From My Sisters' Lips

Ini memoir kolektif sekumpulan wanita Muslimah UK. Kebanyakan mereka adalah saudara baru dan ini kisah mereka melawan arus kehidupan silam mereka, dan juga masyarakat sekeliling. Yang menarik adalah kebanyakan mereka adalah niqabi (niqabi ialah wanita yang berpurdah). Termasuk penulis memoir ini, Naima Robert. Beliau adalah seorang African British yang ayahnya seorang atheis dan ibu beragama tradisi Zulu.

Mereka menceritakan pengalaman mengenali Islam. Kebanyakan cerita adalah hidayah datang dari sumber yang tidak disangka2. Bagaimana mereka merasakan yang mereka memang tidak dapat melarikan diri dari membuat penyerahan diri kepada Allah swt dan kembali ke fitrah mereka. Pengalaman mereka pertama kali mengucapkan syahadah, sesuatu yang kita takkan dapat rasai kerana kita dilahirkan dalam keluarga Muslim. Begitu juga pengalaman pertama kali mengenakan hijab.

Bagi penulis, penerimaan Islam secara total (dari ketauhidan hinggalah ibadah dan pemakaian) berlaku secara beransur2. Ia berkadar langsung dgn tahap ilmu. Pada permulaan memang banyak prinsip Islam yang ditentangnya. Ketika itu kata hatinya ialah cukuplah saja hanya mengakui keesaan Allah dan kerasulan Nabi Muhammad (saw), maka aku orang Islam. Tetapi orang yang rajin mencari tentu tak akan disia-siakan Allah. Semakin dalam dia belajar, semakin terbuka hatinya. 

Satu perkara yang membuatkan beliau yakin dgn ilmu Islam ialah jatidiri ilmuwan Islam merekod kesahihan kata2 Rasulullah saw, atau lebih dikenali dengan Ulum Al Hadith (Science of Hadith). Ia cabang ilmu yg tiada dalam agama lain.Ia menggambarkan kematangan ilmuwan Islam zaman lampau. Sampai 2 mukasurat dia menceritakan kekaguman dia dan rakan2 saudara baru lain dengan Sains Hadith ini.

Selepas membaca kekagumannya, saya mula berfikir, ilmu sains yg kita ada sekarang, adakah kita mengambil kira siapa atau bagaimana sifat perawinya? Tidak, kan? Bagaimana kita benar2 tahu itu kata2 Hippocrates? Adakah kita mengambil kira seorang saintis yg melakukan kajian itu bukan seorang penipu, tiada masalah kesihatan berkaitan otak, tidak mengalami kenyanyukan? Alhamdulillah kebelakangan ini setiap researcher dikehendaki mengisytihar 'conflict of interest' dan keterlibatan penaja2 dalam kajiannya, sekurang2nya ada usaha untuk menilai kejujuran perawi ilmu itu. Malah apa2 praktis perubatan sekarang adalah bersandarkan kepada 'graded evidence' contohnya kalau Gred A adalah berdasarkan trial klinikal besar2an (randomized clinical trial). Sistem ini samalah seperti sistem gred sesuatu hadith samada ia sahih, hasan, lemah atau palsu.

(Sebenarnya saya malu sendiri sebab sebelum ini tak pernah pun terkagum dengan klasifikasi hadith2, hanya tahu hadith ada peringkat2nya tapi tak pernah tahu yang betapa susah-payah-jerihnya mereka cuba membersihkan cabang ilmu ini dari pencemaran fakta dengan dongeng).

Bukan mudah seorang saudara baru untuk belajar mencintai Rasulullah saw. Ia konsep baru untuk mereka, berbanding kita yg telah diperkenalkan dengan baginda sejak kita kecil. Bukan mudah juga untuk meninggalkan pakaian lama dan mengubah seluruh 'wardrobe' mereka. Atau meninggalkan kebiasaan berparti. Tetapi dengan bertambahnya ilmu dan pemahaman, menjalani kehidupan sebagai muslimah bukanlah sesuatui yg terlalu sukar atau mustahil. Ini saya sertakan perasaan penulis ketika membuat keputusan untuk berpurdah (lebih kurang setahun selepas dia memeluk Islam).

"Wearing the niqab, choosing to cover in that way, seemed the least I could do to thank my Lord, to show my gratitude, to enact my submission. I didn't have time to waste on petty concerns- I had been given this chance to make something better, and I decided to take it. And, at that moment, other people's opinions, their hang-ups and point of view, faded into the background; my eyes were fixed on the pleasure of Allah."

Yang menarik ialah penulis ketika itu bekerja sebagai penyambut tetamu di sebuah kolej di London, tetapi majikan2nya yang bukan pun beragama Islam tidak kisah dia bertutup litup seperti itu. (Aahhh Mr Sarkozy, this is something that the French should learn from the British. An independent person should be given his/her rights to dress however he/she likes.)

Satu perkara yang ditulis ialah tentang tahap ilmu Islam dalam sesebuah masyarakat Islam. Saya bersetuju dengan pendapat penulis yang jika satu masyarakat Islam itu mempunyai tahap ilmu Islam yang rendah, yang akan paling merana ialah wanitanya. Ketika itu wanita Islam akan ditindas, tidak diberi hak sepatutnya, disunat dengan kejam (female genital mutilation- satu tradisi masyarakat Islam Afrika), menunggu kes cerai selesai bertahun2 (biasa dengar?), dijadikan simbol sex dan kecantikan (IFF konon). Sedangkan wanita di zaman Rasulullah saw menerima ajaran terus dari baginda, bersoal-jawab dengan baginda, dijadikan sumber rujukan etc.

Jika anda mempunyai kawan2 yg berminat dgn Islam, tetapi anda tidak pandai / malu2 untuk berkomunikasi dengannya, saya fikir buku ini hadiah yang sesuai untuknya. Sesuai juga untuk Muslim yang masih selesa di takuk lama.

Alek Wek's Memoir

Wanted to write so many things but everything ended up in drafts. But I will post this surely. This is a book I read before Ramadhan. It is the memoir of Alek Wek, a supermodel from Sudan.

I picked up this book from the library, at that time they were hosting a 'Refugee Week', and they featured this book on the front desk, so I quickly grabbed it. Alek Wek was a refugee from Sudan and this book tells her story camping in the African bushes to escape the civil war to the glamorous runaways of supermodels.

When I picked this book I was thinking, weii aku lagi cantiklah, apasal kau jadik model?  :P (no need translation). Apart from that she is much taller and slimmer.. hehehe I suppose she fits better in those beautiful dresses.

She and her family left their modest town home for safety from rebels and militants to remote villages of Sudan. There they found tribes who lived centuries away from us. People who still hunt and cook using woods and live in houses made of cow dungs. Boys who washed theirs heads with cow's urine to treat lice infestation. During sleepless nights her mother would teach her children listening to the various sounds of the African jungle and her father showed them the constellations of the stars. No tv, books etc, no electricity or clear water.

Boy treating his head lice with cow's urine

They made a miraculous escape to London and obtained refugee status. There she was discovered by a modeling agency and later made her way through to New York. Now she spends her night in New York, the next day dinner in London and the weekend in Milan. Her involvement with the modeling world was a turning point to the industry that has always label beauty as fair, blond hair and blue eyes.

From a refugee to a supermodel, how easily and quickly a person can be easily spoiled, this she admitted herself.

The funny thing is, the fashion designers told her that she was fat. She has always been hungry and was close to being malnourished and they told her she was fat. What a weird world.

New Resolution

I know it's March. But this is not a resolution for 2010. This is a resolution for life, insyaAllah.

2 days ago our beloved Mak Uda returned to her Creator. She was my father's younger sister. She died of metastatic breast cancer. Luckily my father returned to Malaysia a few days before her death and had the opportunity to say his final goodbye.

My father's mother died due to cervical cancer in 2003. My late Mak Uda had been battling breast cancer for 10 years. And my brother is still fighting it since 9 years ago. The genetic susceptibility is strong in my father's family probably because they intermarried a lot. My grandparents themselves were second cousins.

What cancer can do to you?

10 years ago Mak Uda was diagnosed with breast cancer and has been on treatment ever since. In 2006 she was admitted to my ward because one day she woke up paralyzed waist down and unable to pass urine. The cancer had spread to her spine. Because she was one tough woman, she regained some functions of her legs and able to walk with walking aid. But then the cancer spread to her femur (thigh bone) and fractured it. She was immobilized again. Then last year it spread to her lungs.

My brother? He lost the normality of his right leg and has been sick all the time that he said he has forgotten how it felt to be perfectly healthy. He was unable to pursue his dream to become a pilot. He finished his bachelor's degree 3 semesters later than his friends. He now has kidney failure and had to postpone his masters degree.

So my new resolution is...to do everything I can to protect myself and my family from the dreadful disease.

Yes, you heard (read) me right. We can protect ourselves from getting cancer even though our genetic make ups are against us. All of us have cancer cells in our bodies. But not everybody will develop the cancer-disease.


AntiCancer: A New Way of Life

I was really inspired by this book that I recommend it to be read by everybody, including (especially!) my colleagues.

This book is written by Dr David Servan-Schreiber, a clinical professor of psychiatry with a PhD in neuroscience, at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He also has lectured in Stanford and Cambridge Universities. But more importantly, he also has beaten brain cancer, twice.

As a cancer patient, he realized that his doctors (oncologists) did not have any answer to his most important question-"what do I do to make sure that my cancer does not come back?"

Their answers were vague. Do as you please. Enjoy your life. Don't smoke. Make sure you attend check-ups every six months.

But the scientist in him could not accept those answers.

So what he did was, he dig up the university's large database and searched bits and pieces of what researchers have found over the last few decades- especially in journals that doctors don't read (doctors usually only read famous journals that are sponsored by giant pharmaceutical companies- that publish things like this drug works better than this, this method of surgery has less complications, this procedure saves more lives etc).

He was shocked to find that the world actually has enough scientific evidences to suggest an anticancer life (the oncologists obviously did not know this).

So he changed his lifestyle. And he has been cancer free for 10 years now.

So people, all of us have cancer cells in our bodies. But not all of us will develop cancer as a disease. It is not as popularly believed, that cancer is a genetic illness. It is environmentally influenced, just like coronary heart disease and type 2 diabetes mellitus.

The lifestyle that he has adopted is similar to what was practiced by Shigeaki Hinohara (the Japanese doctor who was still working at the age of 97), which I posted here.

I will share 2 things from the book that illustrate the statement that I have written in bold above.

First, a number of studies have shown that a lot of people carry microtumors in their bodies, without being inflicted by the disease. A systematic autopsy study in Finland revealed that occult papillary carcinoma of the thyroid is a 'normal' finding there. Statistics also showed that relative to men in the West, just as many pre-cancerous microtumours are found in the prostates of Asian men who die before fifty from other causes of cancer. Something in their way of life prevents these microtumors from developing.

In 2003, Dr. R. Mackie (a dermatologist) wrote an article about 2 patients, in New England Journal of Medicine. Patient A had end-stage kidney disease, requiring her to go for haemodialysis 3 times a week. She was then fortunate enough to get a new kidney from Lady K who died in an accident. All went well, her body received the new kidney beautifully, with the help of immunosuppressants (drugs to lower the immune system so that her body would not reject the new kidney). But after a year, the doctors found that she had widespread melanoma (an aggressive skin cancer). That was when Dr Mackie came into the picture. She could not found the primary site of the tumor. No skin lesion at all. Patient A succumbed to the cancer.

Shortly afterwards, patient B, also a kidney failure patient who received a new kidney in the same hospital developed secondary melanoma without the primary lesion. Dr. Mackie was convinced this could not be a coincidence. She found out that patient A and B received kidneys from the same donor. But the donor's medical records were clean (you have to be free of Hepatitis, HIV, cancer etc to be a donor). But she dig deeper. In a cancer database in Scotland she found that the donor actually had melanoma, was treated and years before she died she was declared 'completely cured' by her doctors.

So Dr Mackie managed to convince patient B's nephrologists to stop the immunosuppressant, and instead gave him immunostimulant to quickly reject the kidney. Patient B recovered from the melanoma but of course had to go back to the weekly haemodialysis.

So the donor, actually had been carrying microtumors in her body until her accidental death. She had managed to keep her cancer at bay. But in new hosts, whose immune system were depressed, the cancer cells flared to full blown disease.

Will write more later. AlFatihah to Mak Uda, who was beautiful in every way. You have shown us how to fight the disease and we are sure you are in one of the Heaven's gardens now. Thanks for the prayers for my brother. He is recovering well and still has appetite to eat. A good sign! :)

Recent Memoirs

Recently I read 2 memoirs. Both are very different from each other. Shanghai Tango, autobiography of Jin Xing, a famous Chinese dancer who is a transsexual, and Through The Narrow Gate, which is a memoir by Karen Armstrong (a theologist) during her 7 years as a Catholic nun.

Shanghai Tango

What is your childhood dream? My childhood dream was to become a doctor and to own a chocolate factory. But for Jin Xing, her childhood dream was to become a woman. She was born a man.

I have read quite a number of Chinese memoirs and fictions, and one very very important thing for a Chinese is having a son. In ancient China (I don't know about now), a woman's status in her husband's family depends on whether her firstborn is a son, and also how many sons altogether that she has. You are nothing even if you gave birth to six daughters, but if your firstborn is a son, your status rises significantly (imagine me in ancient China, everybody will kowtow to me). This memoir started with the part when Jin Xing went to tell his mother that her son will soon become her daughter. If you have a tiny bit of knowledge of chinese traditions, you will understand how heavy the news was to Jin Xing's mother.

This book tells about Jin Xing's life as a dancer and also how she came to the decision to change her sex. In medical school we were not exposed to this part of medicine. I was surprised that male to female sex change operation can still preserve whatever nerve endings there are in a male's genitalia. And before somebody is 'allowed' to have a sex change surgery, he/she has to receive psychotherapy for 2 years and another year as 'real life test', meaning the person has to go through life as the opposite sex, successfully before he/she can have the surgery. I also learnt from the memoir that to turn yourself into a woman, a man has to go through a few surgeries. Breasts augmentation, removal of facial hair, vocal cord surgery then finally the genital surgery.

You can google Jin Xing, she is in wikipedia. You can also see her dance on you tube. She is prettier than me :P

Although it is against my religious belief to agree on this issue, I picked her memoir from the library just so that I can understand her (and people like her). It is hard enough to understand and be non-judgemental to 'normal people'. I hope in the future I will be able to see them with clear eyes


Through The Narrow Gate



Karen Armstrong is a famous theologist. She has written many books on religions- Islam, Christianity, Judaism etc and she also has written a number of biographies of religious idols, including of our beloved Prophet Muhammad (saw). She was born a Catholic and at age 17 she entered a convent to be trained as a nun. She was searching for God.

I think generally we can say that nuns are peaceful people. They always smile and look happy. It is not easy to become as peaceful as one. The nuns' aim in life is to be united with God, in order to do so one have to detach oneself from anything worldly. The training is very harsh. It is designed to make you not to feel any joy in life, because the real joy is only in hereafter. A common phrase that they use is 'let yourself die'.

As one reader reviewed in Amazon-
The process of becoming a nun, as Armstrong describes it, is a rigorous program of self-denial. One is not to complain, be tired, be mournful, be happy, be questioning, or let onesself feel any of the things that come with the territory of being human. Rather, it was taught that the pinnacle of the spiritual life was the abillty to shed one's humanness, to think and feel only about one thing - God.

Among the trainings are the practice of the Great Silence. There are only 2-3 hours in a day that a nun-in-training are allowed to talk or discuss, but the rest of the day they have to be silent (except in emergencies, of course) and meditate. Another practice is not to enjoy the food. They only can eat to survive. Karen Armstrong actually developed anorexia nervosa because of this practice.

Once they completed the training and passed whatever necessary to become a nun, a ceremony will be held for 'graduation'. The ritual in this ceremony actually resembles a funeral where the nun is laid and a cross is put on top of her to symbolize death- meaning her worldly-self has died. And when a nun can be dead to herself then only she can serve Christianity to the world. They are then allowed to further their studies so that they can teach in convents and also become missionaries. So Karen was sent to Oxford University where she studied literature. This is where she became more critical and finally left her Order. This actually has been nicely described by one of her Mother Superior- that Armstrong could not 'die' because she was full of 'intelligent pride'.

She continued to search for God. She is now a freelance monotheist (believes that there is only one God but does not follow any organized religion).

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Reading memoirs can really connect you to the particular time in history that the author has relived in a book. Don't you think teaching history lessons in Malaysia should be done by using published memoirs instead of textbooks? So that we learn history through somebody's eyes, so that one can 'feel' and empathize, not just learn and memorize.

Trust Me, I'm A junior Doctor

This book is written by Max Pemberton, when he was a junior doctor (or aka houseman/ house officer/ intern). He is now a psychiatrist-in training and also a columnist with the Daily Telegraph.

Well, this book answered my question- the crazy hellish life of a junior doctor, is it just in Malaysia or is it a global phenomenon? Reading Max was like reading my own diary (which I never wrote). Although now the condition here must have got better since the implementation of European Working Time Directive where working hours and on call requirements have been reduced.

Max described it well. It is a life of either you are working, or you are recovering from working, so that you are able to work the next day (but come to think of it, what work doesn't?).

And the constant feeling of 'I should leave medicine forever' or 'I want to quit now' every time you were scolded by your consultant (in front of the whole team) or a patient you cared for died or when you received abusive words from the patient's families (quite commonly the 'goverment sector' sentiment will be brought up).

But frankly, I never had the thought of quitting or leaving medicine forever, but I did have the occasional feelings of 'I just want to go home now' or 'can I faint now?'. Actually it was quite reasonable for me to faint because I was pregnant with Adam that time. Tapi korang tau lah, aku bukan drama queen kan..

And this is my favourite part of the book, on how we medical personnel detach ourselves from feelings, because to us everything has an explanation.....

Mr Farley has had dementia for the past ten years. His wife has looked after him for all that time, day in, day out. And now his kidneys and heart have stopped working properly. Medicine has decided to bow out gracefully and admit defeat. There's nothing that can be done. He and his wife are in their eighties. How she's coped on her own all this time is beyond me. His eyes are shut and his mouth wide open.

"It's all right darling, I'm here" says Mrs Farley.

No response. She looks a little crestfallen. She gently strokes his cheek while talking to him, and he moves his head towards her.

"Look, Doctor, he still knows who I am," she says to the doctors lined up at the foot of the bed.

But everyone looked slightly embarrassed and Dr Pike says gently, "We're very sorry, there's nothing more we can do. I think it's for the best."

Everyone quietly moves on.

Back in the office I accost Barney, my senior. "But he recognizes his wife, that's incredible, isn't it?" I say.

Barney frowns. "Oh that, no, of course he doesn't recognize her."

I'm perplexed.

"It's rooting reflex," Barney explains. "He's got advanced dementia. He hasn't a clue what's going on."

What this means is that the movement Mrs Farley thinks is her husband recognizing her voice is, in fact, a mere reflex. Anyone or anything touching his cheek would induce the same response.

I feel somehow cheated. I think I prefer Mrs Farley's explanation. Medicine can be cruel like this. It reduces things to neural pathways, to reflexes, to physiological mechanisms. It removes the mystery and wonder from things. Mrs Farley doesn't want to live in a world where her husband has primitive rooting reflex. She wants to live in a world where her husband recognizes her voice.

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And look what my mother bought me as souvenir from Amsterdam...

THE ROAD OF LOST INNOCENCE

This book is written by Somaly Mam, a Cambodian humanitarian activist who fights against sexual slavery.

Abandoned as a baby, she was looked after her grandmother until she disappeared. She was then taken into care of a man who claimed to be her 'grandfather', but was treated no better than an unpaid servant. She was raped at 12 (her 'grandfather' sold her virginity to a Chinese man to pay his gambling debts) and was forced to marry at 15. Not long after she was then sold to a brothel in Phnom Penh.

The first half of this book is about her own life, the next half is about her work with AFESIP, an organization she founded to rescue girls who were sold into prostitution.

In Cambodia, because of 30 years under the Khmer Rouge brutal regime, people became egocentric, or only care about themselves. People do not help others simply because they don't trust each other. 3 decades of bombing, genocide and starvation leads to moral bankruptcy. Families who got themselves into debts, will sell their daughters to brothels and the daughters must work in the brothels until the family's debt is paid. But usually the families will get into more debts, so the girls can never leave the brothels. Sometimes the daughters were sold so that their brothers can go to school, or the fathers can gamble, or simply because the family don't have enough to eat. In some cases the family send their daughters to the cities with middle man or agents thinking that they will work in restaurants or as domestic servants.

What these brothels / businesses are like?

They are wooden filthy houses on stilts above water, with rooms separated by sarongs which are run by a 'meebon' (ibu ayam). Toilets are just holes on the floors where all the excrements go straight into the water below. No fresh clean water supply, just buckets of dirty water for the girls to wash themselves. In the same rooms where the girls cook and wash during the day they will be raped and beaten repeatedly (by smelly, drunk, yellow teeth customers) at night. There will also be torture rooms where any girls who are 'difficult' or cause any trouble (eg try to run) will be tied and beaten, and they will be poured with maggots, poisonous insects or snakes. That was during Somaly Mam's younger days (early 1980s) but now they also use electrocutions.

Once she tried to run away, but was caught by the police and put in a cell, where she was raped by the policemen and the next day she was sent back to the brothel.

Who are the clients? Policemen, government officials, soldiers, taxi drivers etc, and even Buddhist monks.

And in Cambodia, there is a believe that if you have sex with virgins you will live longer and it can cure diseases. So the virgins cost more money. And to ensure virginity, brothels usually use small children, age 5-6. Then, to make more money, they will sew back the child's vagina, so they sell them again as virgins. The younger children catch HIV easily, because they tear more. There are AIDS victims due to prostitution as young as 6. What do these kids know? So much evil in this world.

And against all odds Somaly managed to escape prostitution with the help of foreigners and humanitarian workers. She married Pierre, a French man who worked with a French medical aid organization.

She began working in a clinic and she realized that she needs to help other girls. She distributed condoms and gave advices on hygiene and sexually transmitted diseases to the girls in the brothels. Then she began rescuing girls. First she placed them in her house. Then when it gets more crowded she and Pierre started to search for funds to built shelter.

She then set up AFESIP , a french acronym for Acting for Women in Distressing Situations, an organization that combats sexual trade and slavery. See AFESIP website here.

It is not without hardship. They did not have funding at first. The shelter was initially run on Pierre's salary. A lot of the workers are only volunteers, they don't have salaries. Whenever they alerted the police of a minor being held captive in any brothel, they would follow the raid so that the girl would be released into AFESIP care, instead of into the cells. But sometimes the information would leak (because the police are clients themselves, and sometimes even investors). And if the raid is successful, the pimps would be released in few days, because the judges were bribed. The shelters have high walls and need guards, because they received threats and harassed. Somaly's adoptive family's house was even burnt down.

In one of AFESIP trials in court on behalf of an 8-year-old girl who was raped by a group of men in their 50s, the judge was bribed. The men claimed the girl was provocatively dressed (!!!). And the judge's argument was that the girl is young and has enough time to remake her life, but the men were of venerable age to go to prison. So they walked away free.

Once they raid a large brothel that operates with girls in glass boxes (where the clients, whom a lot are foreigners, can choose the girls on display). This brothel was run by mafias. The next day AFESIP shelter was surrounded by armed men and the girls were taken (even the ones who were not from that large brothel). Even the Ministry of Interior advised Somaly to stay out of it because clearly the mafias are above the government. And Somaly's 14 year-old daughter was kidnapped , but luckily, because she has many contacts in the industry, her daughter was found after 4 days, before she could be smuggled into Thailand.

The AFESIP shelters are now in Pnom Penh, Siem Reap, Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam) and Sisattanak Province (Laos). The shelters are designed to help the girls reintegrate into society by giving them classes on sewing, cooking, hairdressing and keeping accounts, so that they can open their own business. They have psychologist, nurses, social workers, paralegals, and even investigators (to search for other victims). The younger girls were sent to another special shelter in Thloc Chhroy, a village where they can grow up safely and go to the local school with other children. The villagers protect the children.

Everyday girls are trafficked from Cambodia to nearby countries, including Malaysia. The business itself worth $500 million a year, almost as much as the annual budget of Cambodian government. A lot of people have interest to protect this business. Why Somaly is still standing battling this? Only a victim understands a victim. She still lives with the memories of smells of the brothels and the stinking sperm. She washes herself like a madwoman everyday and keep a cupboard full of perfumes. She cannot erase her past. Only rescuing the girls makes her happy.

If this is where the missing children of Malaysia have been sent to, only God can save them. Don't travel alone and protect your daughters. Don't let them walk to school or shops alone. This business is uglier than the Dark Ages' or 'Zaman Jahiliyah'. You can never find them back or you find them broken.

p/s I just found Somaly's Foundation website if you want to see some photos and news on her work

A FRIEND LIKE HENRY by Nuala Gardner

It took me 2 weeks to finish this book. Simply because you really need time to absorb what the author and her family has gone through.

It is about Nuala and Jamie Gardner's son, Dale who has autism. A true example of how parents would struggle to give the best for their children.

Autism was once known as infantile schizophrenia. It is because the child is truly locked in their own world, withdrawn, does not communicate or play like other children. They have lack of eye contact, become obsessed in a particular routine or toy. And they have terrible terrible temper tantrums eg head banging to the wall. Imagine you have this small creature who doesn't show any sign of love, does not engage with you and throw tantrums. (I mean having a naughty toddler is tiring enough, but it is always rewarding and funny, but if you have a child that never reward you even with a smile, how long can you sustain? how long can you love him?)

What Nuala and Jamie did was very amazing. Some things parents just take for granted, like your child babbles then talks, then walk normally, bath and sleep without struggles. Dale spoke his first word when he was 26 moths old and it was 'tree'. Years later then only he says Mum or Dad or anything meaningful.

So, who is Henry? Henry is a dog, a golden retriever who actually broke into Dale's autistic world and help bring Dale back to the real world. Well, never underestimate a pet's influence/impact in a person's life. God always give you help in a way you can never imagine.

Surprisingly, one of the couple's biggest obstacle is from the proffessionals (doctors, educational psychologist etc). The 'war' they had to go through just to get a diagnosis and proper help for Dale. (Sadly, I can relate myself as the profesional in some parts of this 'war'). Quoting from Nuala herself..

"You may have a major impact on your patient's life, and the consequences of your actions, OR LACK OF THEM, live with that patient forever..."

For those who are unable to read this book, but would like to know their story anyway, you can watch a film on dvd based on their story titled 'After Thomas' (the dog is named thomas in this film).

The Light in the Windows

I got this book from a carboot sale for 50pence only. It is a memoir by June Goulding, who worked as a midwife in a home for unmarried mothers in Bessboro, Ireland from 1951-1952.

She wrote this book in the 1990s, after an accident that nearly killed her. She thought that if she waits any longer, the story would be burried untold with her death. Well, it took her 40 years to get the courage to write the book. Probably she waited for the people involved to die, I don't know, because stories like this is not what you want to leak outside the walls.

So, the home was managed by Catholic nuns. Pregnant unmarried girls were sent there,usually by their mothers, to continue their pregnancy and deliver the babies without the knowledge of the neighbours / villagers. Sometimes even the girls' fathers did not know! Their mothers would lie, saying that they were sent to boarding school or something like that. This was Ireland 1950s, when premarital conception was still a taboo; unlike now in the UK where single mothers get more benefits than the married ones. Sadly, most of the girls were naive teenagers, barely 16-18.

Well,although the home was managed by nuns, you will be surprised to know what kind of treatment the girls had. They live in dormitories but were not allowed to communicate with each other at all. The food were not enough, everyday is just bread and margarine, and once a week they will be given a tiny portion of sausages. And there were no workers in that home, all work was done by the heavily pregnant or nursing girls. This include cooking, laundry, scrubbing floors, maintaining the garden of the large convent. no rest for the pregnant mothers, all these are considered atonement for their sins.

The worst part is, the girls had to stay at the home for 3 years, to nurse and raise the children, then the children would be put up for adoption or sent to orphanage. The mothers could not keep the children. it's like the mothers have no right at all on the children. And they were not informed of the whereabouts of the children, which orphanage they were sent to or who adopted them. This is very cruel, as who does not love a 3 year old, whom has been the only person you cared about and whom loved you back unconditionally. At that time, adoption act has not already exist in Ireland. None of the mothers signed any adoption papers.

Goulding's job was to do antenatal check up for the mothers and deliver the babies (she was given a room there so that she can attend if labour occurs at night time). But her power was limited, she can't even give antenatal vitamins to the girl's. Labour has no analgesia at all and the girls were not allowed to scream. Worse, the girls were denied any stitch, no matter how their vagina torn in labour. This is also a type of punishment for their sins.

In the home Goulding tried to do what she could only do, be a friend to the lonely girls. She became their shoulders and sometimes helped them smuggle out letters, buy them cigarettes etc. She even helped a mother and her baby daughter escaped the home together.

Very interesting read, it is a memoir, so don't expect any fantastic writing style. But it does make you shake your head (in disbelief).