’t include all jobs — no female miners or construction workers here — but it will be a much longer list than in the past, including some positions in law enforcement.

These changes will meet entrenched opposition, but the economic and demographic forces behind them seem irresistible. The transition would be easier if women were permitted to drive (the 2011 decree failed to address that issue), but that is bound to come, too — if not this year, then soon, if only because growing ranks of employed women will build pressure for it. Thousands of Saudi women have driver’s licenses issued by other countries; they will be ready when the day comes.

Thomas Lippman is a scholar at the Middle East Institute and the author of “Saudi Arabia on the Edge: The Uncertain Future of an American Ally."