Yemen, women, and ... students in my class?

So, a couple of weeks ago, when we were discussing demographics in my intro class, I remarked that countries like Yemen have high fertility rates, and high fertility rates--at levels way higher than a 2 or 3--are typically in societies, like Yemen, where women don't have rights, or have limited rights.

Naturally, I asked them if they knew where Yemen was and, slowly, through a little bit of critical thinking a couple of students figured out that it was in the Middle East, in the Arabian peninsula.

Coincidentally, this came at the same time that Jon Stewart had fun with the underwear bomber and how we come to know about a country only when somebody from there attacks us.  Yes, of course, I played his video in the classroom :)

Now we are in the final instructional week, and a student "S" was excited about something she came across about Yemen, women, and women's rights .... in the People magazine.  She gave me the piece that she had torn out before rushing to class--that is the scanned image on the left.

It was a coincidence that "S" brought this to class on March 8th, which is International Women's Day!  I wonder if People had also featured this story as a part of the Women's Day issue--you think?

Click on the scanned image or here to purchase the book from Amazon.

Nicholas Kristof wrote about this remarkable Yemeni girl and her ordeal:

For Nujood, the nightmare began at age 10 when her family told her that she would be marrying a deliveryman in his 30s. Although Nujood’s mother was unhappy, she did not protest. “In our country it’s the men who give the orders, and the women who follow them,” Nujood writes in a powerful new autobiography just published in the United States this week, “I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced.”
Her new husband forced her to drop out of school (she was in the second grade) because a married woman shouldn’t be a student. At her wedding, Nujood sat in the corner, her face swollen from crying.
Nujood’s father asked the husband not to touch her until a year after she had had her first menstrual period. But as soon as they were married, she writes, her husband forced himself on her.
He soon began to beat her as well, the memoir says, and her new mother-in-law offered no sympathy. “Hit her even harder,” the mother-in-law would tell her son.
Nujood had heard that judges could grant divorces, so one day she sneaked away, jumped into a taxi and asked to go to the courthouse.

Speaking of Kristof, click here for a video from him on the "Congo workout plan"--the hard physical work that women do, while men sit around and drink beer.  Kristof then attempts to carry that load and gives up!  As I noted once before, at least, we men--sometimes--are good for nothing and only create hassles for women :(  It is simply awful that such conditions exist in the world today. 
More than anything, this being the second time a student has linked something in the world outside to the discussions we had inside the classroom, I am ready to call this term a success.  Was worth all the trouble of preparing the syllabus, lecturing and leading discussions, waking up students in the class (!), grading and grading and grading .... a good term all in all ...