What are you stitching next?

Granted but the way in which it was handled was terrible. It is quite a contrast with Japanese cars, there is an accent on service and after sales service. I believe that is what brought them to the top, the attention to customers, especially in design and especially that Japanese car manufacturers recognised women were drivers too, way ahead of the rest.

Maybe not, but it definitely puts a person off that car !!!

Your modern American upbringing is showing. We automatically expect all our children to survive to adulthood. In less-developed societies, the assumption is that some of them will not even survive infancy.

I won't say it's "easy" for those women to watch children die, but they are more resigned to, and accepting of, that possibility than Americans. If all your neighbors are having a dozen babies in hopes that two will reach adulthood, then it's easier to deal with the same odds in your household than if you're the only person you know in that boat.

Wrong. It has nothing to do with automatically expecting anything. It has to do with acknowleding that unless I have walked in someone else's shoes, I am not in a position to comment on what they expect or what they find painful.

And you know that it's easier because you've done it? I don't think so. I think you're being incredibly calous and unfeeling in attempting to say what is easier for other people to bear, when in fact, you have no idea how people actually feel about what happens to them.

Elizabeth

I fully agree with you Elizabeth. I grew up in a lower middle class neighborhood and was a "poor" kid. I never wanted for food and had great clothes because my mother was an excellent seamstress, but I had much less then some of my friends and I certainly was aware of it. My mother, who worked at piecework when I was a little girl sewing elastic on ladies bloomers was one of two working mothers in my very large group of friends and I knew that was different and resented being a latch key kid.. Then things went from bad to worse when my dad had an accident and couldn't work for several years and my mom had to stay home to care for him. She then took on a job addressing envelopes on a rented typewriter at home and I was stuck working along with her when I came home from school.

Given the fact that I never went hungry or homeless or dressed in rags made my situation heavenly in comparison to the abject poverty I see in some of those under developed countries. These people aren't stupid and I can't imagine any mother being so uncaring about the health and welfare of her kids that she accepts her lot in life without a thought.

You should also be ashamed of yourself with that remark about having a dozen babies with the hope that two will live. Lucky you, you will never know that agony.

Lucille

I know that I have talked to people who grew up in situations where there were no doctors and they were far more accepting of the notion that children die than those of us who grew up in the modern-day US. Here, it's treated as the utmost tragedy when a child dies; they're resigned to it as a fact of life that it's not just "a" child, it's going to be *several* children in each family.

I have gone through it with friends who've lost children, and there was always the "why me?", feeling singled out for tragedy ... which is not going to be the case if everyone around you has had the same experience, repeatedly, because statistically half the babies in your village die before age 5. They don't beat themselves up for their imagined shortcomings because it's happened to everyone they know; there's not the same sense that you must be a bad parent to have a child die if you know that it happens to everyone.

Karen, you're wrong. A life is a life and I will not accept that people just shrug their shoulders.

I have a very strong suspicion, and sadly I do have some experience in that area, that these people just grieve quietly and get on with their lives because they know that beating themselves up is futile and destructive and time consuming. But that really isn't acceptance, it's just that they don't have the luxury necessary to qvetch and complain so they do what they must. However, their lives are worse for every time something like that happens and that kind of poverty makes one weaker and weaker, both physically and mentally. The fact that it happens to others, doesn't make it easier for them.

Fortunately, every so often you do see someone break out of that poverty and do better.

Karen this is rubbish. Any woman, anywhere in the world would grieve just as deeply for the loss of her child. She could have ten and still it would be the same and she would not really care that her neighbour had lost a child or children, her focus would be on her child.

I have never met anyone who felt they were a bad parent because their child died, at least over here they can feel they were able to do everything possible, in many parts of Africa they have to helplessly watch their child inch nearer death every day unable to render any help. How much worse can it get than that ?

This is a stupid argument anyway, it is not possible to say it is easier for a mother in Africa to lose her child - in fact, it isn't stupid, it's outright disgusting.

"lucretia borgia" wrote

Think of the grief of those grandmothers of Africa, who have watched their grown children die horribly of AIDS, often being their caretakers, and are now raising their grandchildren, some of whom will also die of this disease. That there are thousands dying cannot make pain like that any less.

Dawne

Lucretia !!!! For the first time in many years i Must congratulate you on writing some reasonable True observation ,,,, WELL DONE mirjam

I think it was a year ago , maybe two that `Verbatim` , had a marvelous article , about Naming Cars !!! mirjam

I never said it was easy to lose a child. My original statement was that it's easier to be poor if you have nothing to compare your situation with and don't know how poor you are comparatively. There are people who have never seen TV, don't know what Americanized luxury is -- they think everyone lives in a grass hut or a mud hut like theirs and eats only one meal a day, because that's all they've ever seen.

I did say that in times and places where doctors are not as readily available people are/were more accepting of the death of a child as a "fact of life" because it's not as rare as it is here and now. I've known people who thought their mother or grandmother was a success because, against the odds, more than half her children survived to adulthood.

No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

This entire argument is just another case of a word being taken from one of my posts and inserted into another post where it wasn't, in order to pick an argument over something I never said.

Yes, and I often think of how tired those grandmothers must be, just when perhaps they could put their feet up a bit, they find themselves with a young family to raise all over again. We are not talking of just a few, but thousands.

You are showing a lack of knowledge. In most poverty stricken African villages there is one television and on that they see the usual junk out of Hollywood. What do think their impression is of NA ? How do you think they feel ?? No, you probably don't see it like they do, many decide they must try at all costs to get to these lands where everyone is so wealthy ! Then of course in NA they are often badly treated as 'these damn immigrants' !

Which word ? I am arguing against the general idea that a mother in another country feels less pain over a child dying or poverty because those around her are no better off.

Same here. I think you said that it's more acceptable to someone who lives in poverty to lose a child or to be dirt poor if that's all they know and I think it's no easier and just makes them feel more miserable and without hope for the future. I doubt that even the very poorest of the poor are so covered by teflon that they no longer feel pain.

Lucille

I know whereof I speak.

My cousin spent most of the last 5 years as a medical missionary in Africa. They had to invent a solar-powered player for their educational music/poetry recordings because the villages had no electricity and no money for batteries. Which means they also have no means of running a television.