Posts

Showing posts from May 11, 2014

Facing the Challenge of the Unfathomable: #BringBackOurGirls

Image
                     Nigeria and Mother's Day illustration by John Cole for The Times-Tribune . When confronted by something too painful, incredulous, or monstrous to believe, a person will sometimes say, “I  couldn't  even wrap my head around that!” Such was probably one of the main reasons the international community took so long to respond in any meaningful way to the abduction of the almost 300 Chibok school girls in Nigeria. The emotional impact was, and is, not completely unlike that of seeing for the first time a film clip of the aircraft exploding against the Twin Towers on 9/11. It was an image unprecedented in one’s mental model of what reality is supposed to be and therefore an image one was not able to immediately process.   Who could believe that an army of armed adult men would attack and abduct nearly 300 school girls in the middle of the nigh...