Why on earth would you DO that?

"Why on earth would you DO that?!"

That's what my children say to me when I do something they don't approve of. If my parents were to read this blog, that's exactly what they would say too. I'm taking a big step into the unknown by writing my thoughts, feelings and observations as a white woman who was born and raised in Zimbabwe.

I'm doing this more for myself than for anyone else. I have so many thoughts swirling around my mind as of late that I feel blogging about them is my only vehicle. Why now? Well, I can blame my youngest daughter for that.

Karen is my youngest. She's always been a tender-hearted, thoughtful person. We are quite close and, I think, good friends. Even as a young child, Karen naturally gravitated toward history and those who were treated less humanely than others. In second grade her teacher noticed she was reading a book with very graphic pictures, on the holocaust in Hitler's Germany. The teacher was a little perturbed but Karen assured her that my husband and myself were okay with what she was reading.

We were okay with our seven year-old reading about the holocaust. When our children asked us a serious question, we would give them a serious answer. Karen asked a lot of serious questions that she really wanted to know the answers to. Right from that early age she understood the repercussions of repeated mistakes by humankind. She loved history and wanted to help the world to stop making the same mistakes.

Fast forward to the present day. My baby girl is almost twenty three. She's visited Mozambique twice, South Africa and Chennai, India once each. She's graduated from college with a degrees in History and Political Science and is working on her Master's Degree in Social Justice and Human Rights. It's this last degree that has become a symbol of a change in my life, one that really began to stir up all kinds of emotion and sometimes great turmoil for me.