I've started a new project here, working with our crisis centre coordinator on issues of domestic violence. The stories of acid burnings and poisonings, ice picks and rapes keep me awake late at night trying to make sense of it all.

Domestic violence is by no means confined to India. It's just that I've never had to deal with it in Canada.

I'm already feeling as though I'm just barely balancing. Conversations and news reports leave me reeling... Sexual harrassment, glass ceilings, anti-feminists, sexist law, female infanticide. I read a newspaper report which said that of 2000 abortions performed in Bombay this year, only 1 aborted a male fetus.

Flipping through the Vagina Monologues program, I came across the following It shows my fragile state of mind, that I cried when I read it. Although I sometimes want to, I never cry at work.

When the violence stops, women and girls will be:
- Allowed to be born in China and Korea
- Swimming in Iran
- Safe in their beds in the United States, Europe, and Asia
- Eating ice-cream in Afghanistan
- Keeping their clitorises in Africa and Asia
- Wearing blue jeans in Italy
- Voting in Kuwait
- Walking in the park at night in the United States
- Openly flirting in Jordan
- Safe at parties on college campuses
- Able to ask for a divorce in Pakistan
- Driving cars in Saudi Arabia
- Safely walking home from work in Juarez, Mexico
- Enjoying sex
- Playing with toys and not being sold as them
- Loving their bodies
- running the world!

*

No culture has found the answer to women's equality; each society has to evolve its own answers in accordance with its own traditions. But it is becoming increasingly clear to me that there must be some universal rights for everyone in this world; that "equal rights' is not a Western concept, but a human one.

3:05 p.m. - 2004-03-10