MOMENTS: 1 - YOU'LL LEARN NOT TO CRY

 There are also girls in the ranks of child soldiers. The Human Rights Watch report “You’ll Learn Not to Cry: Child Combatants in Colombia” takes its title from this:

  I had a friend, Juanita, who got into trouble for sleeping around. We had been friends in civilian life and we shared a tent together. The commander said it didn’t matter that she was my friend. She had committed an error and had to be killed. I closed my eyes and fired the gun, but I didn’t hit her. So I shot again. The grave was 

right nearby. I had to bury her and put dirt on top of her. The commander said, “You did very well. Even though you started to cry, you did well. You’ll have to do this again many more times, and you’ll have to learn not to cry.”(59)

      Women, and their children with them, have always been lesser beings in human societies.                   

     This is wrong.      

     Women are not the least of us; women are the best of us. A woman has carried in her body for most of a year, before we ever drew breath, every human being who ever lived. Most of our literature has dealt with the deeds, heroic and otherwise, of men, because it has been written mostly by men. But no noble sacrifice in battle, no crossing of formidable mountain ranges or uncharted oceans, matches the quiet (yet sometimes noisy!) heroism of what women do and have always done to give us life, and to keep us alive.

     I’ve come to this: if the world is destroyed, men – in their unceasing quest for power and/or wealth (which is 

increasingly becoming the Greatest Power) - will destroy it.

    If the world is saved, women will save it: women like Azar Nafisi and Shirin Ebadi and Neda Agha Soltan in Iran, like Graça Machel and many others in Africa, like Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, Malalai Joya in Afghanistan, Arundhati Roy in India, like the Saudi poet Hissa Hilal, like ordinary women all over the world who simply struggle to keep their children alive in the face of men’s abandonment and depredations - will save it.

59 Human Rights Watch, copyright © 2003 http://www.hrw.org. p. 73. The report was written by Sebastian Brett, senior researcher in the Americas Division.