#Come live in the home of the family getting actively harassed by assassins I tell you on the Ides of March.

[yvesdot]

HOUSE RAINIER BEGINS APRIL 1ST!

Are you doing Camp NaNoWriMo? Do you need a place to stay for the duration? Do transgender Victorian lesbians sound like good housemates?

Well, you should join HOUSE RAINIER, a Camp NaNo word-crawl-meets-RPG event in my server (colloquially known as the yvescord) starring the three main characters in KAY RAINIER, which I will doggedly be writing. Join a team, search for items, and gain stats in a completely non-canon Choose-Your-Own-Adventure side episode.

In this game, YOU choose what you write (or draw, or edit, or brainstorm), YOU choose when to participate (or spectate), and YOUR actions decide how many times Atlas calls Constantine a bitch. (There is a max of two.)

HOUSE RAINIER is low stakes, open to everyone, and completely on your own terms. Bring your friends! Reblog to spread the word! WELCOME TO HOUSE RAINIER!

ko-fi | Patreon | all writing | book

[panharmonium]

the other thing that i keep thinking about, especially now that i’ve been knee-deep in conversation about kakashi’s father for the last couple days, is the amount of politically/socially-charged context kakashi must be constantly navigating as a leaf shinobi, even though we don’t get to see much of it.  

the transformation of the hidden leaf village is obviously still a work in progress, and society never changes overnight.  we’ve heard at various points in shippuden about the still-present divide between hardliners like danzo and the (somewhat) more moderate senju line, and it’s clear that there are still plenty of reactionary/conservative forces at work in the shinobi world, which means there are absolutely still segments of the population who would view the kind of challenge that kakashi and his students pose to traditional shinobi values as a threat.  and back when kakashi first chose to reaffirm his father’s principles, i’m sure it was much worse - the way minato tells it, the entire village and the land of fire turned on sakumo, and it’s not like all those people just disappeared when kakashi finally allowed himself to recognize that all of them were doing something wrong.  they were still there.  they were his neighbors.  they were his colleagues.  he had to live with them.  he had to work with them - he had to work FOR them, even.  to this day, he still does.

like.  i am FASCINATED by the complexities of this situation, even though we barely see any of it.  just...thinking about thirteen year-old kakashi being a member of the Jonin Assembly alongside all of these grown adults who persecuted his father until the “great man who everyone looked up to” couldn’t survive it any longer.  thinking about teenage kakashi lost and “waiting to die” in the anbu black ops, but still breaking every rule to rescue little tenzo from a hardline conservative who tried to have kakashi assassinated.  thinking about adult kakashi, still a member of that same Jonin Assembly, still working alongside people he can clearly remember harassing and attacking his father for saving their lives, being asked to serve as a clandestine hokage under danzo’s nose, because foreign nations trust kakashi where they don’t trust the actual nominee, and then being nominated for real when danzo turns up dead (and having his nomination approved, i might add, by the land of fire, whose government officially blamed kakashi’s father for the damage that resulted from that abandoned mission years before).

we only get hints about the lingering controversy surrounding kakashi and his family via danzo and, occasionally, the village elders, but like.  kakashi occupies such a complex place in the hidden leaf village, because he’s become incredibly respected and renowned by many (if not most) of its residents, but he also spends every day of his life moving within a community where many (if not most) of the older people around him participated in a campaign of vicious harassment against his father, one that ultimately led to his death.  some of them may have had changes of heart after sakumo’s suicide - that seems like the kind of thing that might have shocked some people into reevaluating their positions, particularly given how respected sakumo was prior to that time - and some of them probably died later in the war, but we know there’s still a conservative faction active in the hidden leaf village, and some of those people are always going to be who they are.  and even the people who aren’t - even the ones who regret how they acted - it’s still so complicated!  how do you continue to live and work in that environment?  how do you navigate a history of being harmed in that way, when you still have to collaborate with and/or serve the same people who did the harming, some of whom likely view you with the exact same disdain they had for your father?

kakashi manages it, somehow, though i’ll bet he has complicated feelings about it, even if he keeps them to himself.  and that’s yet another reason why (if i can just take these thoughts on a slight detour to the present) i think kakashi’s relationship with sasuke is so vitally important, especially moving forward.  sasuke’s family was wronged by the village too, in horrific, unforgivable ways - the shinobi system swallowed itachi whole and sacrificed the entire uchiha clan on the altar of a mission, in exactly the kind of evil, inhuman decision-making process that sakumo and obito and kakashi said could never be justified.  the uchiha were victims of the same shinobi system that drove kakashi’s father to his death - the one that said “everything is acceptable as long as the task at hand is accomplished.  people are disposable in service to a mission.”  both sasuke and kakashi’s families fell to a cultural context that refused to acknowledge that it is never okay to sacrifice your comrades for a mission, a cultural context that embraced this belief to the point where even literal genocide became excusable.

if sasuke is ever going to really and truly Come Home, he’s going to need to learn how to navigate this situation.  not to excuse the wrong that was done, and certainly not to give up on getting justice for himself and his clan, but also to figure out, in conjunction with these important tasks, how to continue existing in an environment where so much officially-sanctioned harm was done to his person, and where so many people around him have at least a little bit of history of being suspicious of or uncharitable towards the uchiha clan, even though they obviously didn’t know about the impending coup or danzo’s extermination order.  

it’s an incredibly complicated situation, and even if kakashi doesn’t have all the answers, he can at least understand what it feels like to be in that kind of position.  he’s been navigating something like this for many, many years.  he’s the precedent, someone who can help sasuke wrestle with the perhaps unanswerable questions of how am i supposed to dedicate myself to a place that wronged me like this?  why should i protect people who hurt me so badly?  is there even a way for me to move forward here, if i can’t forgive the ones who took my family away from me?  can this actually be my home again, when i know what it did to my people?

kakashi has obviously managed to come up with answers to these questions that enable him to stay integrated in his community and keep building a future he believes in, though I doubt any of his answers are simple, and i’m sure there are some things that he’s just had to accept will never be fully settled in his heart.  it’s like what he says to obito in an episode i watched recently: “i don’t know anything for sure, either...i’ve thought that this world is hell, too...but...”  it’s the but that matters.  even in the face of confusion and complexity, kakashi has found a way to keep moving.  he’s learned to co-exist with the uncertainty and discomfort surrounding him, and to make his own meaning out of this life, regardless of how complicated his internal relationship with the village might be.  he’s found a way to keep his eyes trained on the light, whatever that light might look like for him, and even if said light is only, as gaara says, “the faintest glimmer.”  he has so much to teach someone like sasuke, who up until recently was responding to that same plea of gaara’s with a fatalistic “i shut my eyes a long time ago.  the things i seek now lie only in the darkness.” 

anyway.  i am just having Many Thoughts currently about the intricacies of the political and social context that kakashi is always navigating, even though he never says a word about it.  and i’m curious whether this family history will ever come up again in the last fifth of this show.  if i were going on instinct alone, i’d suspect that we weren’t quite done with sakumo yet - i feel like we barely even started with him, to be honest (and also - whatever happened to kakashi’s mother???) - but i should know better at this point than to try and predict what this show is going to do, so i’ll just wait and see.

[leonawriter]

My Personal Takes on Stormbringer:

Without a full and accurate translation to go through in one sitting, it’s still hard to get a handle on things properly. That said, thank you to everyone who’s working on it. 

Now.

(please note all quotes are my memory of translations I have read, and are not verbatim.)

-Asagiri, please, you do not need to make so many coding analogies with regards to Chuuya and Verlaine. They don’t work.

-It often feels - not just in this book but also in 55 Minutes, where there are tight restrictions on a time travel ability - that Asagiri limits abilities based on how scientifically accurate they are. However, this doesn’t make sense! why should it! Literature should be an expression of freedom. There should be rules - the same way the Page has rules - but in the sense of Magic A is Magic A. You make up the rules and then you don’t break them in future. Why have Kunikida able to create something with a mass heavier than a piece of paper out of a page of his notebook, but then say you can’t do [x/y/z] because it’s scientifically unviable?

-I have no issue with how skk treat each other. they are chaos teens. let them be. like... this is the beginning of their actual trust. they’re also in the mafia, and in a dark time in their lives. it’s fine. (it isn’t, but at the same time, it kinda is.)

-I feel like Chuuya taking things from other people and making that thing “his” fits him as a character? he had nothing before, so when you have nothing, all you have is what people give you. If someone gives him a bike, then that bike is his now. He has to learn to look after it, love it, and respect it, and he’ll remember that friend by it. Same goes for pretty much anything else. Also, it’s a show of how well Chuuya adapts to things, and what things he chooses to pick up.

-The hat. I do not like how the hat was treated. Making it into the key that helps Chuuya be able to activate Corruption cheapens the meaning and weight of having been given the hat as a memento of the first person who told him to live as a human being. Why not have the hat be a reminder of his humanity in a purely sentimental way? I’m going to ignore anything canon about this and just say it’s sentimental. Which, like, it could have been a safety blanket type thing, not pseudo-science.

-The coding in Chuuya’s body is a bit... of a reach? How do you put that in there? I don’t get it. Just say that there’s a possibility he might die if he uses Corruption, or that he’ll never become “Chuuya” again. That he’d lose himself utterly. The log history can be either on a chip (insert Dazai making “lost dog, if found return to the mafia” jokes here) or on something else that could easily be destroyed during the course of the story (or not).

-Dazai living in the shipping container reads to me like an extreme version of “I do not want to be found I do not want to be helped I am worthless trash and what’s the point in having an actual home if I plan on dying any day anyway.” Verlaine asks what drove him there, and Dazai says “you” and tbh that offers up so many questions (like, was the shipping container thing recent, was it temporary, or what). There’s the possibility that Dazai doesn’t always live there, because otherwise he’d suffer from hypothermia and get pneumonia in the winter! But above all, Mori had nothing to do with this. He was probably terrified to go too close in case he got killed. Stop saying Dazai lives here because “poor baby was abused :(” that sure was not it.

-Dazai goes all this way - plotting for ages, since before the beginning of the book, having been number one on Verlaine’s hit list, just to get the truth about Chuuya’s humanity and to preserve it - because “I want to see Chuuya suffer as a human being” is him saying he doesn’t want to see Chuuya become like him, or inhuman, because that’s not Chuuya. (dude, there ain’t a straight explanation for this...)

-following on from the previous, Dazai refusing to just let things be the moment he realises that it’d mean double suiciding with Chuuya. I personally see that as a shippy moment because Dazai had already given up on Chuuya being alive (if I read the translation right) and in that case, dying would just be letting go. But Mori says “yeah but I don’t think he’s dead yet?” and that, along with the “double suicide” thing, makes Dazai go “absolutely NOT.”

OK a related thing - as far as I remember, when IRL Dazai attempted double suicide, right up until his actual death it would result in either a failure or... his partner dying and him surviving. The cold potential of this happening in BSD if Dazai had just given up reminded me of that.

-Regardless of my thoughts on how it was handled, Stormbringer reinforced my previous ideas about how Chuuya basically IS Arahabaki. It also suggests that Arahabaki was more of a sentient ability than a true “god” but... that’s fine. For me, all I cared about was that all those “Arahabaki is an evil being that is constantly trying to take over Chuuya and Corruption is Arahabaki being let out” takes are not true. It’s... basically Chuuya taking the lid off his power. I joked at one point that Corruption is Chuuya going “I’m so pissed off I’m gonna kick the door open and throw away the key” and Dazai going “go for it babe, I got your key.”

-Rimbaud and Verlaine are... very complicated characters? They’re not easy to get a handle on. I sometimes find myself liking them and sometimes find myself disliking them, and that’s something that’ll be easier when I have a full translation available - and one of Fifteen. Rimbaud was held back by seeing Chuuya, at first, as nothing more than an empty vessel to Arahabaki’s power, while Verlaine was so taken over by grief without understanding how to handle that, that he became a monster up until the end of the story. Neither of them were good people. That said, their relationship to each other? It’s very complicated and reminds me of their IRL selves to a point but without the skeevy nature and without it going so far, so kudos to that.

-Adam. Knowing his creator was a ten year old girl makes so much sense when you look at the things he says and does. He doesn’t get so much. He’s very logical, but doesn’t understand that a game of billiards isn't as much of an icebreaker as he thinks it should be. Surprised by bubble gum. Games like “strange things humans do” are very much like the word games kids play in the car. 

-Verlaine being the fifth executive was something I did not predict at all, whatsoever, and I can’t stop thinking about it. Like... how did he get to that point. Only so much can be said in a few paragraphs (it seems) of “this is [x] number of years in the future where Chuuya’s an executive now.” 

The last we see of him, he’s overcome by grief, hatless, and he seems to have only just realised how much he wished he could return what Rimbaud gave to him. (Ironically, by being able to grieve like that, it shows that he is capable of what he thinks he can’t do - same as Dazai.)

But how does he become an executive? Do they come to him slowly at first, and they gradually build up trust? Does he stay in contact with Chuuya? Do they see each other properly as brothers now, or not? I can’t help but feel that as it’s a long time - six years, in fact - between Stormbringer and canon, some bond of trust must have been built. The mafia protects Verlaine from the authorities and from the outside world just the same as Kouyou says that she wants to do for Kyouka, and the same as they’re there for Chuuya, too. So. A Verlaine who trains the mafia’s best assassins not because he’s forced into it, but because he feels the same loneliness as Chuuya, and finds that it helps? A Verlaine who learns slowly that he can care about more people than just Rimbaud and Chuuya? Holy shit yes please. A Verlaine who is loyal and protective and who you should be glad is in a (probably) gilded prison of the mafia’s basement, because otherwise he would actually do so many things to those who would harm his family.

Let’s just say - if I think of Arahabaki as a guardian or protector god who is just plain destructive because it can’t help that, then Chuuya and Verlaine looking and acting in similar ways because they share that same “parent” in a sense, makes sense. They are no longer just Arahabaki, they’re “Chuuya” and “Verlaine” - but they also share traits such as “Papa Wolf” and “lonely” and “violent,” among others.

-At least twice, pre-Soukoku Dazai and Chuuya refer to how they’re constantly thinking of each other. No, they don’t mean in positive ways, but they’re chaos teens and it’s still strong emotion. Chuuya mentions how he’s thought of at least 190 ways to punish Dazai for the things that he does (which also implies how their relationship is equal, and Dazai doesn’t call all the shots, and doesn’t get away with everything scot-free), and Dazai says that Verlaine can’t possibly win against him, because Dazai “spends all of his time, waking and sleeping, thinking of ways to annoy and harass Chuuya,” (quote not perfect.) 

We also have Chuuya having Dazai appear to him first in his hallucinations, which I see as Chuuya’s inner Dazai-voice saying all the worst things, and ironically not actually saying or meaning things that would get across what real Dazai would want him to feel; in other words, that’s Chuuya’s view of him, or his mind searching for the one person he’d believe it to realistically come from.

As well, Dazai saying “there’s no way Chuuya could be an artificially constructed personality, because no one could create a personality that I [hate/that annoys me] so much.” Which, like... sure... you tell yourself that, kid...

Basically, they’re all the kinds of things that teenagers who don’t really get how strong feelings like these work yet, who are still figuring themselves (and their orientations, probably) out, would say if they don’t even like that other person that much, but they’re still attracted to them. A strong “why does it have to be THEM?” haha. And yet, as others have pointed out, Chuuya seems more on the oblivious side than Dazai, since as said, Dazai goes to all this effort and seems fond (but only when Chuuya’s not looking, dumbass) but Chuuya just... doesn’t get it.

A shorter summary of my thoughts and feelings?

Chuuya suffers, but is ultimately happier for it no matter whether he’s one of the clones or whether he’s the original (it’s arguable either way, and I don’t mind either way) as he’s still Chuuya. His bond with the mafia is also stronger than so many people think it is. They’re literally his adopted family. Even if he chose to leave, he’d still see them as family. I can’t see him leaving. He’s just... they’re family... don’t tear them apart...

The skk is strong, no matter what people say, because this is the start and it’s the end of their first year in the mafia and it’s not supposed to be a healthy time, for fuck’s sake. They’re both all sorts of messed up. They’re allowed to be. This is a time when that’s kinda the point of the book. But yeah, the trust and the bond is real.

Verlaine. I am now fascinated by Verlaine. I was so sure before the spoilers and translations came out that I’d hate him. I no longer do. He confuses me but I NEED TO KNOW MORE. 

[hevestarrington]

stranger things not!fic

i can't write fic, but i can do a shitty outline. so here we go, a dustin and steve brotp fic

 ·  one night, dustin sees a news story about a potential serial killer in the midwest. the killer targets young (late teens/early twenties) men (white with dark hair and photogenic faces that look tragic next to a "found dead" headline) who are considered attractive and well-liked, and presumed to have been taken from their homes in the middle of the night.  so far, there have been three mutilated corpses found throughout the midwest with evidence suggesting that it's the same person or persons doing the kidnapping/murdering.

·  that same night, dustin has a terrible nightmare about steve being dragged off by a monster, and immediately believes that it's his subconscious trying to tell him that steve is in danger, and it must be the serial killer.

·  tries to convince steve, robin, and the rest of the party of this danger

o arguments that dustin makes

§ steve is considered attractive: dustin doesn't really see what others find attractive about steve. like, he has "great hair, but he also has those big dumb, baby animal eyes and is covered in moles and weird pale skin" "you're really good for my ego there, buddy".

§ steve used to be popular: "but dingus is not 'well-liked' at all" "thanks, rob." (sidenote: people say well-liked, but they mean well-known because they don't want to speak ill of the dead)

§ steve is vulnerable! he's not a great thinker or fighter and he's not very observant ("jesus, henderson, why don't you just kill me yourself and spare me this character assassination"), and he's by himself in a big house by the edge of the woods

§ there's been a lot of new people coming to town since starcourt, and it would be easy for a psycho-killer to go unnoticed

o counter-arguments the party makes

§ steve is no longer popular or well-liked "do you all hate me?" "you're not completely terrible" "gee, thanks again, robin"

§ even if he were in danger, how could they protect him? they have school and homework. "good to know that your homework takes priority over my life"

§ also, they have no idea who the killer is or what they look like

o dustin is not deterred, but they're not really convinced

·  dustin begins to do research with information provided by the nightly news and what he can glean from reports in newspapers found in the library and monitors radio channels with his Cerebro when he can

·  dustin also harasses hopper (he lived, bitch) about it to the point that hopper becomes a little paranoid and starts to believe there might actually be a serial killer in hawkins and that steve harrington could be in danger, but another man goes missing in wisconsin and the FBI thinks they are close to catching the killer and hopper believes that means the killer is busy elsewhere and not currently his problem

·  (meanwhile, there is a new person in town, and he does seem to rent a lot of videos, but he's staying in the motel without cable so that's probably why. he's a friendly, charming guy who can spend upwards of an hour in family video choosing his videos for the night and discussing movies and things to do in hawkins with the clerk [motel guy is from a big city and is fascinated by all the little out of the way places that locals like to hang out at] , who just happens to usually be steve. dustin's noticed him a few times when he's there during steve's shift discussing new evidence, but he thinks he's in town helping set-up a new fast-food joint or something. [he kind of gives steve the creeps actually, but he's not telling dustin that lest he decide the guy should be locked in a little room and interrogated by middle schoolers {freshmen?}))

·  dustin is determined and intelligent and he's not gonna let steve (his protector, his brother) get murdered, so he basically starts stalking steve in his free time (lots of dustin running himself ragged and steve trying to get him to stop and taking care of him when he doesn't).

·  going through the newspapers, dustin comes across an op-ed in the indianapolis star about all these new restaurants opening across the midwest and how they're ruining the small town ambiance of the places they set up in, why just look at all this business with those missing and murdered young men; those restaurants are bringing in the undesirables from all over.

·  dustin figures it out.

·  the killer figures out that dustin has figured it out.  (the public library is a community hub, and if the new guy just so happens to be at the library when dustin is doing his research, and then out of sight but within earshot when dustin makes a frantic phone call to family video from the payphone outside, yelling at keith to give steve a message about "motel guy is the guy! he did it! get steve away from him! i'll be there soon with hopper!" then that's just serendipity).

·  dustin doesn't get a chance to call hopper.

·  but keith relays the message to steve "please stop your children from prank-calling the store, harrington"

·  dustin and hopper do not show up, so steve calls hopper and is informed that hopper has no idea what he's talking about, dustin never called him.

·  steve's protective instincts activate (just imagine a magical girl transformation here {hey, he's got the sailor suit}), and he urges hopper to look for motel guy at his motel, and then contacts robin and the rest of the party to start looking for dustin, and steve hops in his car to go looking, berating himself for not stopping dustin from hunting for a serial killer.

·  the party is freaking out over the walkies, el can't determine where dustin is other than that he is in a moving, confined space and very scared and hopper hasn't found the guy in his motel room

·  steve is wracking his brain for where evil motel guy could have taken dustin, and then remembers the man's interest in the quarry and the twenty minutes he spent one afternoon answering the guy's weird questions about it. he relays this to everyone else and sets out hell for leather for the quarry.

·  meanwhile, dustin has just arrived at the quarry with the killer and has been dragged out of the trunk and towards the edge of the cliff over the water. dustin is yelling and talking and manages to get the guy to monologue to buy time to figure out how to save himself.

·  just when the guy gets fed up with dustin stalling (he’s got things to do, people to kill, and to come up with an alibi when people realize the kid is missing after accusing him of serial murder) and is about to finish dragging him over to the cliff edge

·  steve to the rescue, with a nail bat to the back of the guy's knee, and a hard kick to the head when he’s down, and then steve is dragging dustin away from the cliff edge with both hands

·  but bad guy is not out and he’s no longer down, and he goes for steve, and a desperate fight ensues, getting closer and closer to the cliff edge and bad fall for both of them

·  but bad guy forgot about dustin when he saw his real target

·  dustin’s pretty sure he’s killed a guy before, when he shoved a cattle prod meant for a demogorgon into a guy’s chest.  and that was for steve, too, so he has no problem wating for the right moment and hitting bad guy as hard as he can in the head with a nail bat (he’s gonna be a little fucked up about it later, but it’s for steve).  the blow doesn’t instantly knock bad guy out, it just makes him stumble away from steve in a daze and tumble over the cliff

·   “holy shit, henderson… thanks, buddy”

·  the cavalry finally arrives

·  “you’re late, assholes! me and steve almost died!"

the end.

[eternalsshipsandfics]

In Cold Blood: Chapter 8

Summary: The illustrious Kuran family is thrown into disarray when the crown princess disappears under suspicious circumstances. Will she ever be found?

The cool night breeze whipped her cloak back and forth around her legs. The familiar hustle and bustle of the townspeople coupled with the familiar manor house directly ahead of her sent a blast of nostalgia towards her. She didn't know how long she had been away, but it had been a long while. It felt like a lifetime since she had seen her own home. She was grateful that Zero's escort had let her approach the manor alone.

The hood covered her face from the swarming populace who thankfully hadn't noticed her. She wanted her family and her best friend to know that she was back before anyone else. Taking in one last deep breath of the uplifting scent of home, she began the final leg of her journey home.

As she got closer and closer to the door, she began to wonder what she would say. Should she remain silent; allow them to wrap their heads around her safe return? Should she act as though nothing had happened; show them that nothing had changed? Should she explain it all at once, or a little at a time?

As the intricately patterned white door loomed in front of her, she decided to play it by ear. How could you really explain your disappearance to those who loved you? Especially when you turned up completely unharmed a while later. Her soft knock soon yielded a tiny click as the door was unlocked.

"Yes?" She felt a happy smile rise on her smile as the familiar blond haired, green eyed butler greeted her. She pulled the hood back from her face, delighting in the shocked glee that replaced the thinly veiled boredom.

"Hello, Takuma."

"Lady Yuuki! Welcome home! Come in, come in!" She was ushered inside, the door swiftly shut behind her. She hadn't realised how much she had missed the grand entrance hall with its spiralling staircase and myriad portraits. The fresh scent of the air was replaced by subtle floral scents from the decorative plants. "Kana—Lord Kaname, Lord Rido, we have a visitor!"

Her parents weren't here, then? She felt a little disappointed that she couldn't present herself to them tonight as well. She had missed her mother's warm embrace and her father's soothing influence. Though, she was excited enough to see her big brother again after all this time. She wanted to see her uncle also, but she had never been as close to him as she had the other three.

"A visitor at this hour?" She resisted the urge to run up the spiral staircase to her big brother at the sound of his voice. She felt like a little girl again as she caught sight of him. He looked more mature than he had the last time she had seen him; he was beginning to take on the slightly harassed look that her father had mastered over his years as king.

His eyes widened at the sight of his younger sister, and he almost skipped over the last few steps in his haste. She was rapidly pulled into his embrace.

"Yuuki! You're alright!"

She wrapped her arms tightly around him. To have her loving older brother back with her like this… she had known that it would happen eventually, but now that it had, she could barely describe the bliss she felt.

"I'm home, Kaname."

"Welcome home, Yuuki."

"What's all the noi- Yuuki." Rido didn't sound surprised to see her, as though he had expected to walk down the stairs and find his niece unharmed in the entrance hall.

"Uncle Rido!" The hug she shared with him was short; almost devoid of emotion. Whilst she had been distracted, Takuma had slipped away to attend to his duties. It was just her and her relatives.

"You must be tired, Yuuki. Go and rest! Get cleaned up. We'll call you down to dinner." Kaname told her. "We can catch up then."

"Now that you mention it, I am rather tired."

She had an affectionate kiss pressed to her forehead (god, she had missed this) before she started up the steps; Kaname giving her a lilting reassurance that her room was still the same. When she had lived here before, she had simply hurried through the sophisticated hallways without taking in the beauty of the architecture. Now, she took a slow, appreciative walk.

She had a bright smile and a thank you for a human maid that was hurrying by her, which caused the maid to stagger slightly behind her. Yuuki was going to make sure that she was alright, but she righted herself and gave her a slightly apprehensive nod. Had she always been so unaware of them that they would react in such a way? She had prided herself on her forward thinking views, but she couldn't put hand on heart and say that she had acted much differently to any other vampire. She resolved to thank all of her slaves and servants when she could. If her time in the hunter colony had taught her anything, it was that they worked very hard.

The solid mahogany door loomed in front of her. She had never realised just how big it was. After living in such a small room, she had a newfound appreciation for hers. The crystal knob was cold to the touch and yielded easily to the twist of her hand.

He hadn't lied to her. The large four-poster bed was still standing strong in the far corner of the room, just out of sight of the frosted glass window. Her vanity with the princess mirror stood regally on top and her huge mahogany wardrobe seemed to be welcoming her home. She had a thought to change the airy yellow wallpaper. Maybe a nice lilac…

She flung open the window to gaze outside. There were no market stalls set up tonight. Was that due to the traders, or had one of her relatives ordered it? It seemed like even the servants had turned in, only a few milling around the grounds and taking in the night air as she had. The more hectic activity would be further away, where the town began.

Her eyes darted back and forth in the vain hope of locating Yori. She knew that she shouldn't really be expecting Hanabusa and Yori; after all, they didn't live here. They did have to go home, eventually. She could always get Kaname to send out a summons for them.

She sat down on the edge of the bed. Now that her goal had been met, nothing was directing her thoughts anymore. As such, her thoughts drifted back to the man she had grown to care for while she was away. Along her journey home, she had accepted that this was the way things had to be. She had been telling herself as such before he set her free, but…

It would have been dangerous had she stayed. Not so much for herself, but for him. While he was near, she had been spiralling out of control; the urge to bite and drink deeply from his neck growing stronger and stronger with each passing moment. She would have killed him with her desire.

That didn't make parting from him any less painful for her. She laid back on her bed, gazing up at the rich ceiling above her; the thirst clawing and scratching at her parched throat. This was her punishment, she mused. She was a foolish girl after all.

Forcing herself back up, she headed towards her ensuite bathroom. She needed a delicious scalding hot bath.

~Z~

This was odd. The soft clatter of knives and forks and the pleasant aroma of rich food, coupled with there being actual people eating with her made her feel… not uneasy, exactly, it wasn't a negative feeling. It had become something outside of the norm, different.

Kaname had informed her that she had been gone for a full year. That had surprised her. Time had become a nebulous term in the colony; the only time days had any significance were birthdays. She didn't exactly have open access to a calendar like some of the residents did. She decided to be the one to break the comfortable silence.

"So, Mother and father couldn't be here?" The clatter stopped for the briefest of seconds, and she caught the tail-end of an awkward look between the two males opposite her. Her stomach dropped. Something was wrong.

"Not over the dinner table."

"She deserves to know, Kaname."

"Know what? What happened?" She was beginning to feel a panic rising to life inside her. Kaname was hesitating to speak to her, swallowing visibly as he sought the correct words. He settled on the direct approach.

"Father is dead, Yuuki."

"Wh-what?" It was as though the rug had been pulled out from under her feet. If she had been standing, she was certain that she would have collapsed. Of course, his absence had been immediately noticed by Yuuki, a true daddy's girl, but she had assumed…

"Your mother has been absent in grief for a while. She's kept in touch through writing." Rido took over. Yuuki was struggling to wrap her brain around this news. She hadn't expected her goodbye a year before to have been their final goodbye.

"How did he…?"

"Murder." Rido told her. She felt a mite of disgust at the relief that she felt. She couldn't have handled it if he had killed himself. But then…

"But only hunter weapons can kill a pureblood…" She left unsaid that another pureblood would be able to accomplish the same feat. That was too hard to accept.

"We did find some hair that didn't belong to father at the scene of his death. It matches the known criminal, Zero Kiryuu."

The cutlery finally fell from her fingers, pure shock rolling over her in waves. Zero had done this? The same Zero that had protected her from the assassination attempt? The same Zero who had been so affectionate to the young Yui? The same Zero who had danced with her? She couldn't equate the two.

"When did this happen?" She finally asked in a shuddering voice.

"It was shortly after you disappeared. You can imagine how worried we were when we heard that you were seen in his vicinity."

Yuuki had completely lost her appetite. Zero had been gone for a while shortly after she had woken up. Had he been out murdering her father? Was he, in actuality, a manipulative monster? No… No, she didn't believe that. The colony's affection for him was genuine. Even he couldn't manipulate hundreds of people from different backgrounds in such a way.

"I don't think he did it." She said quietly.

"What?"

"I don't think he did it. He treated me well. He's a kind person."

"You would say that. You've been under his control for a year, dear niece."

"No, it's not that!"

"Yuuki, I understand your reluctance to accept the truth…"

"It isn't the truth! He's being framed!"

"Yuuki…" Kaname sounded like he pitied her. It was as though she had been stabbed in the gut. He had always believed her before, so why wouldn't he believe her earnest response now? She felt betrayed.

"Why won't you believe me?"

"Like Uncle Rido said, you've been with him for a year. He's had plenty of time to manipulate you."

"He hasn't manipulated me!"

"We'll get the truth out of him when we catch him." Rido commented. Yuuki felt a stab of panic. Her uncle wasn't known for being the nicest of vampires.

"Don't you hurt him!" She demanded. She had gotten to her feet and slammed her hands onto the table, though she didn't remember doing that.

"After all the innocent vampires he's murdered in cold blood?"

"Were they innocent?" She asked, before she turned away from both of them. "I'm not hungry. I'm going to bed."

She could only imagine the looks her retreating back was receiving.

~Z~

The next night, after she had calmed herself down, a familiar mass of dirty blond hair caught her attention. She didn't know if her best friend had been informed of her return, but her reaction when she saw her would be more than satisfactory when she saw her.

Channelling her inner predator, Yuuki stalked stealthily toward the oblivious Yori. The startled squeak as she wrapped her arms around her in a sudden hug was worth it. The surprised bliss on Yori's face when she turned and saw her brunette friend was like ambrosia to Yuuki. Yori returned the hug with an enthusiastic squeal of her name.

"I knew you'd come back!" The mood changed as Yori pulled back, a thought striking her. "Do you know…?"

"About father? Yeah."

"I'm so sorry that you had to come back to that…"

"I don't really want to talk about it…" Only a day had passed; it was still too new to her. She wasn't sure that it had really sunk in yet. Yori gave her a sympathetic nod. Then she appeared to be chewing over her next choice of words, as Kaname had.

"How was Zero when you left him?"

"He was fine… Zero?" She would have thought that Yori would have referred to him by his nickname; as unwilling to give him an identity as the others.

"That's good. And he treated you well?"

"Yes. He treated me better than most of the others there." Yori looked…relieved? Had she been correct in her assumption a year earlier? Was she a sympathiser?

"I'm going to tell you something that I haven't told anyone else. Please don't repeat it to anyone."

"I swear I'll take it to my grave."

"Zero and I used to be close friends when we were young."

"What? You were?" Yuuki had always just assumed that Yori had been born into servitude. Technically, she had by virtue of being human. From what she had heard of Zero's background, he seemed to have lived free from vampires until that fateful night. Had he not after all? Or had Yori previously been a free human?

"You seem confused, Yuuki. I wasn't always Hanabusa's – Lord Aido's servitude. I was born in a town hidden from vampire society. The same town that he was born in. We always played together; him, his brother and me."

"Brother?" He hadn't mentioned a brother when they had been talking. Perhaps she should have paid attention to his wording.

"Yes. His name was Ichiru. He's…not around anymore."

"Oh, I see…"

"We were very close, as I said. That's how I knew he wouldn't hurt you."

Yuuki pouted a little. "You didn't worry about me?"

"Of course I worried about you. But the danger wasn't from Zero. He's always been kind hearted."

"I got that impression." She agreed.

"We were out playing as normal when we were discovered by vampires. There were a few of them, and we were quickly separated. A few of the townspeople were unlucky. The vampires were…sadistic… to put it mildly. Some of us were kept alive to be toyed with for days after the initial attack. It was awful." She shuddered a little at the memory. She didn't go into detail. "I didn't see him after that, but I always wondered. And when we saw that poster last year, I was so relieved that he was alive."

"Why didn't you tell me this before?"

"You hadn't had the chance to know him yet. I didn't…want them to know my association to the vampires' public enemy number one."

"Yori… How did you get away from them?" Yori was about to answer, when she received a sudden call from another servant. It seemed like she was in the middle of a task when Yuuki had interrupted her.

"I'll tell you another time. It's so good to see you back." She gave her best friend another hug before she hurried away to complete her task.

~Z~

That night, while Yuuki was rooting around in the familiar bedroom she hadn't been in for a long time, she found a familiar face stuck behind her dresser where it had fallen over a year before. She wiped the dust off of the soft silver fur, looking into the small button eyes of the little toy wolf.

As she climbed into bed for the day, she found herself holding the wolf close. She didn't need to sleep with a teddy anymore, but she kept the tiny animal close as she drifted into a restless sleep.

~Z~

The following year was positively uneventful compared to the one that preceded it. The citizenry appeared calm as the memory of their leader's murder faded into the background. Rido had fully taken over his brothers duties; Kaname having informed him that he didn't feel that he could handle the responsibility yet.

Kaname seemed to have pulled away from her and their uncle. He had been willing to provide her with blood before, but since she had returned, he hadn't allowed her even once. She had been taking the blood she needed from vampire servants who lined up to offer their blood to her. It wasn't satisfactory. The past year had seen her suffer more and more from her unquenchable thirst.

Yuuki had attempted to forget Zero Kiryuu. If she forgot his existence, then she wouldn't be so thirsty anymore. Unfortunately for her, the rather frequent hunting parties sent out to find him served as a constant reminder. It didn't seem as though anyone had noticed how her thirst seemed to have increased tenfold. She hoped that it would remain that way. Kaname and Rido still held onto the belief that he had been manipulating her, so she hadn't spoken to either of them about him.

She had confided in Yori (who had noticed that she would often mope when Zero's name was mentioned and thus connected the dots) that she had hoped that it had just been a passing crush; her growing thirst simply accompanying the powerful peak of her feelings before she returned to normal. She had been forced to accept that this wasn't the case. A year later, and she had to accept that she was completely in love with Zero Kiryuu.

She had been preparing for the annual slave auction. This year, the anger had an extra burning edge to it that had not existed previously. She hadn't been as deeply immersed in the lives of humans before. Now that she was weaving through the usual crowds with her dearest brother, she felt severely out of place.

A different auctioneer stood before her on stage, calling out across the milling crowd. The line of humans that had been captured stood submissively; having been severely abused and beaten until they obeyed their new overlords. Her blood boiled.

Before Kaname could stop her, she was up on that stage; the milling crowd coming to a halt when they realised that their princess was before them.

"How can you all stand by and condone this barbarity! These humans were just living their lives, not bothering any of us before they were ripped from their families and brought here for our convenience! Who gave vampires the right to treat humans this way?" Her angry tirade was brought to a stop as Kaname roughly covered her mouth. The crowd was murmuring a myriad of things that she couldn't make out over the sound of blood rushing through her ears.

"I am very sorry for my sister! Please go about your business." Kaname dragged her off of the stage, not allowing her to open her mouth until they were a decent distance from the stage.

"What the hell? I thought you agreed with me!"

"You aren't the one who'll be punished for this, Yuuki!"

The implication of his statement made her blood run cold.

"Why would they punish innocent people?"

"Because they can't punish you." Yuuki struggled to hold back the pure rage that flooded through her. These people were living beings, with thoughts and dreams of their own. They weren't property.

The crowds were silenced once more when a town crier appeared with a message from the king. A summons to the main square. Yuuki felt the familiar uneasiness settle over her as she and Kaname obediently lead the way to the main square.

It was still referred to as the main square, but the truth was that it had been blocked off indefinitely for months. Many rumours had been floating around about the purpose of the closure, and they were about to see just what had been done.

As they arrived, they noticed the newly built stand. On top of the stand was a block with a single indent in the wood about the size of the average neck. A chopping block. That suited Rido's cruel need for dominance. What better way to take control than to wield the power of life and death?

Secondary to the block, they noticed Rido himself up on the stand. He gave Kaname and Yuuki a commanding look, which they obeyed. They came to a stop next to him, presented to the muttering crowds once more.

"Citizens!" Rido began as the crowds quieted down, "Our princess has been returned to us for a full year! We are all grateful for her safe return!" The crowd roared its' support. Yuuki shuffled uncomfortably.

"However, her kidnapper has remained elusive in the same time span. We have sent hunting party after hunting party to track him down. This is not unexpected; he has been eluding us for years before he took our lady Yuuki. Fortunately, our search has not been for nought."

He gestured to his right. Yuuki shared a glance with Kaname as the crowd gave up an anticipatory roar. Two vampires roughly handled a man who was dressed in tattered rags that must have once been clothes with a woollen sack covering his head onto the stand. His arms were tied tightly behind his back. Her heart sank.

This couldn't be him. He had been successfully eluding them for years, as her uncle had just told the crowd. Why would he suddenly be caught now? She realised that her logic was flawed. Just because he had been successful before didn't mean that he couldn't make a mistake.

But his aura was different. It didn't feel the same as the one she had grown so used to. It was…harsher somehow. More jagged at the edges. He was probably just giving them a show to keep them on side, using an innocent man to pretend that the threat was over.

"Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you the notorious murderer and kidnapper; the esteemed silver wolf himself, Zero Kiryuu!"

On cue, the bag was whipped from his head. Yuuki failed to stifle a gasp. Though the man's eyes and mouth were covered with a thick line of material, the unique silver hair told her all she needed to know.

Zero had come back into her life.

[facts-before-ideology]

It’s a clammy summer night. You’re 24, and you call a suicide hotline.

The nice lady who answers is probably in her seventies. She is very understanding as you explain to her that hundreds of people, thousands of strangers, are saying awful things about you, that some of them seem to really want to hurt you. You don’t know why. You’re just a writer, and you didn’t expect this. But some of them tell you in detail their fantasies of your rape and murder.

The nice lady is very sweet as she asks you if these voices ever tell you to do things. Yes, they tell you to stop writing. You inform the nice lady about this in a creepy whisper because your family is sleeping nearby and you don’t want to wake or worry them. These strangers tell you you don’t deserve to live, let alone have a newspaper column. Do they tell you to hurt yourself? Yes, every day.

The nice lady tells you to hold the line, because if it’s alright, she’s going to transfer you to one of her colleagues with specialist training.

No, wait, you say. You’re not hearing voices. You’re not delusional.  The nice lady can Google you. This is really happening.

* * *

The internet hates women. Everyone knows that by now, and nobody precisely approves, but we’ve reached a point of collective tolerance. It’s just the way of the world, and if you can’t handle it, honey, delete your account. Stop engaging online. Cut yourself off from friends, family, and professional contacts, shut down your business, blow up your social capital, stop learning, stop talking, just stop. Or else.

The U.N. Broadband Commission tells us that one in five young women has been sexually harassed online. Amnesty International’s latest report suggested that over three-quarters of women and girls expected violence and abuse if they expressed an opinion online. “Online” is the least significant word in those sentences. I have been asked enough times if “the internet is bad for women.” And yes, there is reason enough to warn your daughter, your partner, your friend to watch out for herself online, to think twice before “putting herself out there.” You’d warn her in much the same way that you might warn her not to walk through town alone at night, not to wear a short skirt, not to let her guard down, not to relax, ever. And the message is the same: The future, like the past, is not for you. You may visit, but only if you behave.

* * *

You’re 23. You’re an aspiring writer and the blog you write about gender, sex, and welfare from your roach-infested bedroom is nominated for a major prize. You get to go to a fancy ceremony. Your parents are proud. You put on your best shirt and try to look comfortable. All the other nominees are older, and most of them are men, and as you are stashing fancy food in your rucksack to take home and share, one of them comes over and whispers gleefully in your ear: How does it feel to be a hate figure?

You should have taken it as a warning. This is about the time when the death threats start.

* * *

The year 2010, according to a recent report from Manchester Metropolitan University, was when the snowball of new feminism got up enough momentum to become a threat to culture. That momentum came from the internet. “The ability to call out sexism and misogyny on social media has revolutionized the feminist movement,” writes Dr. Emma Turley, one of the authors of the paper.

When it comes to feminism, simply describing the world as so many of us actually experience it can be a radical act, and that’s what a lot of women started doing in 2010 in numbers too big to ignore. However, the report goes on to note that “Social media can expand the means to proliferate misogynistic and sexist narratives, and shame women and maintain power inequalities in the offline world.” The year 2010 was also when mob harassment started to be weaponized against women online in an organized way. That’s no coincidence. Just about exactly when women started to use the internet to organize in ways that kept patriarchy awake at night, it started to become a truism that the internet was a dangerous place for girls. This development is always described in the passive voice, as if there weren’t a lot of people out there determined to make sure it stays that way.

It’s easy to blame technology for this, and people do. I do. I have been known to tell concerned friends and family who are wondering why I suddenly seem so scared of my phone that “the internet is being a bastard today,” not because I really think that the internet is a sentient machine capable of specific and malicious bastardry, but because it’s sometimes too depressing to acknowledge that one is surrounded by moral illegitimacy on all sides.

Let’s be daring for a minute and consider an alternative theory: The internet does not hate women. The internet doesn’t hate anyone, because the internet, being an inanimate network, lacks the capacity to hold any opinion whatsoever. People hate women, and the internet allows them to do it faster, harder, and with impunity. It’s developed into a form of relaxation after a hard day of being ground on the wheel of late-stage capitalism. Melvin Kranzberg’s statement that “technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral” holds true here: The internet lets us be whoever we were before, more efficiently, with fewer consequences.

Misogyny is among many things millennials did not invent. Long before Twitter was a glint in Jack Dorsey’s eye, women who stepped out of line were being shamed by Left and Right alike regardless of which wave of feminism they rode.

The most damaging attacks, however, often came from inside the movement. Years after witnessing violent takedowns of other women in the late ’60s, Jo Freeman penned a desperate article in Ms. Magazine in 1975, “Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood,” which rings a note of ominous familiarity for anyone who has watched what happens to progressive women who dare to display self-respect in public:

It is not disagreement; it is not conflict; it is not opposition. These are perfectly ordinary phenomena which, when engaged in mutually, honestly, and not excessively, are necessary to keep an organism or organization healthy and active. Trashing is a particularly vicious form of character assassination… It is manipulative, dishonest, and excessive. It is occasionally disguised by the rhetoric of honest conflict, or covered up by denying that any disapproval exists at all. But it is not done to expose disagreements or resolve differences. It is done to disparage and destroy.

Forty years later, trashing is still progressives’ favorite tactic to deploy against uppity women. When it happens in the playground, it’s called bullying. When it happens in the workplace, the phenomenon is delicately known as mobbing. Again, researchers report high levels of post-traumatic stress among those who have been subject to it. Again, those singled out for mobbing are more likely to be high-achievers, more likely to be potential leaders, and especially likely to be women.

Freeman continues:

Trashing is not only destructive to the individuals involved, but serves as a very powerful tool of social control. The qualities and styles which are attacked become examples other women learn not to follow — lest the same fate befall them. […] This kind of woman has always been put down by our society with epithets ranging from “unladylike” to “castrating bitch.” The primary reason there have been so few “great women ______” is not merely that greatness has been undeveloped or unrecognized, but that women exhibiting potential for achievement are punished by both women and men. The “fear of success” is quite rational when one knows that the consequence of achievement is hostility and not praise.

Trashing is insidious. It can damage its subject for life, personally and professionally. Whether or not people sympathize, the damage has been done. It doesn’t matter if the attacks have any basis in truth: What matters is that she is difficult. This woman who doesn’t have the sense to protect herself from public shaming by piping down, by walking with her eyes lowered. She can be trashed intimately by people who don’t know her, people who are engaging, at best, with a flimsy caricature based on her worst qualities, and she might understand that it’s not really her they hate, but she’s the one getting those messages every day.

In the 1970s, trashing had to be done with analog tools. Today, it is faster, harder, more savagely intimate. It follows you to work. It follows you to bed. Freeman was talking about the feminist Left, but this happens everywhere. In fact, committed hatred of successful women and a destructive obsession with women who step outside their lane seem to be the sole point on which the entire political spectrum is in absolute agreement.

https://longreads.com/2018/03/28/who-does-she-think-she-is/

[lodelss]

Alice Driver | Longreads | July 2020 | 16 minutes (3,906 words)

“Me with two suitcases, without knowing anything, so far away, not speaking the language, oh no, it was a total odyssey.” — Karla Avelar

* * *

Home was 16 by 26 feet. When Karla, 41, lay on her single bed at night, she could stretch out her left arm and grab her mother Flor’s* hand. She and her mother, who was 64, hadn’t lived together for 32 years: Now they practiced French together and her mother, who never learned to write, carefully traced the letters of the French alphabet in cursive well into the night. Neither of them had finished elementary school; Flor, born in rural El Salvador, was forced to leave school after first grade to work and help support her family and Karla was forced out of school in eighth grade due to bullying from teachers and students who told her she had to dress like a man in order to attend class, who once tried to hold her down and cut her hair and who frequently beat her up. Home was the name she had chosen for herself — Karla Avelar — one that was first legally recognized when she was 41 and requesting asylum in Switzerland. When the weight of memories of her previous life haunted Karla, she went outside to search for a place to cry alone.

When I first met Karla in San Salvador, El Salvador in July 2017, her home was a place I couldn’t safely visit. Karla, a renowned LGBTQ activist, had been nominated for the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights, which would come with a large cash prize of if she won. Members of the Mara Salvatrucha in Karla’s neighborhood, part of an international gang known as the MS-13, had become aware of the news and had threatened to kill her if she won and didn’t hand the money over to them. She had even been forced to change houses due to the threats, but she still felt her neighborhood wasn’t safe for me to visit, so we met at the offices of COMCAVIS TRANS, an NGO that was the culmination of her life’s work as an activist. Like so many trans women in El Salvador, she had survived more violence than most of us could imagine — rapes, assassination attempts, being unjustly imprisoned — and after being released from prison, she founded COMCAVIS TRANS as the first openly HIV positive trans woman in the country. I interviewed Karla for a story about the reasons why trans woman flee El Salvador, neither of us knowing that Karla would eventually become the story.

On October 6, 2017, roughly a month-and-a-half after we bid each other farewell in San Salvador, Karla and her mother flew to Switzerland to attend the awards ceremony for Martin Ennals Award nominees. When they arrived in Switzerland, Flor broke down and told Karla that members of the MS-13 gang had come to her house, beat her up and forced her to watch a video in which they were torturing a man, telling her that they would do the same thing to Karla. Before leaving, they told Flor that they would rape her in front of Karla and then kill her if Karla didn’t hand over the prize money. And then they asked her to confirm the date that Karla would return to El Salvador after her trip to Switzerland.

Karla relayed the threats to the members of the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights who were worried that she would be assassinated if she returned to El Salvador. They encouraged her and her mother to apply for asylum in Switzerland. At the awards ceremony, Karla was recognized for her activism and awarded a monetary prize plus an additional amount to donate to the NGO of her choice. Karla and Flor didn’t have time to celebrate — they needed a few days alone to consider what it would mean to never return to the land of their birth. Karla was proud that she had lived honestly in El Salvador, not hiding her past as a sex worker, as someone who had spent time in jail and was HIV+, even when it put her at risk, but she also knew many trans women who had been murdered for their activism.

On Oct. 22, 2017, Karla and Flor requested asylum in Switzerland, and they were sent to a shelter for asylum seekers. “It was huge,” said Karla of the shelter, adding, “at first [the other migrants] treated us very badly. There was a lot of xenophobia directed at us because we were from Latin America.” After Karla was harassed by a group of African migrants, she and Flor were moved to another shelter where they spent 22 days. The shelter — in contrast to the U.S. detention system which often disregards the safety of the transgender community — provided all transgender asylum seekers with a private room with a kitchen and a bath and guaranteed their privacy and security. Karla and her mother were assigned a social worker to help them through the asylum process, a woman who initially called Karla by the name assigned to her at birth. Karla explained that although it was insulting, “I didn’t want to switch social workers — I wanted her to change and to have the chance to rectify.”

After three weeks at the shelter, Karla and her mother were given the choice of three small government subsidized apartments in a town where they could await their asylum hearing. Karla requested that the names of places where she has lived in Switzerland be omitted for her safety. She visited them all and picked the apartment that was closest to a hospital knowing that she would need to take care of some urgent health issues — a doctor in El Salvador at the Ministry of Health had diagnosed her with a terminal illness. And that is how Karla and Flor ended up in a studio apartment with just enough room for two single beds, a small sink, and a bathroom. “I invade her privacy as an older adult person and she invades my privacy as a trans person,” explained Karla as we sat at an open-air restaurant in October 2018. When I visited her, she and her mother were still stateless, slowly working their way through the asylum process while living off a small monthly stipend provided by the Swiss government. As Karla described the situation, “Although we were born in El Salvador, we no longer have Salvadoran nationality and we can’t travel. We live in Switzerland but we don’t have Swiss nationality so we are two stateless people and that is frustrating — not to be able to work, not to be able to study, not to be able to speak the language, to need to request a permit for everything.”

Even so, Karla was aware that she was lucky to be able to request asylum in Switzerland, a country where requesting asylum was not criminalized and where she could study French while waiting to hear the outcome of her request. “As far as being an activist, I’ve been really fortunate during the [asylum] process,” she explained. “Activism has provided me with support — both financial and moral — from friends and allied organizations that I met through my work.” At COMCAVIS TRANS, Karla had provided support to help trans women who wanted to migrate to the U.S. understand the asylum process and gathered documentation of the violence they had experienced. She had lived the violence that trans women experienced, and understood intimately why trans women sought asylum in the U.S. and Europe.

A 2019 study which COMCAVIS TRANS contributed to, “El Prejuicio No Conoce Fronteras” (“Prejudice Knows No Borders”), found that four LGBTQ people are murdered every day in Latin America and the Caribbean. The study showed that roughly 1,300 members of the LGBTQ community have been murdered in the region in the past five years, a figure that includes many of Karla’s trans friends. To put this data in context, which is important because violence against the LGBTQ community is often underreported, between 1990-2019, 350 trans women who Karla was friends with in El Salvador or who she had met through work at COMCAVIS TRANS were murdered. Many countries in the region, like El Salvador, have few if any laws to protect the LGBTQ community, and since police and the army are often implicated in such violence, laws are rarely enforced.

Most Central American migrants still seek asylum in the U.S., but the number seeking asylum in Europe has increased nearly 4,000 percent in the last decade. Given the cost of paying smugglers and the violence of gangs controlling routes to the U.S., some Central American migrants have discovered that the journey to Europe is safer and cheaper. In Karla’s case, she never planned to migrate to Switzerland, but as soon as she requested asylum, she began networking with LGBTQ migrants from Central America across Europe to form a supportive community like the one she had created in San Salvador.

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The day we reunited in Switzerland, she greeted me in French, the skin around her eyes crinkling as she smiled. She wore jeans, light blue shoes, and a top with pink, blue, and black feathers. We sat in the golden late afternoon light and ordered fondue as we watched lean, youthful bodies jump into a nearby lake. Karla, her face relaxed, talked about the support the Swiss government had provided her to get medical care, describing how all tests for the terminal illness at the hospital had come back negative. She believed the diagnosis that she had received in El Salvador boiled down to doctors discriminating against her and misdiagnosing her as a form of “psychological torture” for being trans. “There are other concerns, right? But a negative diagnosis is the lottery for me right now,” she said.

Karla would also receive support to get reconstructive breast surgery and to fully transition into the body she had always dreamed of, a process that doctors said would take about three years. “In my youth, when I was 15, I injected mineral oil into my breasts,” Karla explained. “It is a do-it-yourself process in Latin America; some trans inject mineral, some airplane oil, some cooking oil, but they all are serious things over time.” When Karla had been beat up by the police in El Salvador — their way of punishing her for being a sex worker — they had hit her breasts, leaving behind hematomas that doctors in El Salvador diagnosed as a terminal illness. “That was news that emotionally destroyed me,” whispered Karla. The doctor in El Salvador had also told her, “What you need to do is look for God.” After being trapped in a body that was not aligned with who she felt she was and lied to by doctors in her own country, Karla was thankful to finally have doctors who respected her. Given that she had waited more than 40 years to fully transition to look and feel as she had always seen herself, three years would feel like no time at all.

Throughout the process of receiving asylum, the Swiss government provided Karla with comprehensive health care that respected her needs as a trans woman. “I am very lucky that the head HIV doctor speaks Spanish. She is from Argentina and she is fabulous,” said Karla, mentioning the compassion with which her team of doctors has treated her. Karla’s experience proved a marked contrast to the experience of trans women who seek asylum in the U.S. who: 1) are sent to detention centers rather than shelters like in Switzerland, 2) are often held in male detention centers in the US where they are likely to experience violence (Cibola County Correctional Center is the only ICE facility in the U.S. with a unit reserved exclusively for trans women), and 3) if they are HIV+, receive negligent medical treatment, which, in cases like those of Roxana Hernández and Joana Medina León, leads to death. In the U.S., migrants and asylees are treated like criminals in the billion-dollar detention business which is mostly run via private prison companies.

Even though laws protecting the LGBTQ community in Switzerland were stronger than in El Salvador, Karla still saw an opportunity to use her experience to provide support for others adjusting to a new home. “I’m thinking of founding an organization here for trans women migrants who are refugees,” Karla said as she dipped her bread in fondue. “We could raise funds and create a baseball or a soccer teams for LGBTQ refugees.” She had turned over COMCAVIS TRANS to one of her co-workers, but she felt a lot of guilt about leaving her colleagues and her community and worried that they felt abandoned by her. “Talking about Comcavis brings up memories — and not only memories — it moves my heart because it is a project that was born out of necessity that I experienced firsthand as a [trans] person and that, in the end, became a reality and went on to benefit many people,” explained Karla. “I hope I can achieve this other trans dream.”

When we first met in San Salvador, Karla talked about how she responded to being a victim of countless acts of violence. “There is nothing to do but rebel,” she said. “Rebelling is one way and another is to claim your rights. The fact is you’ve got to claim the right to live because if you don’t claim it, you become a victim of that violation, of that aggression.” And the beauty of watching how Karla worked was seeing that she rebelled by claiming rights for the LGBTQ community, by creating spaces where they could feel safe and learn more about their legal rights.

After dinner, we walked around a lake, stopping to sit on a bench at dusk, the night gathering around us as we talked. Cruise ships lit up red and yellow passed by as Karla talked about how she had waited her entire life to change her name legally, and that as of June 21, 2018, she was officially Karla Avelar. “This has allowed me to not only feel good about myself, but to also feel good socially because I know that I can go to the bank, the grocery store or the pharmacy and that they will treat me like I want to be treated,” explained Karla. Her mother, whose house she fled when she was 9 because she was being abused by a family member and was rejected for her long hair and feminine gestures, had only become part of her life again after she was released from prison in 2002. Flor first called her Karla in 2017. “It was such a surprise that I couldn’t think of what to say. I just thought, ‘Wow, my mom called me Karla’ and from then on, she said ‘Karla’ except sometimes she called me my birth name because she would call me her son. But it made me very happy to see that she corrected herself and called me ‘Karla’ and then when she was speaking to people she would say, ‘This is my daughter.’”

Both mother and daughter struggled with their inability to work. “It was not easy for me to throw away my life’s dream,” Karla said, referring to her work at COMCAVIS TRANS.  In March of 2018, Karla became depressed and didn’t get out of bed for two weeks. “I told my mom to close the curtains and leave the room dark. I was so helpless that I think I went a week without showering.” In those first months in Switzerland, she and her mother looked for places to cry alone until they slowly built up the confidence to cry openly in front of each other. But there were also days when Karla and Flor were immersed in French classes, thrilled at the opportunity to be learning in a supportive environment. And as news of Karla’s asylum request spread, she began to receive messages on Facebook from members of the LGBTQ community around the globe. “They called me and sent me hugs and nice emails — so many trans people did, people who I helped,” said Karla. She shared one Facebook message that read: “Karla, it took you a long time, but congratulations, you are now free.”

Karla had begun to participate in events and conferences, including a one about global refugees, and she was helping a doctoral thesis student at a university in Holland with her research into the motives that force trans women to migrate to Europe. “I helped her contact trans women in Europe who are requesting asylum. Here she will do interviews with a Panamanian, a Costa Rican and me, and then she will go to Italy, Spain, Madrid, Morocco.”

Karla stood up from the bench, walked to the lake’s edge, and hopped onto the white railing surrounding the lake, kicking her legs in the air and throwing her head back. “I am excited, excited because I want to learn another language,” she said smiling. As soon as she mastered French, which she knew would be difficult given how long she had been out of school, she wanted to learn a third language: English. On the first day of French class, she was the only Latin American in class, so she felt like a fish out of water and wished that the earth would open and swallow her. However, as she continued attending classes, her excitement won out over her nerves — and she was also proud that she had earned high marks from her demanding teacher. “I think that this is a country of respect, a country of opportunities, a country that gives you confidence. And you should treat that confidence like a treasure. I also think that it’s a very strict country that adheres to a lot of laws, to the rules, but therefore it guarantees a lot of rights,” Karla said.

As we walked back to her apartment, down brightly lit avenues, she talked about Flor and her bravery in fighting against a society that had discriminated against her for having a trans daughter. “I think my biggest inspiration is my mother. I’m sure it is my mom because sometimes I’m in bed and she suddenly gets up and it is 12 or 1 in the morning, and she is studying. Then I think to myself, ‘How strong is my mother’s willpower!’”

We walked up a narrow stairway and down a hall lined with trash cans to a thin wooden door. When Karla opened it, we saw Flor sitting on the bed on the right side of the room, a pencil in hand, working on her French homework while practicing her pronunciation under her breath. She stood up, all of five feet tall, her wiry black hair shot through with white in a ponytail, and said, Bonsoir! The cinder-block walls were painted white, and the beds, a few feet apart, were narrow. On the right side of the room was a tiny sink and a hotplate surrounded by a few dishes, and on the left side was a small, bare bathroom. There was just enough space for two people to move around without bumping into each other, but as Karla put it, “In reality, we invade each other’s privacy because there is just one room.”

Karla and I sat on her narrow bed, while Flor situated herself across from us on her bed. Flor and Karla had the same round cheeks that flushed whenever they were happy. We talked about Estrella, a trans woman who Karla had introduced me to in San Salvador, who had received asylum in the U.S. and legally changed her name to Michelle. While Karla studied French in Switzerland, Michelle studied English in the U.S., something that brought them both joy given that they had been forced out of school in El Salvador due to discrimination. Over the two years of our relationship, Karla and Michelle often wrote me on Facebook, initially to discuss individual cases of injustice against trans women and later to celebrate the simple things they had always wished to do but been denied: to study, to work the job of their choice, to watch a same sex couple walk down the street peacefully hand in hand.

“I remember that when I started to express my gender, [the teachers] ordered me to cut my hair,” Karla said, looking back on her childhood. “I remember that my school teacher and director, who was named Francisco, said that because I identified as gay, I was ordered to collect shit from the toilets, from the latrines. I was ordered to collect rotten sludge for being queer. All those things force you not only to leave school but to abandon your studies. They condemn you, they condemn you to being poor, to pursuing sex work, to not being able to feed yourself, to ending up in prison because you have no preparation, no work, no home.” Karla, like Michelle, had faced discrimination in El Salvador from a young age. She remembered that when she founded COMCAVIS TRANS, she didn’t know how to turn on a computer. “Nobody was ever going to teach me, so I taught myself how to use Excel, Microsoft Word. I learned out of pure necessity,” described Karla. The last time we all saw each other on a street corner in San Salvador in August 2017, Michelle and Karla were both afraid of being assassinated by gangs, unsure of the future.

When I left their apartment that night, Karla and her mother were practicing French together, looking over their homework, reviewing their professors’ corrections, finding joy in an educational process they had both been denied for a lifetime. The began: un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six, sept, huit, neuf, dix and worked their way up to 100, their bodies relaxed, their faces hopeful. “If it is going to take me 10, 15 years to learn French — it will take you less,” said Karla to Flor. “I am going to die trying,” she added, laughing.

Two months later, in early December 2019, while at home in Mexico City, I received a WhatsApp message from Karla: “I wanted to share my happiness. Today I received official notice that my asylum has been approved.” She attached a letter that she had written to share with family and friends. She wrote, “The road has not been easy, neither for my family nor for me, with episodes of depression, nostalgia, despair, loneliness, tears, furies and others. But here I am, enormously grateful with life for giving me a new opportunity to advance in peace, secure, calm, happy, free, and without risk of losing it at any moment because of my gender identity and my work as an LGBTI human rights activist in El Salvador and in the region.” Reading it, I remembered sitting in her office in San Salvador in 2017 as we weighed the threats against her life. She mused, “I believe, and I am very clear, that the country does not need martyrs. And I am very clear that I serve more alive than dead.” And so, in the land that first legally recognized her as Karla, she leaned in for the long haul, continuing to do the daily work that over time changes lives — mine, her mother’s, yours.

* * *

*Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

* * *

Alice Driver is a freelance journalist and the author of More or Less Dead. She writes and produces radio for National Geographic, Time, CNN, Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, Las Raras Podcast and Oxford American.

* * *

Editor: Mike Dang Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo

[marymosley]

Dowry: The Goose with the Golden Eggs

“I thought that if lokas existed at all, good women would surely go to one where men were not allowed so they could be finally free of male demands.”-These are the words of Panchali aka Draupadi in Mahabharata. This sentence clearly shows the plight of women in older days. From the time immemorial, women have been submissive to men. Practices like sati and child marriage were prevalent in a country where Saraswati, Lakshmi and Parvati are the three main goddesses of knowledge, money and power.

After independence, a wave of change saturated different classes of Indian culture and significantly amended their thoughts, propensities and traditions. One of the striking changes in Indian Social life is in the status of ladies. Ladies began leaving their draperies and started going to schools and universities and began asserting their rights yet they are being suppressed in the general public on account of an abhorrent practice called dowry which is responsible for all other violence against women like sexual slavery within marriage, infanticide, feticides, murders, suicides, demand of dowry, dowry-death, dowry burning etc.

Various laws have been established every now and then to raise the status of women yet the crime rate is still high: –

“Crimes against women increased 34 percent over the last four years to 2015, with cruelty by husbands and relatives being the most widely reported crime, according to the latest data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). The rate of crime against women – defined as crimes reported divided by women population – has gone up from 41.7 to 53.9 between 2012 and 2015.”[1]

Sadly, awareness and education, has not helped to palliate the situation. In fact, families of people who are better educated, especially those with foreign degrees want the fattest gold laying goose and when the goose stop laying the eggs then they are tormented physically, mentally and economically sometimes to the verge that they take their own lives just to escape from the greedy clutches of the in-laws and husbands. Value of the girl has nothing to do in the finality of the marriage proposition; dowry is the first and final thought for a marriage union. One may characterize this custom as the unchallenged thought that a girl’s family is substandard to the boy’s family. Therefore, they should be on their best conduct and offer sumptuous “gifts” to satisfy the boy’s family. This principle is so deep-rooted in the minds of Indians, they either destroy themselves monetarily to pay the suitable cost of the picked groom, or annihilate the possibility of this money related weight by female feticide/infanticide. This exploitative arrangement of necessity for dowry, regard and subjugation, is one of the major contributing elements thwarting the development of the Indian culture where being a lady is still seen synonymous to being a burden.

Various laws have been brought in action to curb the menace but have turned out to be a sham. Dowry Prohibition Act has been a major failure as it doesn’t stop the problem of dowry but tells how to take dowry and go around it because of the loopholes it inhibits. For ex- s.6 of the act provides that the individual taking dowry needs to give it to the bride within 3 months of marriage which can be very easily exhorted from the girl’s family and later escaped from. However, with the ascent in modernization, training, monetary security and the freshly discovered freedom the radical women’s activist has made 498A and dowry prohibition laws a weapon in her reach. Numerous helpless husbands and relatives have progressed toward becoming casualties of their wrathful daughters-in-law. It is further contended by many that in most cases where one is accused under s.498-A usually turn out to be false, blackmailing endeavors by the wife and her relatives when faced with a strained marriage. The problem of abuse under s.498A, IPC and s.304B is increasing day by day.

The legitimacy or truth of assertions will be demonstrated later (at times decades later), however until at that point, it is viewed as that whatever a woman has affirmed is the total truth. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) information clearly states in most cases U/s.498A, the conviction rate is just 13%, and pendency stays as high as 89%. Cases are recorded and stay pending in the court for a long time. Yet, all the accused are to be captured when the case is documented, as this section of the IPC is non-bailable, and only a court can concede bail to them, only on producing sureties of required amount. This arrest makes s.498A the most startling among other family laws, and makes it a criminal case.

InSushil Kumar Sharma v. UOI & others[2], the Apex Court observed the problem and stated, “The object of these provisions is to prevent and control the menace of Dowry.  But, many instances have come to light where the complaints are not bona fide and have been filed with oblique motive…. Merely because these provisions are constitutional and intra vires, does not give a license to unscrupulous persons to wreck personal vendetta or unleash harassment… But, by misuse of the provisions a new legal terrorism can be unleashed. The provisions are intended to be used a shield and not an assassin’s weapon. “

The police have an exceptionally critical part to play, with its examination control. It unquestionably brings up an issue that, why, after their watchful examination, such a low number of accused are sentenced. But, they will undoubtedly do this, because of the law requirement, which considers that whatever a lady has expressed is obvious truth. They even can’t decline to enlist a FIR. Afterward, the court additionally takes a similar technique when the accused applies for a bail or a stay on the arrest. The courts deny bail on the basis of prima facie allegations confirming the probability of crime happening.

In the event that somebody needs to be guaranteed of arrest of accused, the assertions are to be surrounded such that the court effectively observes the likelihood that the crime has happened prima facie. The measure of harassment that the accused and his family confront is indescribable. The disgrace of being captured, the dread of the police, who regard the accused as though they have carried out a merciless crime, and the blackmail that occurs in the process makes numerous breaks and confer suicide.

The key feature of this horrendous dowry problem, however, is that givers detest the practice of dowry but they either silently accept it or even like it when it comes to receiving it. Therefore, measures to control the dowry problem must be brought out after scientifically studying the social background and the society. Enacting a law no doubt activates social conscience and gives some backing of the law to victims but we cannot eradicate the evil unless the people understand the viewpoint behind the law. However, some of the things that can be done are-

Inter-cast and inter– religion marriage must be supported in public so girls would get an extensive variety of choices in finding an appropriate mate for marriage.

Expenses of the marriage should be divided equally (50-50). While researching the author came across a website discussing the dowry customs of USA, although there is no such custom as of dowry but it is a common practice that the parents of bride spend on party and celebration and groom’s parents spends on furnishing the new house of newlyweds like furniture, car and other gifts (which is the original reason behind dowry and the same is the ideology behind tradition marriage). So similar provisions from other countries could be taken and practiced in India.

Husband and wife must live in a separate home and not with in- laws. This will also help in reducing the demand of a male child over female child and promote equality. This will also help in reduction of cases of female feticide and infanticides.

People should be made aware of their rights as common people still don’t know that a bride is supposed to maintain list of the presents given to her even though The Dowry Prohibition Rules, 1985 providing for maintenance of list by both bride and bridegroom was passed 32 years ago and so it will be injudicious to think that they are aware about IPC sections or other laws.

Bride and her family must be strong enough to dial 100 or 1091/1090(women helpline no.) when someone ask for dowry.

Women should be given formal educations so they don’t have to say yes to a man who ask for dowry.

One should not attend such dowry or extravagant gifts have been demanded or given. The NGOs and women organizations can play an important role in this.

   The police must raid marriages where dowry is being exchanged. This will also completely stop the 498A extortion racket.

Court marriages should be the only legal form of marriage. This will avoid extravagant marriages. Or incentives should be given to people opting for court marriages.

Investigations should be made in marriages of high officials like IAS and IPS because they are the ones with most demands.

A separate helpline should be made for dowry so that people can report dowry exchanges as police and government officials cannot be present in every nook and corner.

Now coming to the problem of misuse –

Take no gifts and give no gifts, and get this fact recorded by atleast four witnesses.

After the wedding also, keep a record of all gifts given by groom or his family to his wife because she can drag him and his family to court for misappropriation of her stridhan.

Parties should sign prenuptial agreements so as to protect one’s interests from false cases when a marriage goes down the hill. for e.g.-before the time of marriage mention your income and during divorce she will be given ¼ x monthly income x no. of years from marriage until the last day of marriage along with any dowry given in respect of marriage or anything else as the court may deem fit.

Husband and wife must live in a separate home and not with in- laws so no case can be made against them.

In court marriages, a dowry prohibition officer must be a witness and he must sign an affidavit that no dowry has taken place and later no complaint can be filed for dowry.

Also Read:

Analysis: Indian Women in Detention & Access to Justice

Marital Rape: An Analysis

  [1]Prachi Salve, Crimes against women up 34% in four years; most reports from UP, Maharashtra, West BengalFirstpost (Sep 06, 2016 08:02:15 IST), https://ift.tt/2SCh0MH.

[2]Sushil Kumar Sharma v. UOI & others,JT 2005(6) SC 266

  Note:

The article is submitted by guest author through our open submission at legaldesire.com/submit

The views expressed are solely of the author.

The post Dowry: The Goose with the Golden Eggs appeared first on Legal Desire.

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[newssplashy]

Banky W: 'Here's what I'll tell my kids about the Super Eagles'

Banky W in his own words justaposes his lessons from Super Eagles 1-2 loss to Argentina to the state of the world.

Many years from now when, by God’s grace, my children are old enough to understand, this is exactly what I plan on telling them about my experience while watching my very first World Cup game live: “On a bright Summer night in St Petersburg, our Super Eagles played with more heart than our leaders have shown in 50 years. And I was proud to see it.”

See, I’m kind of a faith-over-facts type of sports fan, and I suspect that to a certain measure, a lot of us are. We know the facts. We know that Argentina are by far the better team. We KNOW that Leo Messi is on almost every list of the top 5 greatest football players of all time. There’s a reason that their country is currently 5th in the FIFA world Ranking, and to find Nigeria, you’d have to scroll all the way down to 48th. On paper, we know we probably never stood a chance. Coming into that game, in every position on the pitch, the gulf in talent was, to put it mildly… significant. Case in point: we have never ever in our footballing history, EVER had a striker as lethal as Sergio Aguero. Argentina had the luxury of bringing him on as a substitute late in the second half. But I plan on teaching my kids that in this life, despite seemingly insurmountable odds, you should dare to dream anyway.

And that’s exactly what most of us want, isn’t it? The opportunity to just…dream. To dream that maybe you can punch above your weight and be successful at it. Most people aren’t lucky enough to be recipients of glory in this rat race called life, so we project that innate desire onto the teams we support. And so the Nigerian team dreamt that we could do it, and we worked our asses off to make that dream come true. What we lacked in footballing pedigree, skill, and training… we almost entirely made up for in HEART. There were over 66,000 people in that stadium; between the Argentineans in attendance, and Messi’s global fanbase of billions, it looked and felt like 99% of the people in the crowd were rooting for Argentina. You could hardly sport a green jersey, and that’s not because it’s sold out. It’s because there were only a couple hundred of us, versus tens of thousands of them. The Super Eagles were playing in an Elimination Game, against arguably the Greatest player of all time, his top 5 ranked team, and over 60,000 people screaming and heckling our every kick of the ball.

But we played and we defended, we clawed and we FOUGHT. Yes, we lost, but we went down swinging and played with all the heart we could muster. And honestly? So did Argentina. Messi and co weren’t just going to roll over and die, in what would have probably been their most embarrassing world cup outing of all time. They were going to fight. And as I said in one of my numerous social-media-crazed-fan-videos, Nigeria didn’t come just to mark the register. We came to PLAY. Both sides went at it for 90+ mins, and for 86 of them, we were even. In the end, the better team won – because at this level, the truly great ones are able to capitalize on the slimmest of moments to separate themselves and secure victory. But the losing team was equally gallant in defeat. Both sides gave it their all. One side won, but both sides played with heart.

These days, I’ve found that my wife and I spend just as much time praying for our future children, as we do worrying about the kind of world we’d be bringing them into.

 There’s so much darkness, sadness, and pain in the world, you know? Here’s a laundry list of things that have happened in the past month alone: Two globally successful celebrities hung themselves. Then a woman in Lagos allegedly also committed suicide, by jumping into the lagoon. Yesterday, an undergraduate student from Lagos State University attempted to do the same. Plateau state in Nigeria has JUST been hit with two fresh sectarian attacks…over 200 people were slaughtered in cold blood – the latest in a very long line of mass murders over the years. Add the frequency of killings in Zamfara, Benue, Taraba and you’ll find that Nigeria has started turning into the Murder Capital of World, for a country that’s not at war. There is NO justification for the mass murder of innocent human beings, and yet, it just seems to keep happening, moving from state to state. It’s happened so frequently that we’ve become completely numb to it. We don’t care anymore. It’s now just another headline. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Nigeria has just overtaken India as the Poverty Capital of the World. And with all this, all we ever do is tweet #hashtags… #prayforPlateau, #prayforBenue, #prayforNigeria… etc. We say stuff like “our hearts go out to the families of the victims”, but we actually have very little heart left. Because we’ve gotten used to hearing about the brutality, so we just adapt, tweet or retweet a picture and a prayer, and we move on.

It’s not just Nigeria, either. Most Nigerians envy the quality of life in places like the USA – but let’s take stock of where America is at right now. I have a hard time reading the news because it seems like it’s almost always bad. School shootings in the good old US of A are as frequent as Boko Haram bombings in Northern Nigeria. Reports in the media have been awash with images of sweet, innocent children of immigrants, uncontrollably crying their eyes out, because the American Government has coldheartedly separated them from their families and kept them in cages like animals; one can’t help but wonder at the kind of emotional scars and resentment that has been deposited in their hearts. And speaking of humans-being-treated-like-animals, look no further than the recent #JusticeForJunior hashtag on twitter – read about this teenager from the Bronx, whose only crime was bearing a small resemblance to someone that some gang members had a problem with. So what did they do? Five of them dragged him out of a corner store, and beat and stabbed him to death in the street. An innocent 15-year-old, who just happened to look like the person they meant to harm. The store owners saw 5 guys dragging him out of their shop, and chose to look the other way. He came back bleeding his life away and pleading for help, and they pushed him back out, locking their doors and telling him to go to the hospital. The people passing by on the street also looked the other way; the ones watching from their apartment windows, saw him being beaten and stabbed to death, and figured that it was more important to record the entire episode on their cell phones than to intervene, or at least, use the same damn phones to call for help. He died in a pool of his own blood, trying to run to a hospital in time to save his life, because no-one in the community cared enough to lift a finger. And this is all before we recount the numerous horror stories of women being sexually assaulted in the #MeToo movement, the innocent minorities being assassinated by the same American Police Officers who have sworn to serve and protect them, or by the numerous young people on the streets of Nigeria who have been brutalized, extorted, maimed and killed by barbaric members of the SARS police force.

So you know what I plan to tell my kids? I’m going to teach them to be passionate – and to have a Big, Fun-Loving, Kind HEART. It’s fun to be passionate about sports… I mean, there’s already so much evidence online showing just how CRAZY I get about my sports teams. I’ll tell them that it’s okay to be that way, and to be a faith-over-facts kind of sports fan. It’s fun, and life is too short to not have fun. But it seems like some of us are almost subconsciously waiting for our teams to mess up, just so they can hurl insults at them, tell them what a disgrace they are, and project all the anger and pain from our real lives on them; forgetting just how hard it is to break out of the dire circumstances that come with being an underprivileged Nigerian to make it into the National team. Do you know the work, the sweat, the tears, the sacrifices, the sheer determination it takes? Do you know how hard it is to even be able to make a living as an average Nigerian? I’ve got news for you. If you were blessed enough to watch the game on a flat screen TV in the comfort of your home, or at a bar somewhere… you’re not the average Nigerian. The average Nigerian lives on less than $2 a day. Some aren’t actually sure where their next meal will come from.

Some Nigerians, however, thought it was okay to go online to Ighalo’s social media to leave insult after insult, ridiculing him and other players, simply because he had a bad game. Which one of us has never had a bad day at work? Or made a series of regrettable mistakes? Luckily for us, we don’t have our bad days in front of millions of people who are actively rooting against us. And even afterwards, we get to learn from our mistakes quietly, in solitude, and resolve to do or be better. Whereas, Ighalo and co have to hear about it from thousands of comments, some of which represent the very worst of human behavior on the internet. I heard that when he turned off his comments on social media, some Nigerians went and found his WIFE to harass, threaten and bully her as well, as if she’s ever kicked a ball for the team. In what amounts to the greatest misplaced anger I’ve ever seen… we have let thieving politicians and businessmen who have made away with billions, running our economy into ruins go blame free; we have turned a blind eye to all the killings, beatings, oppression and injustice in our countries, and instead poured all our bitterness, criticism and venom out on footballers, their wives, and referees.

So I plan to teach my future kids that in sports, and in life, it’s incredibly important to try and give your absolute best in trying to win. Unfortunately, sometimes, your best will just not be good enough. But even on your worst day, it’s not the end of the world if you don’t get it right… as long as you give your all, and you do it with HEART. I plan to teach my kids, that in this increasingly dark world, it’s so much harder to be an optimist, but it’s so much more fun. It’s better to actively choose to care about others. It’s better to choose happiness over hurt, and it’s better to be kind than to kill with criticism, or violence. It’s better to build up than tear down, and hard as it might be, it’s better to be a beacon of light, and to look for a silver lining on the darkest of days than to spread more darkness.

I’ll tell them that on a bright Summer night in St Petersburg, our Super Eagles gave so much more heart than our Government, Country, or World has displayed in years. And that to me, will ALWAYS be something to be proud of. Because if there’s anything this world desperately needs more of, at this time in our history, it’s human beings with a little more heart.

TheBankStatements

PS: I’d already finished writing this, and was editing the final draft of it, when the news hit about the tanker explosion in Lagos that has consumed 54 other vehicles. Total deaths are as yet unconfirmed. Sigh. May the souls of the dearly departed rest in Peace. May God grant their families strength to bear this loss. May God help us each play our role in changing this earth of ours for the better. May we learn that heaven helps those who help themselves.

source https://www.newssplashy.com/2018/07/banky-w-heres-what-ill-tell-my-kids.html

[lodelss]

The Promised Land

Alice Driver | Longreads | July 2020 | 16 minutes (3,906 words)

“Me with two suitcases, without knowing anything, so far away, not speaking the language, oh no, it was a total odyssey.” — Karla Avelar

* * *

Home was 16 by 26 feet. When Karla, 41, lay on her single bed at night, she could stretch out her left arm and grab her mother Flor’s* hand. She and her mother, who was 64, hadn’t lived together for 32 years: Now they practiced French together and her mother, who never learned to write, carefully traced the letters of the French alphabet in cursive well into the night. Neither of them had finished elementary school; Flor, born in rural El Salvador, was forced to leave school after first grade to work and help support her family and Karla was forced out of school in eighth grade due to bullying from teachers and students who told her she had to dress like a man in order to attend class, who once tried to hold her down and cut her hair and who frequently beat her up. Home was the name she had chosen for herself — Karla Avelar — one that was first legally recognized when she was 41 and requesting asylum in Switzerland. When the weight of memories of her previous life haunted Karla, she went outside to search for a place to cry alone.

When I first met Karla in San Salvador, El Salvador in July 2017, her home was a place I couldn’t safely visit. Karla, a renowned LGBTQ activist, had been nominated for the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights, which would come with a large cash prize of if she won. Members of the Mara Salvatrucha in Karla’s neighborhood, part of an international gang known as the MS-13, had become aware of the news and had threatened to kill her if she won and didn’t hand the money over to them. She had even been forced to change houses due to the threats, but she still felt her neighborhood wasn’t safe for me to visit, so we met at the offices of COMCAVIS TRANS, an NGO that was the culmination of her life’s work as an activist. Like so many trans women in El Salvador, she had survived more violence than most of us could imagine — rapes, assassination attempts, being unjustly imprisoned — and after being released from prison, she founded COMCAVIS TRANS as the first openly HIV positive trans woman in the country. I interviewed Karla for a story about the reasons why trans woman flee El Salvador, neither of us knowing that Karla would eventually become the story.

On October 6, 2017, roughly a month-and-a-half after we bid each other farewell in San Salvador, Karla and her mother flew to Switzerland to attend the awards ceremony for Martin Ennals Award nominees. When they arrived in Switzerland, Flor broke down and told Karla that members of the MS-13 gang had come to her house, beat her up and forced her to watch a video in which they were torturing a man, telling her that they would do the same thing to Karla. Before leaving, they told Flor that they would rape her in front of Karla and then kill her if Karla didn’t hand over the prize money. And then they asked her to confirm the date that Karla would return to El Salvador after her trip to Switzerland.

Karla relayed the threats to the members of the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights who were worried that she would be assassinated if she returned to El Salvador. They encouraged her and her mother to apply for asylum in Switzerland. At the awards ceremony, Karla was recognized for her activism and awarded a monetary prize plus an additional amount to donate to the NGO of her choice. Karla and Flor didn’t have time to celebrate — they needed a few days alone to consider what it would mean to never return to the land of their birth. Karla was proud that she had lived honestly in El Salvador, not hiding her past as a sex worker, as someone who had spent time in jail and was HIV+, even when it put her at risk, but she also knew many trans women who had been murdered for their activism.

On Oct. 22, 2017, Karla and Flor requested asylum in Switzerland, and they were sent to a shelter for asylum seekers. “It was huge,” said Karla of the shelter, adding, “at first [the other migrants] treated us very badly. There was a lot of xenophobia directed at us because we were from Latin America.” After Karla was harassed by a group of African migrants, she and Flor were moved to another shelter where they spent 22 days. The shelter — in contrast to the U.S. detention system which often disregards the safety of the transgender community — provided all transgender asylum seekers with a private room with a kitchen and a bath and guaranteed their privacy and security. Karla and her mother were assigned a social worker to help them through the asylum process, a woman who initially called Karla by the name assigned to her at birth. Karla explained that although it was insulting, “I didn’t want to switch social workers — I wanted her to change and to have the chance to rectify.”

After three weeks at the shelter, Karla and her mother were given the choice of three small government subsidized apartments in a town where they could await their asylum hearing. Karla requested that the names of places where she has lived in Switzerland be omitted for her safety. She visited them all and picked the apartment that was closest to a hospital knowing that she would need to take care of some urgent health issues — a doctor in El Salvador at the Ministry of Health had diagnosed her with a terminal illness. And that is how Karla and Flor ended up in a studio apartment with just enough room for two single beds, a small sink, and a bathroom. “I invade her privacy as an older adult person and she invades my privacy as a trans person,” explained Karla as we sat at an open-air restaurant in October 2018. When I visited her, she and her mother were still stateless, slowly working their way through the asylum process while living off a small monthly stipend provided by the Swiss government. As Karla described the situation, “Although we were born in El Salvador, we no longer have Salvadoran nationality and we can’t travel. We live in Switzerland but we don’t have Swiss nationality so we are two stateless people and that is frustrating — not to be able to work, not to be able to study, not to be able to speak the language, to need to request a permit for everything.”

Even so, Karla was aware that she was lucky to be able to request asylum in Switzerland, a country where requesting asylum was not criminalized and where she could study French while waiting to hear the outcome of her request. “As far as being an activist, I’ve been really fortunate during the [asylum] process,” she explained. “Activism has provided me with support — both financial and moral — from friends and allied organizations that I met through my work.” At COMCAVIS TRANS, Karla had provided support to help trans women who wanted to migrate to the U.S. understand the asylum process and gathered documentation of the violence they had experienced. She had lived the violence that trans women experienced, and understood intimately why trans women sought asylum in the U.S. and Europe.

A 2019 study which COMCAVIS TRANS contributed to, “El Prejuicio No Conoce Fronteras” (“Prejudice Knows No Borders”), found that four LGBTQ people are murdered every day in Latin America and the Caribbean. The study showed that roughly 1,300 members of the LGBTQ community have been murdered in the region in the past five years, a figure that includes many of Karla’s trans friends. To put this data in context, which is important because violence against the LGBTQ community is often underreported, between 1990-2019, 350 trans women who Karla was friends with in El Salvador or who she had met through work at COMCAVIS TRANS were murdered. Many countries in the region, like El Salvador, have few if any laws to protect the LGBTQ community, and since police and the army are often implicated in such violence, laws are rarely enforced.

Most Central American migrants still seek asylum in the U.S., but the number seeking asylum in Europe has increased nearly 4,000 percent in the last decade. Given the cost of paying smugglers and the violence of gangs controlling routes to the U.S., some Central American migrants have discovered that the journey to Europe is safer and cheaper. In Karla’s case, she never planned to migrate to Switzerland, but as soon as she requested asylum, she began networking with LGBTQ migrants from Central America across Europe to form a supportive community like the one she had created in San Salvador.

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The day we reunited in Switzerland, she greeted me in French, the skin around her eyes crinkling as she smiled. She wore jeans, light blue shoes, and a top with pink, blue, and black feathers. We sat in the golden late afternoon light and ordered fondue as we watched lean, youthful bodies jump into a nearby lake. Karla, her face relaxed, talked about the support the Swiss government had provided her to get medical care, describing how all tests for the terminal illness at the hospital had come back negative. She believed the diagnosis that she had received in El Salvador boiled down to doctors discriminating against her and misdiagnosing her as a form of “psychological torture” for being trans. “There are other concerns, right? But a negative diagnosis is the lottery for me right now,” she said.

Karla would also receive support to get reconstructive breast surgery and to fully transition into the body she had always dreamed of, a process that doctors said would take about three years. “In my youth, when I was 15, I injected mineral oil into my breasts,” Karla explained. “It is a do-it-yourself process in Latin America; some trans inject mineral, some airplane oil, some cooking oil, but they all are serious things over time.” When Karla had been beat up by the police in El Salvador — their way of punishing her for being a sex worker — they had hit her breasts, leaving behind hematomas that doctors in El Salvador diagnosed as a terminal illness. “That was news that emotionally destroyed me,” whispered Karla. The doctor in El Salvador had also told her, “What you need to do is look for God.” After being trapped in a body that was not aligned with who she felt she was and lied to by doctors in her own country, Karla was thankful to finally have doctors who respected her. Given that she had waited more than 40 years to fully transition to look and feel as she had always seen herself, three years would feel like no time at all.

Throughout the process of receiving asylum, the Swiss government provided Karla with comprehensive health care that respected her needs as a trans woman. “I am very lucky that the head HIV doctor speaks Spanish. She is from Argentina and she is fabulous,” said Karla, mentioning the compassion with which her team of doctors has treated her. Karla’s experience proved a marked contrast to the experience of trans women who seek asylum in the U.S. who: 1) are sent to detention centers rather than shelters like in Switzerland, 2) are often held in male detention centers in the US where they are likely to experience violence (Cibola County Correctional Center is the only ICE facility in the U.S. with a unit reserved exclusively for trans women), and 3) if they are HIV+, receive negligent medical treatment, which, in cases like those of Roxana Hernández and Joana Medina León, leads to death. In the U.S., migrants and asylees are treated like criminals in the billion-dollar detention business which is mostly run via private prison companies.

Even though laws protecting the LGBTQ community in Switzerland were stronger than in El Salvador, Karla still saw an opportunity to use her experience to provide support for others adjusting to a new home. “I’m thinking of founding an organization here for trans women migrants who are refugees,” Karla said as she dipped her bread in fondue. “We could raise funds and create a baseball or a soccer teams for LGBTQ refugees.” She had turned over COMCAVIS TRANS to one of her co-workers, but she felt a lot of guilt about leaving her colleagues and her community and worried that they felt abandoned by her. “Talking about Comcavis brings up memories — and not only memories — it moves my heart because it is a project that was born out of necessity that I experienced firsthand as a [trans] person and that, in the end, became a reality and went on to benefit many people,” explained Karla. “I hope I can achieve this other trans dream.”

When we first met in San Salvador, Karla talked about how she responded to being a victim of countless acts of violence. “There is nothing to do but rebel,” she said. “Rebelling is one way and another is to claim your rights. The fact is you’ve got to claim the right to live because if you don’t claim it, you become a victim of that violation, of that aggression.” And the beauty of watching how Karla worked was seeing that she rebelled by claiming rights for the LGBTQ community, by creating spaces where they could feel safe and learn more about their legal rights.

After dinner, we walked around a lake, stopping to sit on a bench at dusk, the night gathering around us as we talked. Cruise ships lit up red and yellow passed by as Karla talked about how she had waited her entire life to change her name legally, and that as of June 21, 2018, she was officially Karla Avelar. “This has allowed me to not only feel good about myself, but to also feel good socially because I know that I can go to the bank, the grocery store or the pharmacy and that they will treat me like I want to be treated,” explained Karla. Her mother, whose house she fled when she was 9 because she was being abused by a family member and was rejected for her long hair and feminine gestures, had only become part of her life again after she was released from prison in 2002. Flor first called her Karla in 2017. “It was such a surprise that I couldn’t think of what to say. I just thought, ‘Wow, my mom called me Karla’ and from then on, she said ‘Karla’ except sometimes she called me my birth name because she would call me her son. But it made me very happy to see that she corrected herself and called me ‘Karla’ and then when she was speaking to people she would say, ‘This is my daughter.’”

Both mother and daughter struggled with their inability to work. “It was not easy for me to throw away my life’s dream,” Karla said, referring to her work at COMCAVIS TRANS.  In March of 2018, Karla became depressed and didn’t get out of bed for two weeks. “I told my mom to close the curtains and leave the room dark. I was so helpless that I think I went a week without showering.” In those first months in Switzerland, she and her mother looked for places to cry alone until they slowly built up the confidence to cry openly in front of each other. But there were also days when Karla and Flor were immersed in French classes, thrilled at the opportunity to be learning in a supportive environment. And as news of Karla’s asylum request spread, she began to receive messages on Facebook from members of the LGBTQ community around the globe. “They called me and sent me hugs and nice emails — so many trans people did, people who I helped,” said Karla. She shared one Facebook message that read: “Karla, it took you a long time, but congratulations, you are now free.”

Karla had begun to participate in events and conferences, including a one about global refugees, and she was helping a doctoral thesis student at a university in Holland with her research into the motives that force trans women to migrate to Europe. “I helped her contact trans women in Europe who are requesting asylum. Here she will do interviews with a Panamanian, a Costa Rican and me, and then she will go to Italy, Spain, Madrid, Morocco.”

Karla stood up from the bench, walked to the lake’s edge, and hopped onto the white railing surrounding the lake, kicking her legs in the air and throwing her head back. “I am excited, excited because I want to learn another language,” she said smiling. As soon as she mastered French, which she knew would be difficult given how long she had been out of school, she wanted to learn a third language: English. On the first day of French class, she was the only Latin American in class, so she felt like a fish out of water and wished that the earth would open and swallow her. However, as she continued attending classes, her excitement won out over her nerves — and she was also proud that she had earned high marks from her demanding teacher. “I think that this is a country of respect, a country of opportunities, a country that gives you confidence. And you should treat that confidence like a treasure. I also think that it’s a very strict country that adheres to a lot of laws, to the rules, but therefore it guarantees a lot of rights,” Karla said.

As we walked back to her apartment, down brightly lit avenues, she talked about Flor and her bravery in fighting against a society that had discriminated against her for having a trans daughter. “I think my biggest inspiration is my mother. I’m sure it is my mom because sometimes I’m in bed and she suddenly gets up and it is 12 or 1 in the morning, and she is studying. Then I think to myself, ‘How strong is my mother’s willpower!’”

We walked up a narrow stairway and down a hall lined with trash cans to a thin wooden door. When Karla opened it, we saw Flor sitting on the bed on the right side of the room, a pencil in hand, working on her French homework while practicing her pronunciation under her breath. She stood up, all of five feet tall, her wiry black hair shot through with white in a ponytail, and said, Bonsoir! The cinder-block walls were painted white, and the beds, a few feet apart, were narrow. On the right side of the room was a tiny sink and a hotplate surrounded by a few dishes, and on the left side was a small, bare bathroom. There was just enough space for two people to move around without bumping into each other, but as Karla put it, “In reality, we invade each other’s privacy because there is just one room.”

Karla and I sat on her narrow bed, while Flor situated herself across from us on her bed. Flor and Karla had the same round cheeks that flushed whenever they were happy. We talked about Estrella, a trans woman who Karla had introduced me to in San Salvador, who had received asylum in the U.S. and legally changed her name to Michelle. While Karla studied French in Switzerland, Michelle studied English in the U.S., something that brought them both joy given that they had been forced out of school in El Salvador due to discrimination. Over the two years of our relationship, Karla and Michelle often wrote me on Facebook, initially to discuss individual cases of injustice against trans women and later to celebrate the simple things they had always wished to do but been denied: to study, to work the job of their choice, to watch a same sex couple walk down the street peacefully hand in hand.

“I remember that when I started to express my gender, [the teachers] ordered me to cut my hair,” Karla said, looking back on her childhood. “I remember that my school teacher and director, who was named Francisco, said that because I identified as gay, I was ordered to collect shit from the toilets, from the latrines. I was ordered to collect rotten sludge for being queer. All those things force you not only to leave school but to abandon your studies. They condemn you, they condemn you to being poor, to pursuing sex work, to not being able to feed yourself, to ending up in prison because you have no preparation, no work, no home.” Karla, like Michelle, had faced discrimination in El Salvador from a young age. She remembered that when she founded COMCAVIS TRANS, she didn’t know how to turn on a computer. “Nobody was ever going to teach me, so I taught myself how to use Excel, Microsoft Word. I learned out of pure necessity,” described Karla. The last time we all saw each other on a street corner in San Salvador in August 2017, Michelle and Karla were both afraid of being assassinated by gangs, unsure of the future.

When I left their apartment that night, Karla and her mother were practicing French together, looking over their homework, reviewing their professors’ corrections, finding joy in an educational process they had both been denied for a lifetime. The began: un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six, sept, huit, neuf, dix and worked their way up to 100, their bodies relaxed, their faces hopeful. “If it is going to take me 10, 15 years to learn French — it will take you less,” said Karla to Flor. “I am going to die trying,” she added, laughing.

Two months later, in early December 2019, while at home in Mexico City, I received a WhatsApp message from Karla: “I wanted to share my happiness. Today I received official notice that my asylum has been approved.” She attached a letter that she had written to share with family and friends. She wrote, “The road has not been easy, neither for my family nor for me, with episodes of depression, nostalgia, despair, loneliness, tears, furies and others. But here I am, enormously grateful with life for giving me a new opportunity to advance in peace, secure, calm, happy, free, and without risk of losing it at any moment because of my gender identity and my work as an LGBTI human rights activist in El Salvador and in the region.” Reading it, I remembered sitting in her office in San Salvador in 2017 as we weighed the threats against her life. She mused, “I believe, and I am very clear, that the country does not need martyrs. And I am very clear that I serve more alive than dead.” And so, in the land that first legally recognized her as Karla, she leaned in for the long haul, continuing to do the daily work that over time changes lives — mine, her mother’s, yours.

* * *

*Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

* * *

Alice Driver is a freelance journalist and the author of More or Less Dead. She writes and produces radio for National Geographic, Time, CNN, Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, Las Raras Podcast and Oxford American.

* * *

Editor: Mike Dang Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo

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[newssplashy]

Banky W in his own words justaposes his lessons from Super Eagles 1-2 loss to Argentina to the state of the world.

Many years from now when, by God’s grace, my children are old enough to understand, this is exactly what I plan on telling them about my experience while watching my very first World Cup game live: “On a bright Summer night in St Petersburg, our Super Eagles played with more heart than our leaders have shown in 50 years. And I was proud to see it.”

See, I’m kind of a faith-over-facts type of sports fan, and I suspect that to a certain measure, a lot of us are. We know the facts. We know that Argentina are by far the better team. We KNOW that Leo Messi is on almost every list of the top 5 greatest football players of all time. There’s a reason that their country is currently 5th in the FIFA world Ranking, and to find Nigeria, you’d have to scroll all the way down to 48th. On paper, we know we probably never stood a chance. Coming into that game, in every position on the pitch, the gulf in talent was, to put it mildly… significant. Case in point: we have never ever in our footballing history, EVER had a striker as lethal as Sergio Aguero. Argentina had the luxury of bringing him on as a substitute late in the second half. But I plan on teaching my kids that in this life, despite seemingly insurmountable odds, you should dare to dream anyway.

And that’s exactly what most of us want, isn’t it? The opportunity to just…dream. To dream that maybe you can punch above your weight and be successful at it. Most people aren’t lucky enough to be recipients of glory in this rat race called life, so we project that innate desire onto the teams we support. And so the Nigerian team dreamt that we could do it, and we worked our asses off to make that dream come true. What we lacked in footballing pedigree, skill, and training… we almost entirely made up for in HEART. There were over 66,000 people in that stadium; between the Argentineans in attendance, and Messi’s global fanbase of billions, it looked and felt like 99% of the people in the crowd were rooting for Argentina. You could hardly sport a green jersey, and that’s not because it’s sold out. It’s because there were only a couple hundred of us, versus tens of thousands of them. The Super Eagles were playing in an Elimination Game, against arguably the Greatest player of all time, his top 5 ranked team, and over 60,000 people screaming and heckling our every kick of the ball.

But we played and we defended, we clawed and we FOUGHT. Yes, we lost, but we went down swinging and played with all the heart we could muster. And honestly? So did Argentina. Messi and co weren’t just going to roll over and die, in what would have probably been their most embarrassing world cup outing of all time. They were going to fight. And as I said in one of my numerous social-media-crazed-fan-videos, Nigeria didn’t come just to mark the register. We came to PLAY. Both sides went at it for 90+ mins, and for 86 of them, we were even. In the end, the better team won – because at this level, the truly great ones are able to capitalize on the slimmest of moments to separate themselves and secure victory. But the losing team was equally gallant in defeat. Both sides gave it their all. One side won, but both sides played with heart.

These days, I’ve found that my wife and I spend just as much time praying for our future children, as we do worrying about the kind of world we’d be bringing them into.

 There’s so much darkness, sadness, and pain in the world, you know? Here’s a laundry list of things that have happened in the past month alone: Two globally successful celebrities hung themselves. Then a woman in Lagos allegedly also committed suicide, by jumping into the lagoon. Yesterday, an undergraduate student from Lagos State University attempted to do the same. Plateau state in Nigeria has JUST been hit with two fresh sectarian attacks…over 200 people were slaughtered in cold blood – the latest in a very long line of mass murders over the years. Add the frequency of killings in Zamfara, Benue, Taraba and you’ll find that Nigeria has started turning into the Murder Capital of World, for a country that’s not at war. There is NO justification for the mass murder of innocent human beings, and yet, it just seems to keep happening, moving from state to state. It’s happened so frequently that we’ve become completely numb to it. We don’t care anymore. It’s now just another headline. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Nigeria has just overtaken India as the Poverty Capital of the World. And with all this, all we ever do is tweet #hashtags… #prayforPlateau, #prayforBenue, #prayforNigeria… etc. We say stuff like “our hearts go out to the families of the victims”, but we actually have very little heart left. Because we’ve gotten used to hearing about the brutality, so we just adapt, tweet or retweet a picture and a prayer, and we move on.

It’s not just Nigeria, either. Most Nigerians envy the quality of life in places like the USA – but let’s take stock of where America is at right now. I have a hard time reading the news because it seems like it’s almost always bad. School shootings in the good old US of A are as frequent as Boko Haram bombings in Northern Nigeria. Reports in the media have been awash with images of sweet, innocent children of immigrants, uncontrollably crying their eyes out, because the American Government has coldheartedly separated them from their families and kept them in cages like animals; one can’t help but wonder at the kind of emotional scars and resentment that has been deposited in their hearts. And speaking of humans-being-treated-like-animals, look no further than the recent #JusticeForJunior hashtag on twitter – read about this teenager from the Bronx, whose only crime was bearing a small resemblance to someone that some gang members had a problem with. So what did they do? Five of them dragged him out of a corner store, and beat and stabbed him to death in the street. An innocent 15-year-old, who just happened to look like the person they meant to harm. The store owners saw 5 guys dragging him out of their shop, and chose to look the other way. He came back bleeding his life away and pleading for help, and they pushed him back out, locking their doors and telling him to go to the hospital. The people passing by on the street also looked the other way; the ones watching from their apartment windows, saw him being beaten and stabbed to death, and figured that it was more important to record the entire episode on their cell phones than to intervene, or at least, use the same damn phones to call for help. He died in a pool of his own blood, trying to run to a hospital in time to save his life, because no-one in the community cared enough to lift a finger. And this is all before we recount the numerous horror stories of women being sexually assaulted in the #MeToo movement, the innocent minorities being assassinated by the same American Police Officers who have sworn to serve and protect them, or by the numerous young people on the streets of Nigeria who have been brutalized, extorted, maimed and killed by barbaric members of the SARS police force.

So you know what I plan to tell my kids? I’m going to teach them to be passionate – and to have a Big, Fun-Loving, Kind HEART. It’s fun to be passionate about sports… I mean, there’s already so much evidence online showing just how CRAZY I get about my sports teams. I’ll tell them that it’s okay to be that way, and to be a faith-over-facts kind of sports fan. It’s fun, and life is too short to not have fun. But it seems like some of us are almost subconsciously waiting for our teams to mess up, just so they can hurl insults at them, tell them what a disgrace they are, and project all the anger and pain from our real lives on them; forgetting just how hard it is to break out of the dire circumstances that come with being an underprivileged Nigerian to make it into the National team. Do you know the work, the sweat, the tears, the sacrifices, the sheer determination it takes? Do you know how hard it is to even be able to make a living as an average Nigerian? I’ve got news for you. If you were blessed enough to watch the game on a flat screen TV in the comfort of your home, or at a bar somewhere… you’re not the average Nigerian. The average Nigerian lives on less than $2 a day. Some aren’t actually sure where their next meal will come from.

Some Nigerians, however, thought it was okay to go online to Ighalo’s social media to leave insult after insult, ridiculing him and other players, simply because he had a bad game. Which one of us has never had a bad day at work? Or made a series of regrettable mistakes? Luckily for us, we don’t have our bad days in front of millions of people who are actively rooting against us. And even afterwards, we get to learn from our mistakes quietly, in solitude, and resolve to do or be better. Whereas, Ighalo and co have to hear about it from thousands of comments, some of which represent the very worst of human behavior on the internet. I heard that when he turned off his comments on social media, some Nigerians went and found his WIFE to harass, threaten and bully her as well, as if she’s ever kicked a ball for the team. In what amounts to the greatest misplaced anger I’ve ever seen… we have let thieving politicians and businessmen who have made away with billions, running our economy into ruins go blame free; we have turned a blind eye to all the killings, beatings, oppression and injustice in our countries, and instead poured all our bitterness, criticism and venom out on footballers, their wives, and referees.

So I plan to teach my future kids that in sports, and in life, it’s incredibly important to try and give your absolute best in trying to win. Unfortunately, sometimes, your best will just not be good enough. But even on your worst day, it’s not the end of the world if you don’t get it right… as long as you give your all, and you do it with HEART. I plan to teach my kids, that in this increasingly dark world, it’s so much harder to be an optimist, but it’s so much more fun. It’s better to actively choose to care about others. It’s better to choose happiness over hurt, and it’s better to be kind than to kill with criticism, or violence. It’s better to build up than tear down, and hard as it might be, it’s better to be a beacon of light, and to look for a silver lining on the darkest of days than to spread more darkness.

I’ll tell them that on a bright Summer night in St Petersburg, our Super Eagles gave so much more heart than our Government, Country, or World has displayed in years. And that to me, will ALWAYS be something to be proud of. Because if there’s anything this world desperately needs more of, at this time in our history, it’s human beings with a little more heart.

TheBankStatements

PS: I’d already finished writing this, and was editing the final draft of it, when the news hit about the tanker explosion in Lagos that has consumed 54 other vehicles. Total deaths are as yet unconfirmed. Sigh. May the souls of the dearly departed rest in Peace. May God grant their families strength to bear this loss. May God help us each play our role in changing this earth of ours for the better. May we learn that heaven helps those who help themselves.

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