Two Recommendations

I STRONGLY urge you to read and watch the following recommendations. They are currently changing my world and I'm positive they will leave a lasting impression on you as well. Knowledge is power -- take it, use it, share it!

Recommendation #1 -- the movie Food Inc.

A powerful look at how our food is made, marketed and distributed. The "life-changing" moment in this movie for us: there is NO way that we can get factory packaged meat with it having feces in it. That's just the start of it. Wait until you see how the animals are treated and how our food is made. I still shudder at the thought. We promptly threw out 50% of our fridge/freezer. I am so thankful I am moving to a place where we can create a garden, buy organic and get involved in a food/dairy/meat share programs. We might go broke doing it, but it will certainly be worth it.

Recommendation #2 -- the book Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

This book should be on the mandatory reading list for all parents of girls (or boys that will marry girls, or anyone with a sister/mother/aunt, etc). Jeremy was annoyed the whole time I read this book, as I was constantly screaming out facts and stories that enraged and inspired me. This book is awesome because it doesn't just point out the problems -- it offers practical and efficient ways to help solve them. Seriously, I can't say enough good things about this book.

Here are some powerful stats:

More than 100 million women are missing.

Countries that nurture terrorists are disproportionally those where women are marginalized.

One third of all women worldwide face beatings in the home.

90 percent of girls and women over the age of three were sexually abused in parts of Liberia during civil war there.

11 percent of the world’s inhabitants live in sub-Saharan Africa, and they suffer 24 percent of the world’s disease burden – which is addressed with less than 1 percent of the world’s health care spending.

The WHO estimates that 536,000 women perished in pregnancy or childbirth in 2005, a toll that has barely budged in thirty years (one maternal death every minute).

In Niger, a woman stands a 1-in-7 change of dying in childbirth. Niger only has 10 ob-gyns in the entire country.

During WWI, more American women died in childbirth than American men died in war. But from the 1920s to the 1940s in the US, maternal morality rates plunged – apparently because the same society that was giving women the right to vote also found the political will to direct resources to maternal health.

122 million women around the world want contraception and can’t get it.

Each additional year of primary education leads a girl to have .26 fewer children – a considerable reduction.

A cost effective way to get more girls to attend high school may be to help them manage menstruation. African girls typically use (and reuse) old pads during their periods, and they often have only a single torn pair of underwear. For fear of embarrassing leaks and stains, girls sometimes stay home during that time.

31 percent of households in the developing world do not get sufficient iodine from water or food. The result is occasional goiters and, much more frequently, brain damage when children are still in the womb. Fetuses need iodine in the first trimester to develop proper brains, and both human and animal studies show this is particularly true of female fetuses. A capsule of iodine oil can be given every two years to all women who may become pregnant – at a cost of only fifty cents per capsule.

Half of Tanzanian women, and nearly half of Ugandan women, say they were abused by male teachers, and one third of reported rapes of South African girls under the age of fifteen are by teachers.

Women now own just 1 percent of the world’s titled land.

By 2007 Rwanda surpassed Sweden to become the nation with the highest share of women members of any parliament in the world. The United States ranked sixty-eighth among the countries of the world in the share of women holding national public office.

Once every ten seconds, a girl somewhere in the world suffers female genital mutilation.

In 2007, nearly sixty-six million girls do not have access to education in communities across the world.