872 Notes & Comments

It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls.

It is a violation of human rights when women and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution.

It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small.

It is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war.

It is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of death worldwide among women ages 14 to 44 is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes.

It is a violation of human rights when young girls are brutalized by the painful and degrading practice of genital mutilation.

It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will.

If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, it is that human rights are women’s rights - and women’s rights are human rights. Let us not forget that among those rights are the right to speak freely - and the right to be heard.

23 Notes & Comments

Here in the US, society holds onto redemptive violence, like the death penalty, and participatory violence, in the name of self-defense, as rights divined by God himself. I find that this position couldn’t be further from the truth.

219 Notes & Comments

Last year, Americans spent $450 billion on Christmas. Clean water for the whole world, including every poor person on the planet would cost about $20 billion. Let’s just call that what it is: A material blasphemy of the Christmas season.

18 Notes & Comments

With the proceeds from the sale of his parents’ home in India, loans from aunts and uncles, and the money he’d saved while working as a welder in the Middle East, Aby K. Raju was able to scrape together the $20,000 the job recruiter wanted from him in exchange for a job in the United States and a green card.

The recruiter painted a rosy picture of life in the United States — a well-paid job as a welder at the shipyard company Signal International, a shared apartment with three other workers, transportation to and from work and good food…

He was assigned to Signal’s Orange, Texas, shipyard, but only as a part-time worker, like many of his fellow Indian workers. They made significantly less than their white colleagues. He and his Indian American colleagues were given housing in “labor camp-like” conditions, as he describes it. They were packed in cabins, with 24 bunks and two bathrooms to a cabin. The company docked $1,050 a month toward rent from each employee’s paycheck. The canteen food was so salty and oily that most of the men “survived on frozen foods,” Raju said, noting that company officials paid no heed when they complained about the food or the housing. “We asked if we could rent apartments (on our own) near the shipyard, and they said we could but that they would still deduct $1,050 in rent,” Raju said.

Because their H2B temporary work visas did not permit them to transfer to other companies, the men had no choice but to stick it out — until Raju and a handful of his fellow workers began organizing in 2007, often under cover of darkness.

After several clandestine meetings, Raju and about 250 other workers took a leap of faith and escaped from the labor camps. Many of the workers began a 23-day hunger strike to demand redress and attract media attention. That got them a meeting with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials. But ICE “ganged up with Signal against us,” Raju said. …

43 Notes & Comments

[R]oughly half-million people live in Texas’ colonias. These impoverished communities are found in all border states, but Texas, with an estimated 2,300 colonias, has the most. First established in the 1950s for migrant workers, many of the colonias were created by unscrupulous or predatory developers. Along the 1,248-mile Texas-Mexico border from El Paso to Brownsville, in communities with names like Agua Dulce and Mexico Chiquito, the overwhelmingly Hispanic residents of these colonias tell identical stories: of migrating with dreams of safety and prosperity, of getting swindled or misled into buying worthless land with no modern infrastructure, of sticking it out so their children — most of them American citizens — will get educated. And of getting sick. At last count, nearly 45,000 people lived in the 350 Texas colonias classified by the state as at the “highest health risk,” meaning residents of these often unincorporated subdivisions have no running water, no wastewater treatment, no paved roads or solid waste disposal. Water- and mosquito-borne illnesses are rampant, the result of poor drainage, pooling sewage and water contaminated by leaking septic tanks. Burning garbage, cockroaches, vermin and mold lead to high rates of asthma, rashes and lice infestations. And the poor diet so intrinsically linked to poverty contributes to dental problems, diabetes and other chronic conditions, which residents of the colonias rarely have the health insurance, money or access to regular health care to treat. “If I see 50 kids, at least 30 of them are very sick,” said Dr. Sarojini Bose, a pediatrician and immigrant from India who operates several clinics in the Rio Grande Valley, including a mobile unit. “To see this in the United States, the most powerful country is the world, is heartbreaking.