Mother's Day

Happy Mother's Day. Give thanks today that you didn't have to raise a son like me. Since Mother's Day was Sunday I thought I would mention something about it here in the U.S. and ask you to tell me about it there. is it any different than here?
Mothers were first singled out for honor in ancient Greece when a a spring festival was held in honor of Rhea, the head of female Gods. But in the U.S., the specific Mother's Day we celebrate (and it seems much of the rest of the modern world does too) started about 150 years ago when a mom named Anna Jarvis, a housewife from somewhere in the northeast U.S., organized a specific day to raise awareness of the poverty in her town. She called it "Mother's Work Day" because she believed that moms had it toughest of all when things went bad in a community. After Anna Jarvis died her daughter approached politicians and community leaders pushing for a day to honor her mom and all moms in the U.S. Finally, just before W.W.I President Woodrow Wilson signed a bill that recognized Mother's Day. In the periods after W.W. I many other nations grabbed that idea too and the holiday spread throughout the world. But the great irony of Mother's Day is that instead of it being a day of church , letter writing and expressions of thanks, it quickly turned into a commercial holiday (that it is today) of greed and profit.
Anna Jarvis' daughter was so bitter at what had happened to Mother's Day she demonstrated to kill it off, and swore until the day of her death that she regretted ever starting a Mother's Day tradition. I remember when my mom was alive we always went out to eat at a nice restaurant and presented her with gifts involving sentiment. That's probably the way most Americans celebrate it.
I have some interesting Mother's Day related lists to pass on, since it's that time of year. It's a list of the 10 Best and a list of the 10 Worst Countries in which to be a mom. The ranking reelects why, for inc. stance, a mother living in sub-Saharan Africa compared to that of a mother living in a Scandinavian country (which are at the top of the list of best because of both affluence and small populations) is 28 times more likely to see her child die in the first year of life and over 750 times more likely to die herself in pregnancy or childbirth.
The list is from 'Save The Children' foundation as part of its annual State of the World's Mothers 2006 report that ranks the best and worst places to be mother and child. 125 countries were included in the study, child was based on 10 indicators that pertain to only health and wealth. Here are the two lists. Top 10 Countries
1. Sweden 2. Denmark 3. Finland 4. Austria 5. Germany 6. Norway 7. Australia 8. Netherlands 9. Canada 10. United States
The Bottom 10 Countries
115. Congo 116. Central African Republic 117. Yemen 118. Ethiopia 119. Sierra Leone 120. Chad 121. Guinea-Bissau 122. Mali 123. Burkina Faso 125. Niger
Some other findings I found of note in the report include:
-Every minute, one mother and 7 newborns die in the first month of a child's life
- 4 million newborns die each year mostly due to infection complications at birth or from low birth weight.
- Women who are educated are more likely to postpone marriage and early childbirth, seek health care for themselves and their families, and encourage their children to attend school.
- As contraceptive use rises and mothers are able to space births at healthy intervals, deaths among mothers and children decline.
- In the bottom 10 countries, nearly 1 out of 3 children is not enrolled in school, and only 1 in 4 adult women is literate.
- In the bottom 10 contraception is used by fewer than 5% of the women. Well, the results are predictable because it is common sense that there is a direct link between health and wealth status and quality of life. But it is good for us to see, reminding us how fortunate we are to not live in such poverty, and how difficult it is sometimes to be a mom.
The maids in Saudi Arabia are tired of it and aren't any longer going to "take it lying down". Err...uh... bad choice of words, but you'll see what I mean. An incident of sexual abuse, so common by Saudi men against women, has ended in a painful lesson for the abuser. It's because surgeons in Riyadh have reattached the penis of a Saudi man who paid the price for trying to have sex with his Filipina maid. She attacked him with a knife, a hospital source said on Monday. "This is a sophisticated operation. You are dealing with an organ in a difficult area and you want to try to return to its efficiency," said a spokesman at Riyadh's Takhassusi Hospital. Ouch! Earlier this month newspapers reported that the maid removed her employer's manhood when he tried to molest her in the middle of the night as his wife was sleeping. The maid is now in police custody and likely to be the scapegoat for defending herself in such a dramatic and emphatic manner.
"It's one of the rare cases ... but they did it (the operation) last week and it went smoothly," the spokesman said. "The hospital has done this kind of operation before, but only after people had car accidents." Let's hope the lady is freed and the rest of the female population of Saudi Arabia goes shopping for butcher knives this weekend.