While traveling the world, you experience many things. You get to be fully immersed in other cultures, and this isn't always a positive thing. Especially being a woman in cultures where women don't have the same rights and freedoms as we do back in the states. Its been mostly a smack in the face, just to not only see, but experience firsthand all the injustice.
INJUSTICE. A situation in which the rights of a person or a group of people are ignored.
i.e. Rights of women. Rights of children.
There are of course other's who's rights are being violated but these are the main ones who are oppressed, at least that I have seen and experienced. It fills me with such anger. It fills me with such helplessness. What is there that you can even do, but pray?
There are many weights and pains that come with being a traveler, this is just one of many.
Others: having to leave people you come to know and love, knowing that you can leave but they are so often stuck in their situation, wanting to do more, somehow, and seeing all the corrupted, injustices, unfairness…
In the safety and comfort of our green backyards in the lovely USA, we don't understand what the big deal is about freedom of speech and religion, or the rights of women and how it seems crazy for women not to have rights, right? Its not until you go and experience what it's like without these things that you really understand, and really appreciate how good you have it. Your young girls can usually go to school and walk across parking lots in the middle of the day and not have to worry about getting harassed, but at least if they do, there are authorities who will do something about it if such things occur. Here, there is no such discipline. Boys run rampant with their brains in their pants with no thought for the consequences. Its easy for me to be angry at these little delinquents, and angry at the teachers, at the police, at the parents who do nothing to stop the injustice, to fix their own community, for goodness sake…but who is the right person to be angry with? I know in my heart that they all just need Jesus, but in my flesh I just want them to face consequences and punishment. But God is the one who says, "Vengeance is mine."
But where does that leave us for now? How do we deal with these things until then? How do we keep fighting the good fight when it seems like darkness is pressing in from every side?
We do the only thing we can do, keep our eyes fixed on the light.
