I was going through my computer, trying to find out how to reinstall a program to make my speakers work again, and then I stumbled upon this. It's a paper I wrote in ninth or tenth grade, so I was about 14-15 years old. The assignement was something like, "Write about someone's thoughts or reactions of people who live in the countries we hear about on TV and radio." I corrected some misspellings and wrong use of words, but otherwise I didn't bother to try and improve it. I didn't base this story on myself, though, just wrote down what someone else might react to what's happening in the rest of the world. It was a little amusing to read something I had written that long ago, so I just decided to post it for fun's sake.
Before you laugh yourself silly over this effort <g>, remember that I wrote this a long time ago, so don't expect too much.
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People I Don't Want to Know
It was an early spring morning when it happened. I can’t remember what day or month it was, just me having breakfast alone by the kitchen table with my knee brought up against my chest while I sat staring out the window. That could be any day.
When the clock strikes 7 am, the radio turns itself on, and as usual it tells us about the rest of the world. How awful it is. It was the same news all over again: there were murders, war, robberies and misery. As usual, I digested the news with the rest of my sandwich – not really thinking too much about it.
It was a news report from a country I didn’t know where is. The reporter is talking about a woman. A woman he’d been told that has been prosecuted and captured by the enemies. They had raped her, and then cut her breasts off before killing her. Cut off her breasts! I let out a breath of disgust, my appetite gone with it. I sensed my whole body, and I was suddenly cold. I wondered what pain she must have felt, when the knife blade had cut through a piece of her body like that. I shuddered.
Who were these people? Who were these women? But I pushed those thoughts away, because I had homework to do before going to school. I was supposed to have done them the day before, but there had been a really good movie on TV.
When I got to school, sitting safely back at the third row, the teacher picked up from where we had left off the day before. South Africa. As usual, Mrs. Roberts’s dull voice fills the room while the class pretends to pay attention. Problems like violence and women being suppressed. But then she says something that gets to me: “Every thirty seconds, a woman in South Africa gets raped.” I glance up at the clock on the wall, and I notice that twenty minutes have passed since we started. Forty women have already been raped. Forty! Normal people like me, *women* like me. They kept coming. First it was the woman on the radio, the one whose breasts got cut off, and now… rape. Imagine the fear, pain and suffering they must go through. My mind started spinning, but I forced myself to focus and push those thoughts aside. I leaned over to the person sitting next to me and asked if I could borrow his notes from English class.
The thoughts would reappear some nights, and it bothered me, but no more that I could say ‘Fine’ when people asked how I was. I *was* fine. It was only about a week later when we had to watch a documentary at school, about the sex industry in Thailand, I think it was. Like the week before, I felt cold. What was wrong with me? I knew these things existed before I’d seen that tape. But there was just something about those people. Something about the women: the *girls*, even. Little girls who should be playing with dolls and jumping ropes, and shouldn’t know about the cruelty we lived in.
There was one girl who said, “Only fat German men with a mustache come here to Bangkok to get laid.” But it’s not! They’re all kinds of men, and they all say the same: “These women are not being forced to anything. They don’t have to do anything if they don’t want to.”
I had to bring a bucket beside my bed when I went to bed that night. I felt so sick. Who were these people? Who were all these women?
I surfed on the internet and read about countries that shared the same problems. I read about prostitution, about people getting killed for the sake of honour, women being forced into marriage. While I was reading, I was sure there was someone out there, begging me to stand up and make a difference. “Do something!” they yell. But what can I do? I want to. I really do, but what?
But then it slips. After I while I couldn’t stand to have all those pair of eyes watching my back, waiting for something to happen. Then it was too late. I gave up. I had learned about people who were so like me, and yet so different. The similarities scared me. For a while I had stepped out of my own secure bubble, but now I have returned.
It’s safer that way.
