The Star Online: Lifestyle: Parenting
The Star Online: Lifestyle: Parenting |
| Posted: An injured Afghan girl finds a second home in the United States. THE dark-haired girl wearing an "American Girl" T-shirt blended in with the other giggling girls flopped on their bellies and watching cartoons inside a darkened classroom. All that distinguished 11-year-old Farida was an eye patch she had decorated with purple glitter and a gaudy "F" to cover her missing left eye. Four years ago, in Farida's remote village in southern Afghanistan, shrapnel from a buried Taliban bomb tore through her eye as she played outside her mud-walled home. That explosion killed two of Farida's brothers and a sister, and wounded her mother. The vision in Farida's left eye is forever gone, but a new world has opened for her in the lush Carolina Piedmont, where she has had several eye operations and has fallen in love with a second family. After visits here over three consecutive summers, Farida acts and sounds as American as her two host sisters, Hannah, 12, and Macy, seven, who shared their home with her this summer. Farida speaks nearly flawless English, laced with coded kids' jargon familiar to any American parent. She calls her host parents, Asheli and Eric Thompson, "Mummy" and "Daddy". Seven thousand miles away, her Afghan family anxiously awaits the latest return of a girl who, until four years ago, had never left her home district. In a decisive act of courage, Farida's father, Abdul Rauf, defied the Taliban and permitted his daughter to leave home with an American charity that provides US medical care for injured Afghan children. The Taliban dominates the family's province, intimidating locals and killing Afghans who side with the government in Kabul, or who work for US forces. Insurgents run shadow courts, cutting off hands, gouging out eyes or stoning to death those who violate their dictates. Abdul Rauf, 47, is a farmer, a thin, wizened man with a flowing silver beard and calloused hands. After his daughter was wounded in 2009, a neighbour told him about Solace for the Children, a North Carolina-based charity that had helped another injured village child. Rauf was faced with a wrenching decision – placate the Taliban and condemn Farida to a life of poverty and deprivation, or allow her to leave home in the care of the hated American infidels. "Some people were saying if the Taliban finds out, they'll cut off your head," Rauf said last year in Kabul, where he was reunited with Farida after the girl's second summer in the US. "I asked these people: Are you afraid to have your own children treated? Will you sacrifice your own flesh and blood?" he said, wrapping Farida in a hug. "I told them: Something good is happening here. Don't be afraid." Sandy Tabor-Gray, a Solace co-ordinator from Mooresville who accompanied Farida to Kabul, fought back tears as she listened to Rauf in the charity's Kabul shelter that day. "He's risking everything for his daughter," she said. "I'm in awe of this family's courage." Farida is too young to fully comprehend the cultural and religious chasm between rural Afghanistan and middle-class America. But being thrust into a new world at a tender age has reshaped and moulded the girl from the Afghan village. She has embraced life in America. She wants to go to school and make her own choices, supported by her father. "This little girl is blessed beyond belief to have a father who wants her to have everything possible," Asheli Thompson said. Since March, Farida has lived with the Thompsons in Mooresville, outside Charlotte. She's the second injured Afghan girl the family has taken in. Three summers ago, they hosted Sahar, then seven, who had lost an eye and had part of her face destroyed in a Taliban acid attack. The Thompsons considered Sahar their daughter, and they have come to think the same of Farida. A trip to Disney World tops Farida's list of favourite things about America, just ahead of McDonald's and the Atlantic Ocean. Over the July 4 weekend, she accompanied the family to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, the first time she'd ever seen an ocean. Farida wears glasses to correct the vision in her right eye. Her left eye socket had been fitted with a conformer shell, a clear plastic lens designed to allow her eyelid to blink without rubbing the suture line from surgery. But the socket closed over the device, and Farida will need further treatment. She wears her purple eye patch most days. When around her host family, Farida is comfortable enough to remove it and leave the socket exposed beneath her glasses. Her legs and abdomen are laced with rough, weathered scars from the explosive that detonated as she and her siblings played in a dirt courtyard. She says she remembers the accident clearly – the blast that killed her brother after he stepped on the device, and the piercing screams of her mother, who was peppered with shrapnel as she saw three of her children die. "She wants me to bring her back some medicine. She still hurts," Farida said. Farida has spoken just once with her family since March, on a call her American family managed to place to her father's cellphone in southern Afghanistan. (The charity asked that Farida's surname and province not be published for fear of Taliban retaliation.) Farida worries that she's forgetting her native Pashto language after months away. At her North Carolina public school, where her teacher says students compete to sit beside Farida, she delivered a talk about Afghanistan to a sixth-grade class. "I was really nervous," she said. "But it went OK, and I wrote down all of their names in Pashto for them."A couple weeks ago, the day arrived that Farida and the family had been dreading. It was time to drive her to the airport for her flight to Kabul, accompanied by several other injured Afghan children treated by Solace. Farida was in tears at the airport, and so were her host sisters and parents. She had spent the morning tearfully saying goodbye to her bedroom, the neighbours, and the family hamster and dog. "She told me she wanted to stay with us a million days," Eric Thompson said. In Kabul, Farida's father knows that his daughter's life has been forever altered – not just her physical recovery, but her future as an independent young woman. The father of 11 children, Rauf does not want Farida married off to a relative or older man at age 12 or 14, the custom for many Pashtun girls in rural southern Afghanistan. Farida is scheduled to live at a Solace refuge in Kabul, and attend school nearby. "Everything is different now for her. She will go to school. She'll be an educated woman," Rauf said. "I believe in my heart it's things like this that will bring peace to our country." - Los Angeles Times/McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. |
| Posted: What would it take to burn off that burger? DEAR Mr. Dad: My husband and teenage son are both overweight. I've been trying to get them to cut back on the junk they eat, but telling them about calories and fat doesn't have any effect. Is there some other way to get through to them? MY youngest daughter and I recently stopped at a chain restaurant. We hadn't been there for a while, so I was surprised to see that each menu item included calories and grammes of fat. The numbers were so huge – in some cases, a single dish included several weeks' worth of saturated fats – that I immediately lost my appetite and had nothing but ice water. My daughter, however, thoroughly enjoyed her pancakes and scrambled eggs. On the way out, I asked the manager whether business had taken a hit since putting calorie and fat information on the menu. Not in the slightest. I started looking into this and discovered the problem: Most people don't pay attention to fat and calorie numbers, because they simply have no idea how much of either they're supposed to be getting every day, or how much is too much. No wonder you can't turn on the TV or read a newspaper without hearing about the epidemic of obesity. Back to your question. Yes, there are some ways to present basic nutritional information in a way that will actually get your husband and son to eat less. Here's how it works. A team of researchers led by Sunaina Dowray of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, took a group of more than 800 people and randomly gave them one of four nearly identical menus. One group got a menu that had no nutritional information at all. One got the same menu plus calorie data, one got a menu with calories plus a listing of how many minutes the customer would have to walk to burn off those calories, and the last got the menu with calories and how many miles of walking it would take to burn off the calories. The differences between the four groups were huge. The menu-only group ordered an average of 1,020 calories (roughly half a day's worth of calories for most people). The menu+calories group ordered an average of 927 calories, the menu+calories+minutes-of-exercise group ordered 916 calories, and the menu+calories+miles-of-walking group ordered only 826 calories. Another team of researchers took a slightly different approach when looking at how to get teenagers to drink fewer sugary soft drinks. They posted one of three signs next to beverage coolers in corner stores in Baltimore: "Did you know that a bottle of soda or fruit juice has about 250 calories?" "Did you know that a bottle of soda or fruit juice has about 10% of your daily calories?" and "Did you know that working off a bottle of soda or fruit juice takes about 50 minutes of running?" Kids who saw only the 250-calorie sign were just as likely to buy drinks as those who didn't see any warnings at all. Those who saw the percentage-of-daily-calories message were 40% less likely to buy sugared drinks, and those who saw the 50-minutes-of-running message were 50% less likely. In most cases, the kids who didn't buy the sugared drinks bought water instead. Just so you know, depending on age and activity level, teen boys and adult men should get between 1,800-3,200 calories per day; teen girls and adult women need 1,600-2,400 per day. – McClatchy-Tribune Information Services Armin Brott is the author of The Military Father: A Hands-On Guide For Deployed Dads and The Expectant Father: Facts,Tips, And Advice For Dads-To-Be. Readers may e-mail him at armin@askmrdad.com. |
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