I have always been reluctant to compare between countries from the so-called first and third worlds. I think they are never fair and realistic. But I couldn’t help it after my last trip to a community center in Tawila IDP camp, in North Darfur. There, women work hard in several cooperative projects and many of them do it literally with the babies on their backs. While making bricks, stoves or other household items, while cooking or cleaning or even when they are farming, babies sleep, cry, laugh or just observe from the shoulders of their mothers.
In Darfur there is obviously no babysitters to take care of the children and when they are grown enough to start walking, mothers let them run freely with the confidence that members of the community will keep an eye on them all the time. I’m lucky to see that there are still other ways of raising children!
Comments