Category Archives: Viva!

In the Shadows of Men: THE BEGINNING

THE BEGINNING

I was born in a patriarchal society, into a conventional family with ordinary behaviors and average education. My mother was fifteen when her family arranged for her to marry my nineteen-year-old father; marriage was one way to keep his behavior in check.

My mother gave birth to me shortly after she turned sixteen—a child giving birth to a child, I always thought. I was raised in the midst of my parents’ teenage dreams and the uncertainty of their new adult lives. Memories became lost in the flow of life. This made us forget what had been and simply carry on moment to moment.

Each of us grows, and inside are the lost dreams and thwarted wishes of our mothers. You are the origin of her dreams’ demise. You are asked to rise to the appointed challenges because, in spite of being a woman, you will face this world and prove you are worthy to exist within it.

Girl after girl after girl was born, and the dreams of our mother broke around us, their shrapnel scattered and then reshaped into another dream far away from us—the dream of the male. The boy. No matter how abundant and well-bred girls may be, they can never make up for the absence of a boy.

As I grew up, this conflict left a crack in my identity. I was the eldest daughter, the one responsible for the long line of sisters that followed. Each time my mother gave birth to another girl, faces would frown and the sky’s colors would fade. Strangely, I didn’t see this disappointment in the males of the family. But the tears of my mother, the gossip of my grandmother, and the words of my neighbors haunted me. “It’s okay. May God compensate you.” Even the word mabrouk—congratulations—went unspoken. However, we girls continued to grow, one after the other, and we were treated with compassion.

My memories of my father during my childhood are limited. He was a workaholic, too busy providing a life my mother insisted should be better. She would not accept the idea of sending us to public school, despite the fact that we were girls. Instead, we were sent to expensive private schools that only the rich and highly educated could attend.

Though my grandfather was a tyrant, he invested in our education, as he had done for our aunts before us. Perhaps he had done the same for the boys as well, but his sons were not as diligent as his daughters. One of my aunts attended college in Egypt in the 1960s, and my youngest aunt, who is not much older than me, went to a private school, the same school my sisters and I would later attend.

I can’t say whether or not the school was a fundamental turning point in the formation of my character, or if my life changed there. The school community was completely different from that of my home environment. My classmates came mostly from elite, educated families, and their religious backgrounds varied. I had a more modest upbringing. Nevertheless, the fact that my parents could afford the expensive tuition for decades made my classmates assume we were rich.

From my father, I learned modesty and self-sufficiency. From my mother, I learned to face and overcome challenges. I lived my life by these qualities—modesty and richness, contentment and ambition. Still, there was always one thing I had to remember : I am a girl.

Behave like a man but remain a female. Be responsible and never forget that your strongest weapon is your beauty. Grow tired, strive, struggle, and resist, yet, of that one thing always remain aware: You are a woman. Your horizons are limited. Your mother keeps your freedom locked up, and your father holds the key. Your actions come with great responsibility. Any misstep is a black mark that will later reflect on your sisters. Never forget that your arrival was a good omen, but only conditionally. After all, seven more girls trailed behind you.

 

Puerto Ricans protest as anger rises over unused emergency aid

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Some have called for the governor’s resignation and protesters marched a guillotine to the residence where Vazquez lives

Hundreds protested in Puerto Rico on Thursday in a demonstration reminiscent of those that ousted the island’s former governor last year, as anger grows over emergency aid that until recently sat unused in a warehouse amid ongoing earthquakes.

Demonstraters gathered under the heavy rain at the governor’s mansion as they waved flags, banged on pots, with even carried a guillotine aloft, although it appeared to be purely symbolic.

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Pregnant and shackled: why inmates are still giving birth cuffed and bound

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Despite a federal law that prohibits the shackling of expectant mothers, the 85% of incarcerated women who are in state prisons or county jails often remain at the mercy of guards

Seven months pregnant, hands cuffed and feet bound, Sophia Casias shuffled across the floor at the Bexar county adult detention center in San Antonio, Texas, on March 2017. A guard at stood in front of her, holding the chain connected to Casias’s handcuffs.

Casias couldn’t keep her balance though and crumpled on to the wet cement floor. She sobbed and felt as if she couldn’t breathe. She would later realize that she had felt the same way when multiple family members sexually assaulted her as a child.

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Australia’s Platypuses Are Invisible Victims of the Bushfires

The platypus—furry-sausage body, duck bill, beaver tail, venomous heel spurs—lives what might be considered a cryptid lifestyle. The semiaquatic, egg-laying mammals are notoriously hard to spot, skulking around in Australian streams at night. They’re predictably hard to catch, and escape easily from the conservationists trying to track them, including Josh Griffiths, an ecologist with Cesar Australia, an environmental consulting firm, who has studied the creatures for 12 years. On a typical survey night near Melbourne, which lasts anywhere from 14 to 16 hours, Griffiths might catch two or three of the strange, slippery creatures.

The recent Australian bushfires, which have burnt tens of millions of acres* and killed approximately a billion animals, have spotlighted the plights of certain species, from koalas to the lesser-known Kangaroo Island dunnart (a mouse-size marsupial). But there has been little news about how the platypus has been faring, in part because their status is still largely a mystery to science. After all, they’re incredibly hard to spot even when there aren’t raging bushfires. “The short answer is that we simply don’t know,” Griffiths says. “The scale of the fire we’ve got at the moment is unprecedented.” All the sites he usually monitors for platypuses have been declared emergency zones and are inaccessible. “It’s one more nail in their coffin,” he adds.

In 2008, after bushfires and floods swept through Victoria, the Australian Platypus Conservancy conducted a survey of the creatures, according to Geoff Williams, a conservancy biologist. At the time, they found little relationship between platypus populations and local bushfires. Temperatures above 86 degrees Fahrenheit can be lethal to platypuses, so they retreat to underground burrows when things get too hot. These may have provided a critical refuge—one that more terrestrial or arboreal animals such as koalas often desperately need—according to Tom Grant, a biologist who has spent nearly 50 years studying the platypus. (Grant wrote the definitive book on them, and Griffiths calls him “the Godfather of platypuses.”) And in times of drought, platypuses move into the refuge pools that persist in many dried-out streams. These strategy are how platypuses have survived for as long as a million years, Williams says.

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But those studies focused on smaller, localized fires. “These most recent catastrophic fires present a different situation, where the vegetation consolidating the banks, in which they dig their resting and nesting burrows, has been devastated,” Grant writes in an email. He predicts that when rain does finally fall in these areas, the banks will erode, degrading water quality and stifling the small, bottom-dwelling invertebrates that platypuses depend on.

To make matters worse, January and February are the time of year when, baby platypuses tend to emerge from their mothers’ burrows, Grant says. “They will be attempting to find their own food in streams devastated by the fires and in many cases reduced to disconnected refuge pools by the current severe drought,” he says. He predicts many of these platypus young will die this season.

The 2008 study also examined stable rivers and streams that still held a substantial water after the fire had passed. But the country’s extreme, ongoing drought has taken a toll on refuge pools, Grant says. And according to Griffiths, the small creeks that once connected habitats have gotten vaporized by the current bushfires, further fragmenting platypus habitat and maybe putting distant remnant pools off-limits. Travel over land to get to these places would expose them to predators, and lingering heat, even at night, could prove fatal. It is, perhaps, a perfect storm, and Griffiths, Grant, and Williams all see the possibility that local populations may go extinct.

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In some places, conservationists air-dropped food, such as carrots, to help some stricken wallabies, but that’s not an option for the more finicky platypus. “We can’t do food drops because they only eat live prey,” Griffiths says, including waterbugs and yabbies, a type of freshwater crayfish. “And we have to be careful when spreading live organisms around.” Williams says he’s heard of some prior attempts to feed vulnerable platypuses live earthworms and yabbies, but that there was never any evidence that the food was actually eaten. Plus, this solution is simply not scalable in a crisis like this, he says.

Another option could be to capture and care for some platypuses, but that’s also proven tricky. “You can’t just put in cave traps, you have to use highly specialized nets that can only be used in shallow waterways,” Griffiths says. And the species consumes at least 15 percent of its body weight per day in live prey, making it a huge drain on resources for any zoo or facility, most of which are already stressed to their limits, according to a statement from the Australia Platypus Conservancy. Relocation is also a bad option, since any surviving rivers likely also hold surviving platypuses and other species, competing for the same meager habitat and resources, Williams says. The only thing that might make this possible, as it did following a 1983 bushfire, would be to move surviving populations into places where others had died out. It’s a long-term plan, though, and biologists still have limited access to the survey sites they’ve been studying.

When the state of emergency passes, Griffiths says, he will return to his monitoring project, a collaboration with the San Diego Zoo called the Great Australian Platypus Search. The project relies on environmental DNA, or eDNA, the genetic traces platypuses leave behind. But the bushfires might have thrown a wrench into this project, too. When Griffiths surveyed a site near Melbourne after Australia’s 2009 Black Saturday Fires, he found charred soil; the fire had burnt off the eDNA. And any samples he finds now might be from platypuses that did not survive all the environmental stress.

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Though the bushfires are a serious, recurrent problem, the real menace to platypuses is likely to remain the drought. Since European colonization of Australia, the species has lost nearly half its historic population across the eastern part of the mainland and Tasmania, according to Gilad Bino, a researcher at the University of New South Wales Centre for Ecosystem Science. “There’s been a change in what we call the shifting baseline, a change in our collective memory,” he says. “When we see two platypuses in a pool, we think that’s a lot of platypuses, but it’s a fraction of what it used to be.” Bino published a paper modeling the platypus’s future decline, and potential extinction, in the February issue of Biological Conservation. His research identifies a toxic soup of factors beyond fires that threaten the strange mammals’ future, including prolonged drought, climate change, land clearing, and the construction of dams that break up habitat.

The platypus is such an iconic species that it’s almost surprising its decline has happened without much fanfare. European scientists first encountered the platypus in 1791, but argued over its anatomy for nearly a century, according to a 2019 paper in the Journal of Mammalogy. Aboriginal people, who called the platypus mallangong, tambreet, gaya-dari, boonaburra, and lare-relar, among other names, had developed a deep ecological understanding of the creatures, though European scientists characteristically ignored this knowledge, suspecting the specimens they saw were some kind of elaborate hoax.

Bino hopes his paper will lead to a national risk assessment of the future of the species. “There’s a desperate need for more information, and for government funds to monitor platypuses,” he says. “Not knowing what’s going on is not an excuse to assume everything is fine.” And if you are in Australia on a midnight stroll and happen upon a platypus, consider marking it in platypusSpot, a citizen science project Griffiths helps run.

Meanwhile, researchers continue to toil away for long nights in pursuit of the elusive animals. “The more data we’re getting points to that they should be at least listed as vulnerable, or endangered,” Griffiths says. “At least then, people would have to pay attention to them.”

* Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that the recent bushfires have burnt two million acres. They have burnt tens of millions of acres.