As predicted, I’ve been reading nearly constantly. If my crochet hook is not in my hand, my Kindle is. This is partially due to my continued inability to connect my computer to the internet in the apartment (resolved fully as of this morning), but it certainly helps that I have no job and 17 books currently on my Kindle. While we were on the bus back from Jiangxi, I finished reading Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, which I will get to in a minute. Instead of sighing and looking out the window for the remaining 20 hours of the ride, I went back to reading Atomic Lobster by Tim Dorsey (which I finished a couple of days later and moved on to Up in the Air by Walter Kirn…which I finished the morning I began writing this review). When I did something similar in the Philippines back in 2000, it resulted in a large pile of books that I didn’t have room to bring home with me. I’m diggin’ this Kindle thing. A lot.
Half the Sky Review
If you’re not familiar with Nick Kristof’s column in the NY Times, you should be. He writes about issues that are important but often not well-known, and I’m grateful for being introduced to these. Kristof is careful to not merely complain about things; he often highlights the work of a person or an organization which has been working on the highlighted issue with good results. His appeals also often lead to a flood of donations for whatever charity he mentions.
The book is no exception, for it contains a large appendix which lists all the charities he mentions in his narrative as well as others he knows of. They are sorted into the same categories as the sections of the book: sex trafficking, gender-based violence (including neglect), and maternal mortality. The narrative itself approaches each general topic from several angles, each telling the story of one or a few women and Nick or Sheryl’s experience with them. For someone brought up with plenty of opportunities, the stories are shocking. Each situation is impossible to imagine, starting with the opening story of a Cambodian girl who was sold into sex slavery and escaped, only to be jailed and have a crooked cop sell her again. There is no way for me to wonder what I would do in such a situation, because it’s so far beyond my experience.
Half the Sky will move you, hopefully to action. Because I’m lucky enough to be spending the majority of this calendar year volunteering, I intend to find a way to put a special focus on the girls and women. I won’t know specifically how I can do this until I get there, but I will try to highlight it here. Once I’m back in the US and earning money, you can bet that I’ll be contributing far more than I have in the past. Kristof mentions a few “price points” in the book:
- Tithing, which is traditionally giving 10% of one’s income to the church, need not be limited in such a way. The idea is to work a certain percentage into your budget and making giving a priority.
- The world spends $40 billion annually on pet food, but an increase of only $9 billion per year in aid money would “provide all effective interventions for maternal and newborn health to 95% of the world’s population”. What if we all donated, each month, to a charity focused on this problem, an amount equal to whatever we’ve spent on pet food?
Please, read this book, and start reading Kristof’s column in the New York Times.
Depending on who you ask, there are anywhere from three to five stages of culture shock. Let’s look at the 3-stage process through the eyes of J. Maarten Troost, author of Lost on Planet China. This consists of the Honeymoon Phase, the Negotiation Phase, and the Adjustment Phase.
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