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| Although no one reads my blog, i feel that this needs to be said in more places than one. The recent case of the Austrian man trapping his daughter in a dark cellar may seem to be the most evil thing someone can ever do, but it could be worse. Yes, it could, read on.
http://www.expatica.com/fr/articles/news/French-incest-victim-says-world-ignored-her-plight.html
MEAUX - Frenchwoman Lydia Gouardo was beaten, raped and burned with
acid by her father for 28 years, bearing him six children, but the
45-year-old says the world turned a blind eye to her ordeal.
As
Austria reels from the horrific discovery that a 73-year-old man locked
up his daughter for 24 years and fathered her seven children, an eerily
similar case went this month before a French court of appeal.
From
the ages of eight to 36, Gouardo was tortured and repeatedly raped by
Raymond Gouardo, her legal though not biological father, bearing him
six children, without setting off alarm bells in the village of
Crecy-la-Chapelle, east of Paris.
She says the abuse - which
came to light after her father's death in 1999 - started the day her
stepmother plunged her in a scalding bath, inflicting third-degree
burns that forced her to be taken out of school.
In an interview
broadcast Tuesday on French radio RTL, Gouardo said she was raped "in
the morning, in the evening and the night" in full knowledge of her
stepmother who simply asked her husband to "get on with it".
Years
later, when she tried to run away from her abusive home, she says her
father started to burn her with hydrochloric acid, on the legs, arms
and stomach, in punishment.
Yet as in the case of Austrian Josef
Fritzl, neither neighbours, teachers nor social services thought to
raise the alarm, despite the young woman's pregnancies and repeated
spells in hospital for injury.
She says she was tied down for
months during her first pregnancy, at the age of 19, to prevent her
from seeking an abortion, and was each time taken into hospital by her
father to give birth "at the very last moment".
"One day the midwife asked who the father was, and he said 'I am'. No one said a word," Gouardo told RTL.
In
April, an appeal court toughened the sentence handed to Gouardo's
step-mother at the original trial in March 2007, handing her a
four-year suspended prison sentence for failing to prevent decades of
abuse.
Today, Gouardo lives in a tumble-down farmhouse in the town of Coulommes, east of Paris, with seven of her nine children.
Barely literate, unemployed, she hides her burn scars under long-sleeved clothes - but says she is happy to have survived.
"When I think of what I've been through, I wonder how it's possible. Every day when I open the front door, I take a deep breath.
"I live from day to day. But I love life. When people complain, I say life is beautiful," she told RTL.
"I am fighting back now. When a bill comes through the door, I am happy. I am here, I exist."
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"There is a huge problem with the haze and air pollution." we say.
"Use public transport to reduce the fumes from your cars." they reply.
"It takes us 2 hours to get to work, the traffic is horrendous." we complain.
"Use public transport to reduce the number of cars on the street." they reason.
We
have heard this rhetoric time after time, patronized for not
patronizing our public transportation system. It seems that public
transport is the political panacea for all our traffic woes, but is it
really?
Obviously the less vehicles there are on the street, the
less congested it is, and the less pollutants will be released into our
atmosphere. If so, why would we not take the public transportations? Do
we deserve to BE patronized like we are? Do we deserve to be treated
like selfish, and ignorant fools who feel public transport is "below"
us and would not listen to sound advice?
2 hours. In my
experience, this is the average waiting period for public
transportation, be it the train or the bus. And this is not a constant
wait, heavens, no. You could one day, stand at the bus station for 2
hours and not see a single bus, while in another, you would see 3-5
busses(on the same route no less) pass you by in the span of 10 minutes.
But
that is not all, just because a train or a bus is in front of you does
not mean you can get on. There are some other elements involved. Luck,
for example. If you are lucky, the train or bus will stop with a door
facing you, if you are not, well, be prepared to fight. More often than
not, if you are kind enough to allow those on the vehicle to exit, you
WILL NOT be able to get in. So fight, brawl, push and shove. It does
not matter who your opponent may be. Heck, i have personally seen
people separating children from their caretakers just to get onto the
train.
Is this what we wish the people of our country to become?
Savage Lord of the Flies type children? Because, there is no doubt that
prolonged usage of our public transport would transmogrify us in just
that way.
While the politicians WE ELECTED tell us to take
advantage of our public transportation system, one has to wonder, "Do
they know the state of our public transport?"
"Do they know how overcrowded the public transportation is during peak hours?"
"Do they know how many people have attempted to use public transportation?"
"Do
they know that large bus companies such as Konsortium hires drivers
with a LONG records of traffic offenses? Drivers who have and would
continue to cost people to lose their very lives?"
"Have they forgotten what it is like, to be a rakyat?"
“Have they gotten so used to their Mercedes and police escorts that they no longer see the Malaysia we live in?”
What
is it about being elected into office that creates such a divide? We no
longer see the Malaysians who were elected into office as rakyat
but as politicians, as a “them” to our “us”, and from past experience,
neither do they. Maybe it is time to wake up, maybe it is time to start
anew, maybe it is time Malaysia leads the world. We can and need to
bridge the divide between the people and the government. It is time to
take action, and with the recent change in the political landscape in
our country, there is hope, however faint that this might just become a
reality.
The fate of our country is in their our hands... | | |
| Today's Calvin and Hobbes strip:
So THAT'S how Santa and Christmas connects to one another...
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