Golden cages

Someone reads history and thinks that we are beyond many of the violence and cruelty of middle ages, the cold war, the war between iraq-iran... but we continue to find in the news extremely despicable news of injustice where there is a big doubt of human kind conscience.

There has to definintely be a lack  of emotional intelligence of many of us.

Still, sometimes I still make the same error over and over again. Feeling I am excluded from all of that "nonsense" or that people near me is okay; that there is freedom of liberty, rights and human value.

How wrong I was when in a conversation with friends I hear of a neighbor that lives in the "Top Neighborhoods" of Erbil. It is a place where you can even find families of different nationalities, even the families of important politicans of the country, where you would assume it is a different environment... a better one.

Hits, punches and kicks of a husband to his wife in a regular basis is not something you would believe in this place. An iraqui woman now in her thirties married many years ago to someone she didn't even know by that time. Well...at least it wasn't like the situation of her sister who married at 12 years old.

"Leave him!" we would think.

Well it isn't that simple in a place where the woman can't take her children with her if she asks for divore, the husband would keep them by law. A woman that asks for divorce is something unimaginable. Her family is poor and she doesn't have a specific way of preparation to work or maintain a family.

What will she do? What options does she have?

Now, the husband is already searching for a second wife and I don't know if it is a good or bad thing... but now he is demanding her to leave him and tells her she can take the kids, two girls.

Would there be a different proposal of the husband if one of his children were a boy?

Would he change his mind about keeping or not his two girls?



This doesn' happen in all households, I must say. This is a family where the husband is a very "conservative" muslim, Not all families in Iraq or Kurdistan are like this... but this is just one story of a woman that snapped and told the truth to someone else; in a place where everything looks nice and calm.

After expressing her circumstances, the woman doesn't go out of the house anymore.