what can you do?

my favorite saturday night thing to do is to have my friends alicia & erynne over. these 'movie nights' usually begin with one of us going through my not small DVD collection to narrow it down to three choices. then from the three choices, we pick one, and that is our movie du nuit.

tonight, an unusual thing happened...we watched a something that none of us had seen before. tonight's movie was water. set in india in 1938, the movie starts with an eight-year old girl, Chuyia, who is married to a man 50 years older than her. the man dies, and Chuyia is sent to live with other widows, most of whom are closer to a century old than to Chuyia's eight years.

to go to heaven at the end of their lives, these women must live chaste, pure, ascetic lives... even if their husbands died while they were still children. when her father asked her about her wedding, young Chuyia didn't even remember being married, then suddenly she was thrown into a world of shaven heads, colorless clothing and exile among other widows.

i won't give the plot away, because if you haven't seen the movie, do so. but what i will say, is that this movie, along with recently reading a thousand splendid suns, as well as the reading and research provided by the international justice mission, has opened my eyes to so many of the injustices that women all over the world have to face every day... things that i and most of my friends, have never had to worry or even think about. things, that if i'm honest, i don't really want to think about, because they are uncomfortable, and i would prefer to live in a world where these things did not exist.

but they do exist, and turning a blind eye to known injustice is a coward's way out. we cannot all go to thailand to rescue young girls from a life of forced prostitution, or to kenya to help put an end to female genital mutilation, but we who have so much need to not do anything, simply because we cannot do everything.

what can you do?