Nigeria: Please Support Project Alert

The appeal

I am writing this blog to ask you to support the work and activities of Project Alert, an NGO that caters for incidences of violence against women in Nigeria.

I believe Nigeria is quite needful of agencies that challenge and address societal, cultural, traditional and religious attitudes that tolerate, condone or encourage the abuse of women and minors. There are too many victims suffering in silence, left in abominable hellish lives because of the stigma of acknowledging problems they have experienced and because the law places undue strain on them giving advantage to perpetrators to terrorise with impunity.

Support for agencies like Project Alert and Prevent Abuse of Children Today (PACT) that I wrote about a few months ago is necessary to ensure that victims of abuse are not permanently damaged without respite, succour or comfort; it is also important that we are able to refer victims to these organisations at the earliest opportunity to get help which might include treatment, counselling, material support or even legal advice – all of which are critical to the healing process.

What you can do

Project Alert requires your support in cash and kind as listed on their Donate page, I hope we can engage some expertise to facilitate an online donation kiosk as well as a courier service to help first as collection points of gifts and then to deliver the gifts to the agency.

• Pledge to support Project Alert
• Help create an online payment kiosk with minimal administrative costs (Pro-bono web gurus?)
• Make material donations to the women’s shelter
• Make cash donations to help run Project Alert
• Offer to ease administrative burdens of collecting and delivering gifts made to Project Alert
• Share information about the services Project Alert offers
• Support activities that promote the rights of women and minors (On blogs, Twitter, Facebook, media, etc. )

Josephine Effah Chukwumah, the Executive Director talks about the activities of Project Alert here and you can find references to Project Alert in the news here.

Project Alert - Contact Details

Ultimately, people need to know they can get help and we all can support those who deploy resources to help. Thank you.

The Backstory

I write a lot and probably do not write enough. However, I have found that much of what I write revolves around human rights; the rights of children, the rights of women, the rights of the poor, injustices, sexual abuse, sexuality and other taboo subjects that need the clear light of day.

The difficult subjects I write about come from my experiences and observations, I may not be able to empathise but I hope that I can at least sympathise with victims of all sorts of abuse and neglect and in the process use my writing to stimulate honest debate and possibly the change that will ensure victims can get help, seek redress and receive justice.

Sharing my own personal experiences has helped me reach out to others who have encountered similar and sometimes more heinous violations of their persons that are beyond description but until we acknowledge the prevalence of these evils we will never be anywhere near being able to help and heal – sometimes, what the other person needs is just someone to believe their story first whilst our society would rather deny the existence of such evils.

Only a few weeks ago, I had someone challenge the notion that boys could be sexually abused, the import being it was more a pleasurable educational experience than a violation of their person and a loss of innocence – only one word could sum up that thinking – IGNORANCE!

My Sex Post

It was just over 5 years ago when some of my blogging friends were writing excited blogs about their first sexual experiences, most of them strove for and lost that innocence in their late teens having exercised curiosity and interest for many years before.

Then, it was customary for these blogs to be written with a template that comprised a series of questions that you had to answer after which you tagged 5 other friends and in the process you socially networked your intimate experiences with boasting and much else.

I was tagged and I did not have the kind of story my friends had to tell, in fact, I could only answer the first question about when I first had sex, the other questions would have been too difficult to answer for a 7-year old even if he had the luxury of putting almost 40 years between that experience and now. [My Sex Post]

We are many, not a few

What surprised me about that blog was the number of people who had had similar experiences as mine, male and female, in the apparent comfort and safety of their homes without anyone to talk to about the violations of their bodies and the loss of their innocence, many still bearing the scars until today.

We need to move on from the constant indifference and denial of the sexual abuse of minors and women in Nigeria and have to appreciate that victims need all the help they can get to deal with paedophiles, incest, rape, harassment, prostitution, battering, mutilation and other unmentionable evils.

If there are other agencies in Nigeria that you know of who address these issues, please do not hesitate to leave a comment.

Thank you.

Thought Picnic: The Times Are Hard

A phone to make you look silly

Veering off the routine of being a hermit I wandered into the city centre to have my mobile phone sorted out. For a while, it was not connecting to Mobile Internet considering it is part of my package, but as I got to the shop, everything seemed to work fine, it left me looking rather silly.

After leaving the shop though, the connection was lost again, it took a complete shut down and restarting of the phone for the service to present any semblance of stability.

Disguises of begging hungry

That however, was not what caught my attention the most but the number of people in all sorts of costumes, fancy dress or masquerade gear looking regal, weird, scary or terrifying.

There must have been 15 of them, some even in pairs, all gesturing to tourist to pose for pictures with them for a token fee. At least 4 were dressed like the Grim Reaper complete with scythe and guttural voices to strike terror in kids and amusement in passers-by.

The competition for curious tourists willing to pose was fierce and keen, what was once an occasional novelty has now become a travesty with tourists literally being jostled, the subtext being, this a sophisticated begging, there are problems out there and it is exemplified in this rather innocuous entertainment.

The times are hard

The once generous safety-nets of social welfare are not as generous and hardly enough to meet daily needs. I would hate to think it is desperate, but the stark reality is only desperation would have driven people to clown around on main streets to eke out a living – God bless their souls.

If the competition was not stiff enough in terms of how bizarre you had to look to be attractive and attract custom, there was this singular lady with an accordion playing tunelessly but expecting a hand-out.

The one that took it to the next level of necessity being the mother of innovation was when I saw a dog posing with sunglasses – for a token amount, you could take a picture. The times are really hard.

Nigeria: How not to deal with the rape of children

The difficult issues

I find myself writing on the issue of our attitudes to rape in Nigeria for the third time in a week because some pertinent matters fail to be addressed between the stigmatisation that bedevils victims of sexual violence and the critical need to see rape as well beyond physiological damage to the emotional scars that result from such traumatic experiences.

In a report that appeared in the Vanguard Nigeria newspaper yesterday, whilst I could see the anger of the parents that was about to be expressed in taking Ekene Dili Chukwu Transport Company Limited to court, which I think they should along with other prosecutions of the nabbed criminals that visited untold terror on the girls, what is most palpable is the denial of the parents of certain detail that has emanated from the ordeal.

Maybe there was no rape

The said students were between the ages of 11 and 16, even though they were attendees of an apparently convent school with the name Holy Rosary College and a principal who happens to be Reverend Sister, it is utterly naïve to suggest that the girls will not know if they had been interfered with, suffered an ordeal or had been subjected to the grossest humiliation by being asked to take off their clothes under threat of harm and menace.

We have been deflected with the notion that one of the girls escaped rape by reason of her menses and another who happened to be a parent was able to convince the hoodlums that she was pregnant and by reason of that the sexual appetite of all the men was fully sated. That stretches my imagination no end, even if I am to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.

It is strange that as the transport company is in search of exculpation daring the parents to provide any evidence of rape having taken place, the parents who have vehemently denied that rape had occurred at all are painfully vocal to dispute rape whilst behaving as if they are beyond consolation by reason of their daughters who might have really been raped.

Unseemly notions

It transpired that the girls were asked if they had been raped and none answered in the affirmative and that could have been for all sorts of reasons from having not being raped or the fear and stigmatisation that might ensue from revealing the fact that they had been violated.

However, that is not what really bothers me as much as what the parents themselves have to say of the alleged rape and most especially, a man and no doubt a father of at least one of the girls.

“I don’t think any of the children was raped because if an armed robber rapes a 10 or 13-year-old child, I don’t think that child would be able to walk for one week. And if they were raped, there  would have been blood stains, but when we saw them after the incident there was no blood on their body.  We have asked all of them and none said she was raped and these children cannot lie. We have also taken most of them to Island maternity where doctors who treated them confirmed that they were not raped and we have our medical report to that effect.”

This parent who is the Chairman of the Lagos Branch of the Parents Teachers Association made some incredible assertions.

Que?

• That the rape by an armed robber will present in certain incapacitation – This man must have a concept of rape that is fearful in context and in denial of reality if it did occur without presenting the expected symptoms.
• That blood stains always accompany rape – This might be by reason of his assuming all the girls were virgins and there is nothing to say they weren’t but I really worry about this alarming conclusion.
• That these children cannot lie – I cannot vouch for the sainthood of the children, neither will I question their honesty, but to expect children to come forward as if they were answering a question in class in the presence of their peers is to misunderstand the context, the setting, the situation and their children. I cannot say that I am not utterly saddened by the lack of sensitivity and empathy necessary to address this all in the attempt to deflect the stigma that accompanies rape.
• The more worrisome element to this is that most of the girls were medically examined; however, I do fear that medical validation might have been used to ward off suspicion of rape than to address it such that the man is asserting that there are medical reports to prove the girls had not been raped.

It gets worse

He goes on to aver that, “Although the armed robbers asked them to pull off their dresses when they were searching them for money but when they couldn’t find any money, they asked them to put on their clothes and pushed them into the bus.”

I find that utterly incredible. The armed robbers asked the girls to pull off their dresses in search of money? By which time I had lost all sympathy for the man as I agonised about what the poor girls might have gone through much of which has now been denied, dismissed and made little of by parents hoping to protect their girls from an immediate stigma without addressing the long term consequences of their ordeal.

Are we helping the children?

It again leaves one rather disgusted by the notion that children soon forget what happened to them and time will eventually put this all behind them especially when no one addresses the trauma by ignoring it, in the misguided view that time heals.

It just does not work like that and the earlier we begin to address the matters of rape as having real victims who could well be our daughters and ensuring perpetrators face the full wrath of the law for their unforgivable acts of unimaginable cruelty and violation of our loved ones, more victims will remain voiceless and rape will just be the norm we are ready to tolerate, condone, ignore and deny because we do not have the courage to help victims find a semblance of closure that involves the truth, the therapy and the regaining of confidence and self-esteem to be themselves before the experiences they suffered.

Source

LUXURY BUS ATTACK: Parents threaten to sue transport firm, recount experience | Vanguard Nigeria

Pink Slime: What you can eat may not be food

Raising the Yuck Factor

I cannot say I am one to be overtaken by food scares that fill our headlines from day to day but I do worry when the way our food is derived departs from as it were standard procedures to concoctions that make Frankenstein plasticine play.

In all honesty, I should be unconcerned with the uproar about “pink slime” because I never use minced beef in my cooking and rarely ever eat meals that have minced beef as part of the ingredients.

“Pink Slime” or to give its it more fanciful name - Lean Finely Textured Beef – plumbs the depths of sick-making yuck that could have you filling sick-bags with more than the contents of your stomach.

Taking science beyond food

As the story goes, some food industry genius thought after beef was cut off the bone there was still too much being discarded and he came up with the process of heating the beef trimmings in centrifuges to separate the fat from the meat, the exposing the product to ammonium gas to kill bacteria and this is mixed with ground beef in what Beef Products Inc. (hardly reminiscent of your dear grandma’s kitchen in name or purpose) might have called the triumph of economics and science over waste.

Reading this is stomach churning enough for my somewhat rigid constitution but what makes it alarming is the way the food industry has subsumed the regulators who trot out the idea that this whole thing is safe.

I will however contend that just because the processing of food is safe does not mean it is fit for purpose; the safety of processing must not just be demonstrated but it must be seen to not to take the Yuck Factor to the point of chronic emesis.

These unnatural things

Indeed, one must commend Jamie Oliver [1] for exposing this atrocious travesty that takes the nutritious and edible out of food leaving it just barely amenable to mastication with our digestive systems struggling to derive any nutrients before the muck is passed out our bodies made more susceptible to unknown attacks having not evolved to the chemistry necessary to process this stuff.

It is bad enough to learn that beef is treated with carbon monoxide [2] to prevent its natural browning due to rancidity or to note the rise of Frankenstein Sugars [3], but nothing prepared me for when I read that beef from a cow apparently suffering from Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy [4] (BSE) or “Mad Cow’s Disease” ended up in 8 states and the Island of Guam [5].

What is real?

There is no reason to touch the topic of Mechanically Recovered Meat [6] if you have not filled three sick bags already, but when you realise that sausages and chicken nuggets from conveyor-belt mass-market and cheap outlets do not lend themselves to traditional methods your begin to wonder what else is sacred about our food.

This is not to say that there is no need to find ways to improve quality and yield for food products be they plant or animal derived but the tampering with natural processes to do with colour, texture, taste and unnatural derivations has to be more tightly regulated and probably stopped, besides, with the certificates of food-worthiness given by food agencies we are left to better trust our instincts than allow for these compromised agencies in cahoots with the Food Industrial Complex to certify products stray dogs might well sniff at.

Debunking Myths

According to Snopes.com [7], McDonald’s stopped using mechanically recovered meat in Chicken McNuggets in 2003. When I feel better, I might be tempted to try it again.

Sources

[1] BBC News - Could 'pink slime' be rebranded?

[2] Akin Akintayo: The beauty of the dead cow

[3] Akin Akintayo: The rise of the Frankenstein Sugars

[4] Bovine spongiform encephalopathy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[5] Akin Akintayo: Cult of the Mad Cow

[6] Mechanically separated meat - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[7] snopes.com: Pink Slime and Mechanically Separated Chicken

Nigeria: Do Everything to Restore the Dignity of these Girls

It’s becoming the norm

The story of the robbery and rape of young secondary school girls on a journey from Enugu to Lagos in Nigeria had me seriously upset that when I was asked to comment on the need for justice I could only lament the circumstances that allowed for such heinous crimes to take place without prospect of punishment or justice.

I am almost becoming inured to tales of apparently marauding; sex-starved savages whose sighting of damsels automatically sets in motion the impunity and ferocity of rape without consequence, in our universities or now on our roads and any other place when women might find themselves vulnerable to the uncontrolled lusts of evil men.

There are too many issues related to this matter that needs addressing but I will concentrate on more general points with the view to preventing the recurrence of such tragedies.

Excuses and many

Ekene Dili Chukwu Transport Company Limited, has been in this business for the better part of four decades or more, I cannot understand how having been chartered by a school to convey vulnerable girls they allowed for this journey to commence without adequate support that the poor girls were left exposed and open to prey in the middle of nowhere at almost midnight.

Whilst, I read that the transport company suggests that they were under duress [Vanguard Nigeria] to deliver the kids that night, there are many other aspects to the tale that show that the company, its staff and arrangements are lackadaisical, irresponsible and without due preparation and concern.

They had completed more than 80% of the journey before the bus broke down in another version of the saga [Punch Nigeria] which has one question the road-worthiness of a bus that could not complete a journey of less than 600 kilometres and I hope that features in charges of neglect, recklessness and lack of care and attention to minors that should be preferred against the company, first exacted in the arrest of the driver of the bus.

Convoys are a solution

Considering the security situation of Nigeria and the notoriety of highwaymen on those roads, I am surprised that a company with that length of experience had not adopted the use of mass convoys in travelling between the East and West of Nigeria.

It would have been an easy arrangement to have a convoy of probably 10 buses leave at set times of the day, all in radio contact with each other with contingency. By which I mean, if any of the buses ran into difficulty, the others can be quickly alerted and vulnerable passengers immediately taken to safety.

The other usefulness of convoys means that scale can allow for escorts either by licensed security agents or the police, ensuring that passengers do not fall easy prey to opportunistic attacks.

Camping stops at dusk

I was also told these buses rarely travel at night and whilst this might have been an exception due to all sorts of extenuating circumstances, it is not beyond Ekene Dili Chukwu Transport Company Limited to have setup camping stops to accommodate passengers, especially vulnerable ones as dusk sets in, with information of the progress of the journey relayed to the destination to allay the fears of parents, guardians and relations.

In my view, none of this is rocket science, there is nothing unique about convoys and Nigeria presents the conditions, situation and setting for using convoys, security and camping stop motels to avoid the daring and reckless exposure of vulnerable passengers to menace.

Processing rape

One of the victims of this sad tale offered in rather graphic detail information of how she avoided getting raped as the police vehemently deny that any of the girls were sexually harassed apart from being robbed.

I can well understand that societal stigma of rape but the girls are twice abused if they are not provided psychological and counselling support after their trauma as parents hope the passage of time might heal the scars.

We need to realise that there are benefits to therapy and need to begin to avail ourselves of that professional service. Denial is no medicine for trauma, just as we need to be better educated about the need for extended support systems that do not castigate, judge or condemn victims for situations they could not have avoided.

Justice must matter

Basically, nobody is helped by obfuscating the truth because it means the criminals will not be adequately charged for their crimes and the girls will hardly have obtained the required and needed justice that appears to elude many rape victims in Nigeria.

Difficult as the subject of rape might seem, it needs to be addressed without scruples and dealt with sympathetically on the part of the victim and without mercy on the part of proven rapists and accomplices who could have prevented the situation but tolerated and condoned it.

The least that can be done to restore the honour and dignity of these girls is to prosecute their assailants to the fullest extent of the law whilst ensuring that Ekene Dili Chukwu Transport Company Limited is no way exculpated for allowing such vulnerable passengers to fall prey to such unforgivably atrocious circumstances.

Sources

LUXURY BUS ATTACK: Police arrest robbery, rape suspects, driver | Vanguard Nigeria

Luxury bus robbery: Police arrest five suspects — The Punch - Nigeria's Most Widely Read Newspaper

Three Days after, Police Arrest 5 Bus Rape Suspects, Articles | THISDAY LIVE

Welcome to Linda Ikeji's Blog: Robbers attack luxury bus, rape schoolgirls

Grounded By The Heart of Worship

An altered Sunday

On Sunday, just as I was about to step out of church I was co-opted into a prayer meeting of the Outreach Team; a group of quite highly exuberant people with infectious enthusiasm for proselytising and inviting people to church events.

The event this time was called Heart of Worship, a gathering of youths and young adults with ages ranging from 11 to 29 years old.

I did not plan on proselytising and after the meeting just as I rode my bicycle home, I took a detour to the South-East of Amsterdam with the hope that one of those African shops will not have kept the Sabbath – I never expected to find one open but I surprisingly did and with that got a few choice items for my nostalgic palate.

An unusual venue

Heart of Worship was to start at 18:00 and though it uses a venue just 3 minutes by bicycle from my home, I have never attended the event, but this time I just dared.

As I arrived at Pakhuis de Zwijger, a warehouse that had been converted into a multi-purpose venue with part of it hollowed out in the middle to offer access to a detachable vehicular bridge, I could already hear the sound of loud music.

The hall was dimly lit, the music loud and the performance of the band a lot different from the conventional antics at church. The music was also quite unfamiliar but full of meaning and feeling as I realised how stuffy, groan up and grown up I had become amongst that many who were closer to nephews, nieces and children if I had ever been a parent than siblings.

Adjusting to difference

In any case, I did still try to soak in the atmosphere even though I did not find myself gesticulating as if I were at a hip-hop concert at the instigation of the singers. I need to loosen up a bit for all this jumping, revelling and high-fives, but I have apparently been slaughter at the altar of respectability.

To my observation, I noticed how much talent is reposed in the youth of our church much of which finds no expression in the main church services in their musicality and absence of inhibition which appears to be curtailed by the formal settings of organised programmes and groan ups like me.

They all gained my respect with the way they used their voices as they switched between instruments with ease and one performance had a new solo singer, a worship singer take the keyboard, a keyboardist take the guitar and the drummer squatting on what I later found out was an Afro-Peruvian cajón – genius!

After the singing, dancing and clapping, there was some teaching based on the story of Hannah, the mother of Samuel who later became the prophet who anointed David for the position of king of the Israelites, taken from the 1^st Chapter of the First book of Samuel.

The message showed how people can be frustrated by the successes of others who can use their good fortune to denigrate those who have not been as fortunate. How desperation and desire can concentrate the mind on a goal, how the dedication of that desire to service can bring needed help and the wonderful testimony that can come out of having not just answers to particular prayers but much beyond that too.

Suddenly, it dawned on me that a message from the pulpit can be of great significance to all, from the fully liberated to the reserved – the heart beats to a rhythm of life seeking solutions, respite, succour and peace regardless of who embodies that heart.

I was truly blessed, but will I ditch the cravat and brogues for a less demure and more casual appearance at the next Heart of Worship? Time will tell.

Thought Picnic: Just one chance to live

Proven to self, unproven to others

Every waking day, for over two years you have in gratitude and newness of life proved to yourself that there is life, hope and expectation beyond what at one time looked like a diagnosis that was terminal.

However, as strength and recovery seemed to take greater hold so has been the difficulty of proving to others that one is a prospect, one is able and one can do.

Each time, each encounter has acknowledged, praised and commended but it was always short of perfect, never the ideal or just not the right fit.

When will it end?

It is as if what one has personally left behind is constantly dogging your progress with the results sapping confidence, draining resolve and extricating bit by bit everything one has built up for decades.

You wonder how much longer can you continue to believe yourself if not one else will dare to believe or reach out to you when you are no more in that position of great strength and opportunity that once was part of the ideal expression of your personality.

Need more than talk

Yet, you are told to be encouraged in the face of privation, to be strong in the midst of disgrace, to be hopeful as everything is carted away that even it is a struggle to hold on to one’s dignity.

You then have to decide as you review the sum total of your existence, will you allow the concept of having failed to overwhelm you or that of having tried to egg you on to new heights? A man by himself can only find so much inner strength before he is exhausted.

There comes a time when all you have is really those who can give succour, respite and time for recuperation and recovery – do you have a friend to fill that space?

All you need is a chance to show that you are living and have a life worth living.