Blogging like mad - I know. This is the first couple of quiet days I've had in a while and I'm both having more input because of doing things like reading blogs and watching TV and having more time to process input in writing. This entry is because I just watched a segment of a PBS series called China From The Inside that helped me realize how ignorant I a of the way people live all over the world. This segment about women in China, in combination with last night's Wide Angle segment on the training of midwife surgeons to fight the high rate of maternal and infant mortality in sub Saharan Africa really focuses me on the extreme privilege in my own life, even at times when money seems tight. These shows make me see the degree of difference between my life and most people in the world's lives more clearly than just reading words and numbers can. Sub Saharan Africa has 85% of the disease in the world and 2% of the doctors (or something close to that - imperfect memory) and one Chinese woman kills herself every four minutes - mostly women in the country side between sixteen and thirty five. A woman in the countryside is not asked if she is married, according to this show but "who her master is". My own little life has been so privileged - so sheltered. I really recommend the China From The Inside series. They seem to have amazing access. The women's segment showed both rural and urban life - the regimentation of factory life (which some young women were very pleased with as better than rural poverty and others found very stressful. To my western sensibility the crowding and regimentation in the cities would be very difficult as would the hard physical work and poverty of rural Chinese life. The topic of preference for boy children (and the abortion or abandonment of girls) was also addressed. The next segment will be on the environment.