Think Global: Sub Saharan Africa

By Halie Schuster Authors and journalist Nicholas Kristof detail the history, present state, and even specific accounts of gender equality and oppression in  Half the Sky . For example, they begin by telling the story of Meena Hasina. Meena is an Indian Muslim has been prostituted by a brothel controlled by the local sex trade for many years. She was kidnapped at the young age of nine and was kept at a rural house until she was old enough to attract clients. After being sent to the brothel, she experienced rape, violence, and drugging. Unfortunately, Meena’s story is not an uncommon one. Kristof makes the assertive claim that force prostitution, such as what Meena experienced, is essentially modern-day slavery. He writes that “it is not hyperbole to say that millions of women and girls are actually enslaved today” and that “the term that is usually used for this phenomenon is ‘sex trafficking’, a misnomer” (pg. 9). Although Kristof’s belief may initially controversial, his judgment...

          In Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the story starts off with the story of a girl named Rath. In the story Rath goes to Thailand to try and find work. A job agent after they had been washing dishing for a couple months took them deep into Thailand where he turned them over to some gangsters. The girls then stayed in a tenth-floor high rise apartment where they were sent back and forth with guards from a karaoke lounge that operated as a brothel. There, the men told Rath and her friends that the men paid lots of money for them and they were going to have to pay the money back and then he would send them home. They weren't sure how they were going to pay the money back but that became clear very quickly when Rath was locked in a room with a customer who tried to force her to have sex with him. When she refused the man came in the room and beat her telling her that he'd kill her if she refused to have sex with the custome...

  In Half the Sky , Kristoff starts off by telling a story about a young girl named Rath. Rath went to Thailand with four of her other friends to work at a restaurant to help her parents pay the bills. However, the trip quickly took a turn for the worst. The job agent sold Rath and her friends to gangsters. These men treated the young girls as property, explaining that he had paid money for them and they are obligated to repay him with their services. Their job was to obey the men and serve the “customers” so that the gangsters could earn their money back. When the girls disobeyed the men or resisted the customers, the gangsters beat them and threatened to kill them until they eventually gave in. Basically, the girls were slaves to the gangsters. Slavery is described as “the state and condition of being a slave, who is someone forbidden to quit their service for another person and is treated like property. Slavery relies heavily on the enslaved person being intimidated either by th...

  By Halie Schuster In her Ted Talk, Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks discusses the notion that individual identities and the way that people perceive the world are often influenced by the culture that they themselves are surrounded in, with little consideration of other cultures outside of their own which, in turns, impacts one’s assumptions and judgements of others. She beings her Ted Talk by providing examples from her own childhood and upbringing. When she was a young child, she mostly read books from the United States and Britain and assumed that all stories and books featured “white and blue-eyed” foreign characters. As she grew older and discovered African books, she realized that this was not the truth. Additionally, she also learned that these kinds of one-sided truths, or ‘stories’, were not just limited to novels and literature. She goes on to tell the story of Fide, her family’s live-in help who came from a nearby rural village. Adichie’s mother made her...