"My Vagina Was My Village II" (13)

The focus of my last blog post was that the issues around the world that we are presented with should not be dismissed just because they do not happen to us, because we did not choose the life we were given. It is something that is completely out of our control. You could have easily been born as a dragonfly and have a life span of twenty-four hours.

From a very young age, Eve Ensler, the author of The Vagina Monologues, was sexually abused by her father. Her two siblings and her mother were never touched. During an interview that we watched in our Women's Literature class the other day, Eve Ensler talked about it very a very calm and upbeat tone. She mentioned that she lived in a middle class, all white neighbourhood. Bad things don't happen in areas like that right? Wrong. She was being abused by her father, and everyone was in such denial that they dismissed it all together, even though many of the neighbours knew what was going on behind closed doors.

I am guilty of this exact thing. Not under those circumstances, but there have been many things that I have seen or heard that I have dismissed because I was in denial that they actually happened. That is not okay. We are meant to make a difference for someone who can't, and we are failing at our job. So after watching a video about the work that Eve Ensler was doing in the DRC, there were many dropped jaws. We quickly moved on from the video and had a more upbeat discussion about the book that we were reading. But after class my close friend Simone asked if we could talk about it. We talked about how it was one of the most powerful video's that we had seen in a long time and we didn't just want to move away from the subject. So recently we have gotten a few people from our english class together to do something about this issue going on in the DRC. In two weeks, our two Women's Literature english classes are combining and holding a week long bake sale to raise money for the women in the DRC.

Its sad that we had to watched such a horrifying video in order to want to do something, but it definitely had an affect on all of us. I think that we should all try and do something to help those who need it, because we are part of this world, and we should act as if everyone is our brother or sister.