Beltane Early Growth Moon
Kate and I went to see Girl Rising at the Stone Arch Cinema in St. Anthony Main. This movie shows vignettes from the lives of several girls in very different circumstances. A bonded servant in Nepal, a young girl in Haiti’s earthquake ravaged city of Port Au Prince, a young radio announcer from Sierra Leone’s Freetown, a Peruvian miner’s daughter transformed by poetry, a Calcutta street child who loved to draw, an Egyptian 12-year old who had been raped and a Afghan yearning for education.
The stories are poignant. The girl who was a kamlari (first on the left in the bottom row) in Nepal, a form of bonded servitude illegal since 2000, but still widely practiced, for example, wrote songs about her experience, then organized other kamlaris who had been freed to visit homes where kamlaris were held. They rode their on bicycles, then sang her songs, coming back again and again.
The Haitian loved school and before the earthquake her mother could afford it. After the earthquake she could not. Wadley, (second from the right on the top) the girl, found her old school teacher teaching in another school. Told to leave because she had not paid, Wadley refused, saying she would come back the next day and the next day and the next day. The teacher accepted her.
The cinema was full of young girls, some from girl scouts, some from parochial schools and at least one Muslim mother with her two daughters, Somali or Ethiopian. We saw these three later after the movie at Pracna. The two girls were laughing and playing in the hall while their mother prayed in a carpeted office front, head down, hands out toward Mecca.
This is not a great movie, but it is a powerful one and it got my attention about the plight of girls in the developing world. They are the most vulnerable of the most vulnerable.
