More articles from the Times!
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AIDS, pregnancy, and poverty trap African girls
AIDS, Pregnancy and Poverty Trap Ever More African Girls
By SHARON LaFRANIERE
PATRICE LUMUMBA, Mozambique - They met a year ago on the dirt road outside her aunt's house, in this struggling township where houses are built from bound-together reeds and the only water comes from wells. Flora Muchave was 14. Elario Novunga was 22, nicely dressed and, Flora said, full of promises.
One stood out: Flora's family had been teetering on the edge of destitution since her father, a miner, died of AIDS in 2000. Elario said he would change that. "He asked me to have sex with him, and he guaranteed everything I would need," Flora recalled. "He said he would take care of everything for me."
He lied. Elario gave Flora the equivalent of about $4 and a baby, whose impending birth has forced her to drop out of sixth grade. Before Flora's mother died in May, apparently of AIDS, she forgave her daughter for ignoring her warnings about fast-talking men. But she sketched out a bleak future for her only daughter.
"Now," Flora recalled her sobbing from her deathbed, "you are going to suffer."
Flora Muchave's cautionary tale is nothing new; Africa claims the world's highest adolescent birthrate and the world's lowest share of girls enrolled in primary school.
But for the last 25 years, the trends had been positive. African girls, like girls elsewhere, were marrying later, and a growing percentage were in school.
The AIDS epidemic now threatens to take away those hard-won gains. Orphaned and impoverished by the deaths of parents, girls here are being propelled into sex at shockingly early ages to support themselves, their siblings and, all too often, their own children.
"AIDS is reversing the trends that were improving for girls," said Margie de Monchy, regional child protection officer for the United Nations Children's Fund. "We really have to look at the kinds of lousy choices - and sometimes no choices - that they have for survival."
With 12 million children orphaned in sub-Saharan Africa because of AIDS, suffering abounds among boys as well as girls.
But orphaned girls tend to fare worse, relief officials say, because they traditionally hold a lower status in African society, are more vulnerable to sexual exploitation and, for anatomical reasons, are more likely than boys to contract H.I.V.
In Zimbabwe, a new Unicef study has found that orphaned girls are three times more likely to become infected than are girls whose parents are alive. In Zambia, orphaned girls are the first to be withdrawn from school.
In Zambia's capital, Lusaka, impoverished relatives order some orphaned girls as young as 14 out on the street at night, telling them they must earn their keep, a recent survey found. In Lesotho, a growing number of adolescent girls are forced to work as maids or prostitutes, Unicef researchers have reported.
"Orphaned girls are at the absolute margins," said James Elder, Unicef's spokesman in Zimbabwe. "They are the very bottom of the barrel. They are much more likely to engage in risky behavior just to survive."
Patrice Lumumba, on the Indian Ocean a three-hour drive north of the capital, Maputo, is by no means Mozambique's poorest township. Most of its houses of reeds or concrete are well built and neatly maintained. Most residents have some semblance of furniture, even if only a set of plastic chairs hauled out for guests.
But AIDS has hit hard here, like everywhere in southern Africa. One in every six people between the ages of 15 and 49 is infected with the virus in the surrounding Gaza Province. Of the town's 43,000 residents, 1,583 are orphans. One in four primary school students has lost at least one parent, according to Pedro Mausse, headmaster of the primary school.
Flora's parents furnished their two-room reed house, which has a corrugated metal roof, with a wardrobe, dishes and two upholstered chairs.
Flora said she remembers how her father's earnings from work in South Africa's mines kept the family supplied. After he died in 2000 at 36, she said, her mother's earnings as a cook for a Bible school - the equivalent of less than $35 a month - did not go far enough.
She could no longer afford to hire a tractor or a pair of oxen to plow the family's two fields. "It was hard to get food and clothes and soap," said Flora, a short, plump girl with a ready smile, curly lashes and ebony skin.
The whole situation made her more susceptible to Elario's blandishments, she said. "Actually, I was cheated," she said, smiling in embarrassment, as she waited for donated food outside a Unicef-financed organization. "He is a big liar."
Flora's mother, Ester, was still working as a cook in a Bible school last October when a relative told her Flora was pregnant. "At first I denied it," Flora said. "Then I started to cry. Then she started to cry. She said: 'I warned you against this. Now you are going to find out for yourself.' "
Her mother's death on May 9 is vivid in Flora's mind. That morning, she said, Ester called Flora and her 7-year-old brother to her bedside and ordered them to eat breakfast.
"I am told you are not eating, that you are spending all your time crying," Flora recalled her saying. "Whether you cry or not, I am still going to die. And I don't know who will provide for you."
Although Flora's body is unwieldy after eight months of pregnancy, she still looks like a typical adolescent. Her face is covered with acne, her black polyester blouse is frilly, her plastic thongs a cheerful yellow. But there is nothing childlike about her life anymore.
Her father's relatives have abandoned her and her brother because her mother kept her husband's possessions after he died, flouting the tradition that says that a man's relatives, and not his wife, should inherit his wealth. Her mother's sister, a widow with five children, can offer little help.
So it was Flora who, one Wednesday in May, hauled home a 66-pound sack of unmilled corn, 7 pounds of beans and a quart of cooking oil from a Unicef-supported center run by Reencontro, a Mozambican charity that assists people with AIDS and orphans. The next day, she balanced a 55-pound pail of water on her head and trekked half a mile home from the township's well.
"There isn't anyone to help," she said, soaked to the skin from the pail's sloshing water, as she struggled to set the bucket down. "The responsibility is in my hands, so I have to do it."
Workers for Reencontro are urging Flora to return to school, and Flora, who says she used to get good grades, is interested. "But I don't know who would pay for the textbooks," she said.
Flora is but one of 639 orphaned girls here identified by Reencontro.
Two years ago, a worker found Lisario Mariquele, already pregnant at 13, caring for her ailing mother and three younger siblings. Her father had died at least four years earlier, apparently of AIDS.
Although a younger brother had made it to third grade, Lisario had never been to school before. What she knew was chores: hauling water, cooking over an open fire, kneeling over a wooden bowl with a heavy stick and pounding kernels of corn into paste. Her work multiplied last year after her son was born and her mother died of AIDS.
One recent morning, Lisario stopped pounding corn long enough to chat, her arms and blouse spattered with white flecks of paste. Her son, Vincente, slept nearby on a dirty reed mat, anemic and plagued with diarrhea. The dirt yard around them was strewn with beer bottles, shoes, rags and other debris.
Her son's father is named João, she said. She never learned his last name or his age. She agreed to have sex, she said, because "he promised to take care of me."
"It was a mistake on my part," she said. When the baby was born, she tracked down João in a nearby township. She said he told her: "The baby is yours."
Under pressure from Reencontro, she has now enrolled in first grade. Every other weekday afternoon, she lashes Vincente to her back with a strip of cloth and hikes to the school, where a two-hour class for adults is held under a tree.
She is ill-equipped and unsure of herself there. One recent Wednesday, she had to borrow a pencil and a sharpener. She repeatedly checked her notes on elementary Portuguese, Mozambique's official language, against those of a classmate.
"I learned a lot of things," she said the next morning, hurriedly wrapping a cloth around her naked baby. "But I can't remember them now."
Parents are a problem for recruiters.
Growing Problem for Military Recruiters: Parents
By DAMIEN CAVE
Rachel Rogers, a single mother of four in upstate New York, did not worry about the presence of National Guard recruiters at her son's high school until she learned that they taught students how to throw hand grenades, using baseballs as stand-ins. For the last month she has been insisting that administrators limit recruiters' access to children.
Orlando Terrazas, a former truck driver in Southern California, said he was struck when his son told him that recruiters were promising students jobs as musicians. Mr. Terrazas has been trying since September to hang posters at his son's public school to counter the military's message.
Meanwhile, Amy Hagopian, co-chairwoman of the Parent-Teacher-Student Association at Garfield High School in Seattle, has been fighting against a four-year-old federal law that requires public schools to give military recruiters the same access to students as college recruiters get, or lose federal funding. She also recently took a few hours off work to stand beside recruiters at Garfield High and display pictures of injured American soldiers from Iraq.
"We want to show the military that they are not welcome by the P.T.S.A. in this building," she said. "We hope other P.T.S.A.'s will follow."
Two years into the war in Iraq, as the Army and Marines struggle to refill their ranks, parents have become boulders of opposition that recruiters cannot move.
Mothers and fathers around the country said they were terrified that their children would have to be killed - or kill - in a war that many see as unnecessary and without end.
Around the dinner table, many parents said, they are discouraging their children from serving.
At schools, they are insisting that recruiters be kept away, incensed at the access that they have to adolescents easily dazzled by incentive packages and flashy equipment.
A Department of Defense survey last November, the latest, shows that only 25 percent of parents would recommend military service to their children, down from 42 percent in August 2003.
"Parents," said one recruiter in Ohio who insisted on anonymity because the Army ordered all recruiters not to talk to reporters, "are the biggest hurdle we face."
Legally, there is little a parent can do to prevent a child over 18 from enlisting. But in interviews, recruiters said that it was very hard to sign up a young man or woman over the strong objections of a parent.
The Pentagon - faced with using only volunteers during a sustained conflict, an effort rarely tried in American history - is especially vexed by a generation of more activist parents who have no qualms about projecting their own views onto their children.
Lawrence S. Wittner, a military historian at the State University of New York, Albany, said today's parents also had more power.
"With the draft, there were limited opportunities for avoiding the military, and parents were trapped, reduced to draft counseling or taking their children to Canada," he said. "But with the volunteer armed force, what one gets is more vigorous recruitment and more opportunities to resist."
Some of that opportunity was provoked by the very law that was supposed to make it easier for recruiters to reach students more directly. No Child Left Behind, which was passed by Congress in 2001, requires schools to turn over students' home phone numbers and addresses unless parents opt out. That is often the spark that ignites parental resistance.
Recruiters, in interviews over the past six months, said that opposition can be fierce. Three years ago, perhaps 1 or 2 of 10 parents would hang up immediately on a cold call to a potential recruit's home, said a recruiter in New York who, like most others interviewed, insisted on anonymity to protect his career. "Now," he said, "in the past year or two, people hang up all the time. "
Several recruiters said they had even been threatened with violence.
"I had one father say if he saw me on his doorstep I better have some protection on me," said a recruiter in Ohio. "We see a lot of hostility."
Military officials are clearly concerned. In an interview last month, Maj. Gen. Michael D. Rochelle, commander of Army recruiting, said parental resistance could put the all-volunteer force in jeopardy. When parents and other influential adults dissuade young people from enlisting, he said, "it begs the question of what our national staying power might be for what certainly appears to be a long fight."
In response, the Army has rolled out a campaign aimed at parents, with television ads and a Web site that includes videos of parents talking about why they supported their children's decision to enlist. General Rochelle said that it was still too early to tell if it is making a difference.
But Col. David Slotwinski, a former chief of staff for Army recruiting, said that the Army faced an uphill battle because many baby boomer parents are inclined to view military service negatively, especially during a controversial war.
"They don't realize that they have a role in helping make the all-volunteer force successful," said Colonel Slotwinski, who retired in 2004. "If you don't, you're faced with the alternative, and the alternative is what they were opposed to the most, mandatory service."
Many of the mothers and fathers most adamant about recruitment do have a history of opposition to Vietnam. Amy Hagopian, 49, a professor of public health at the University of Washington, and her husband, Stephen Ludwig, 57, a carpenter, said that they and many parents who contest recruiting at Garfield High in Seattle have a history of antiwar sentiment and see their efforts as an extension of their pacifism.
But, he added, parents are also reacting to what they see as the military's increased intrusion into the lives of their children.
"The recruiters are in your face, in the library, in the lunchroom," he said. "They're contacting the most vulnerable students and recruiting them to go to war."
The access is legally protected. As recently as 2000, said one former recruiter in California, it was necessary to dig through the trash at high schools and colleges to find students' names and phone numbers. But No Child Left Behind mandates that school districts can receive federal funds only if they grant military recruiters "the same access to secondary school students" as is provided to colleges and employers.
So although the Garfield P.T.S.A. voted last month to ban military recruiters from the school and its 1,600 students, the Seattle school district could not sign on to the idea without losing at least $15 million in federal education funds.
"The parents have chosen to take a stand, but we still have to comply with No Child Left Behind," said Peter Daniels, communications director for the district. In Whittier, a city of 85,000 10 miles southeast of East Los Angeles, about a dozen families last September accused the district of failing to properly advise parents that they had the right to deny recruiters access to their children's personal information.
Mr. Terrazas, 51, the father of a Whittier High School junior, said the notification was buried among other documents in a preregistration packet sent out last summer.
"It didn't say that the military has access to students' information," he said. "It just said to write a letter if you didn't want your kid listed in a public directory."
A few years ago, after Sept. 11, the issue might not have gotten Mr. Terrazas's attention. His father served in World War II, his brother in Vietnam, and he said that he had always supported having a strong military able to defend the country.
But after the war in Iraq yielded no weapons of mass destruction, and as the death toll has mounted, he cannot reconcile the pride he feels at seeing marines deliver aid after the tsunami in Asia with his concern over the effort in Baghdad, he said.
"Because of the situation we're in now, I would not want my son to serve," he said. "It's the policy that I'm against, not the military."
After Mr. Terrazas and several other parents expressed their concern about the school's role in recruitment, the district drafted a new policy. On May 23, it introduced a proposed opt-out form for the district's 14,000 students.
The form, said Ron Carruth, Whittier's assistant superintendent, includes an explanation of the law, and boxes that parents can check to indicate they do not want information on their child released to either the military, colleges, vocational schools or other sources of recruitment. Mr. Carruth said that next year the district would also prohibit all recruiters from appearing in classrooms, and keep the military ones from bringing equipment like Humvees onto school grounds, a commonly used recruitment tool.
He said that some of the information from the 11-by-17-inch poster that Mr. Terrazas sought to post, including how to verify recruiters' claims about financial benefits, will be part of a pamphlet created by the school for students.
And at least a dozen other districts in the area, Mr. Carruth added, up from three in November, are considering similar plans.
Unlike Mr. Terrazas, Ms. Rogers, 37, of High Falls in the upper Hudson Valley, had not thought much about the war before she began speaking out in her school district. She had been "politically apathetic," she said. She did not know about No Child Left Behind's reporting requirements, nor did she opt out.
When her son, Jonah, said he was thinking of sitting out a gym class that was to be led by National Guard recruiters, Ms. Rogers, who works part time as a clerk at the local motor vehicles office and receives public assistance, said she told him not to be "a rebel without a cause."
"In this world," she recalled telling him, "we need a strong military."
But then she heard from her son that the class was mandatory, and that recruiters were handing out free T-shirts and key chains - "Like, 'Hey, let's join the military. It's fun,' " she said.
First she called the Rondout Valley High School to complain about the "false advertising," she said, then her congressman.
On May 24, at the first school board meeting since the gym class, she read aloud from a recruiting handbook that advised recruiters on ways to gain maximum access to schools, including offering doughnuts. A high school senior, Katie Coalla, 18, stood up at one point and tearfully defended the recruiters, receiving applause from the crowd of about 70, but Ms. Rogers persisted.
"Pulling in this need for heartstrings patriotic support is clouding the issue," she said. "The point is not whether I support the troops. It's about whether a well-organized propaganda machine should be targeted at children and enforced by the schools."
Another book-war.
A Town's Struggle in the Culture War
By BRUCE WEBER
MUHLENBERG, Pa. - In April, at an otherwise mundane meeting of the school board here, Brittany Hunsicker, a 16-year-old student at the local high school, stood up and addressed the assembled board members.
"How would you like if your son and daughter had to read this?" Miss Hunsicker asked.
Then she began to recite from "The Buffalo Tree," a novel set in a juvenile detention center and narrated by a tough, 12-year-old boy incarcerated there. What she read was a scene set in a communal shower, where another adolescent boy is sexually aroused.
"I am in the 11th grade," Miss Hunsicker said. "I had to read this junk."
Less than an hour later, by a unanimous vote of the board (two of its nine members were absent) "The Buffalo Tree" was banned, officially excised from the Muhlenberg High School curriculum. By 8:30 the next morning all classroom copies of the book had been collected and stored in a vault in the principal's office. Thus began a still unresolved battle here over the fate of "The Buffalo Tree," a young adult novel by Adam Rapp that was published eight years ago by HarperCollins and has been on the 11th-grade reading list at Muhlenberg High since 2000. Pitting teachers, students and others who say the context of the novel's language makes it appropriate for the classroom against those parents and board members who say context be damned, it is a dispute illustrative of the so-called culture war, which, in spite of its national implications, is fought in almost exclusively local skirmishes. The board was set to meet the evening of June 1 to reconsider its decision.
"We're absolutely middle-American," said Joseph Yarworth, the schools' superintendent for the last nine years. "And we're having an argument over our values."
According to the American Library Association, which asks school districts and libraries to report efforts to ban books - that is, have them removed from shelves or reading lists - they are on the rise again: 547 books were challenged last year, up from 458 in 2003. These aren't record numbers. In the 1990's the appearance of the Harry Potter books, with their themes of witchcraft and wizardry, caused a raft of objections from evangelical Christians.
Judith Krug, director of the library association's office for intellectual freedom, attributed the most recent spike to the empowerment of conservatives in general and to the re-election of President Bush in particular. The same thing happened 25 years ago, she said. "In 1980, we were dealing with an average of 300 or so challenges a year, and then Reagan was elected," she said. "And challenges went to 900 or 1,000 a year."
Muhlenberg is a township of modest homes and 10,000 people or so, a bedroom community for the city of Reading, in the southeastern quadrant of the state. It is conservative politically and almost entirely white, and there are a growing number of evangelical Christians. Miss Hunsicker had just returned from a two-week church mission in Honduras when, encouraged by her mother, she made her public complaint.
But the town is not militantly right wing. It is significant that even the more vociferous opponents of the book did not insist it come off the school library shelves (though thieves apparently took care of that). In fact, on April 14, as soon as Dr. Yarworth discovered that an overzealous underling had had copies of the novel stored in the school vault, he ordered them returned to storage in classrooms so it could still be read by students who sought it out.
"I wanted us to comply with the narrowest possible interpretation of the board's decision," Dr. Yarworth said.
What followed was a period of unusual activism here. Students circulated petitions. Teachers prepared defenses of the book, and their local union prepared a defense of the teacher who had assigned it. Letters on both sides appeared in the local newspaper, The Reading Eagle, which published a number of articles about the dispute. In May a column appeared headlined "The Upside of Censorship," by a regular columnist, John D. Forester Jr., who wrote that after reading only "passages" of "The Buffalo Tree," "I am actually applauding the efforts of parents to have books banished in their school libraries and classrooms." A few days later, an editorial took the opposing view.
On May 4, the school board met for the first time since banning "The Buffalo Tree" and about 200 people attended, 10 times the usual number, Dr. Yarworth said. The president, Mark Nelson, apologized for his vote to ban the book, not because he approved of it in the curriculum - he admitted later he had not read it - but because he felt the decision had been hasty and in violation of the board's policy for book challenges, which says a challenge should first be heard by a committee of teachers and administrators before the issue goes before the board.
Another member, Otto Voit, who had read the novel, responded that the board, as the ultimate authority, was within its rights in removing the book from the curriculum.
Over the next two hours, some of the rhetoric on both sides became inflated. Some declared that dirty words are dirty words, and that with novels like "The Buffalo Tree" being taught it's no wonder American society is going down the tubes. And others, not allowing for the genuine discomfort that some readers of "The Buffalo Tree" feel, invoked the specter of Nazi book-burning.
Several students spoke with more reasonable passion about the value of the novel, and one high school senior, Mary Isamoyer, offered to replace the missing library copies of "The Buffalo Tree" with her own.
"Do not insult our intelligence by keeping this book from us," she said.
Tammy Hahn, a mother of four and perhaps the most outspoken of the book's opponents, responded that the students' view was irrelevant. She was not about to let her daughter take part in a classroom discussion about erections, she said, adding that it amounted to harassment to subject a girl to the smirks and innuendoes of male classmates who would have no sympathy for her discomfort.
"This is not about a child's opinion," she said of the students' defense of the book. "This is about parents."
Afterward, Joan Kochinsky, a board member who had not been at the previous meeting, moved that the ban be rescinded. But wary of making another decision in haste, the board postponed the vote for a week.
On May 11, it met for another tense, well-attended session that lasted until nearly midnight. This time there was much discussion about the particulars of Miss Hunsicker's unhappiness with the book.
School policy allows for alternate reading assignments when a student or a parent objects to a book on religious or moral grounds, but Miss Hunsicker never did that; her mother, Tammy, said she would have made those specific objections if she had known it was necessary. Miss Hunsicker had simply asked for something else to read because she didn't like "The Buffalo Tree," and her teacher, Luana Goldstan, refused.
"No one is more critical of literature than English teachers," Stacia Richmond, a colleague of Ms. Goldstan's, told the board. "Do you really think we as educators choose literature in terms of its titillation? Do you not realize we are battling the same immorality you are?"
Dr. Yarworth then suggested that confusion could be avoided if a more explicit policy for book challenges were given to parents, including a synopsis of all books on the required reading lists. If that were done, he asked, would the board consider rescinding the ban on "The Buffalo Tree"?
An informal poll was taken, and by a 5-to-3 vote the board indicated it was ready to reverse itself. It was unclear how many members had finished "The Buffalo Tree"; at least two had, at least three had not. But the lengthy debate seemed to prepare them to change their minds.
After the meeting, however, Mrs. Hahn said she felt her arguments had been given short shrift, and she met privately with Mr. Nelson, the board president, to push the idea of a rating system for schoolbooks, similar to what the Motion Picture Association of America does for films. And on May 18, the board rejected the English department's new policy for book challenges and asked that Mrs. Hahn's requests be accommodated: that reading lists made available to parents include a ratings system, plot summaries of all assigned books, and the identification of any potentially objectionable content.
Teachers adamantly opposed these strictures, Michael Anthony, chairman of the English department, said, adding that they would undoubtedly result in more frequent challenges. Dr. Yarworth, who is trying to broker a compromise between the board and faculty, said he had already heard a few grumbles about "Of Mice and Men" and "Catcher in the Rye."
In any case, Mr. Anthony said, " 'The Buffalo Tree' isn't coming back anytime soon."
AIDS, pregnancy, and poverty trap African girls
AIDS, Pregnancy and Poverty Trap Ever More African Girls
By SHARON LaFRANIERE
PATRICE LUMUMBA, Mozambique - They met a year ago on the dirt road outside her aunt's house, in this struggling township where houses are built from bound-together reeds and the only water comes from wells. Flora Muchave was 14. Elario Novunga was 22, nicely dressed and, Flora said, full of promises.
One stood out: Flora's family had been teetering on the edge of destitution since her father, a miner, died of AIDS in 2000. Elario said he would change that. "He asked me to have sex with him, and he guaranteed everything I would need," Flora recalled. "He said he would take care of everything for me."
He lied. Elario gave Flora the equivalent of about $4 and a baby, whose impending birth has forced her to drop out of sixth grade. Before Flora's mother died in May, apparently of AIDS, she forgave her daughter for ignoring her warnings about fast-talking men. But she sketched out a bleak future for her only daughter.
"Now," Flora recalled her sobbing from her deathbed, "you are going to suffer."
Flora Muchave's cautionary tale is nothing new; Africa claims the world's highest adolescent birthrate and the world's lowest share of girls enrolled in primary school.
But for the last 25 years, the trends had been positive. African girls, like girls elsewhere, were marrying later, and a growing percentage were in school.
The AIDS epidemic now threatens to take away those hard-won gains. Orphaned and impoverished by the deaths of parents, girls here are being propelled into sex at shockingly early ages to support themselves, their siblings and, all too often, their own children.
"AIDS is reversing the trends that were improving for girls," said Margie de Monchy, regional child protection officer for the United Nations Children's Fund. "We really have to look at the kinds of lousy choices - and sometimes no choices - that they have for survival."
With 12 million children orphaned in sub-Saharan Africa because of AIDS, suffering abounds among boys as well as girls.
But orphaned girls tend to fare worse, relief officials say, because they traditionally hold a lower status in African society, are more vulnerable to sexual exploitation and, for anatomical reasons, are more likely than boys to contract H.I.V.
In Zimbabwe, a new Unicef study has found that orphaned girls are three times more likely to become infected than are girls whose parents are alive. In Zambia, orphaned girls are the first to be withdrawn from school.
In Zambia's capital, Lusaka, impoverished relatives order some orphaned girls as young as 14 out on the street at night, telling them they must earn their keep, a recent survey found. In Lesotho, a growing number of adolescent girls are forced to work as maids or prostitutes, Unicef researchers have reported.
"Orphaned girls are at the absolute margins," said James Elder, Unicef's spokesman in Zimbabwe. "They are the very bottom of the barrel. They are much more likely to engage in risky behavior just to survive."
Patrice Lumumba, on the Indian Ocean a three-hour drive north of the capital, Maputo, is by no means Mozambique's poorest township. Most of its houses of reeds or concrete are well built and neatly maintained. Most residents have some semblance of furniture, even if only a set of plastic chairs hauled out for guests.
But AIDS has hit hard here, like everywhere in southern Africa. One in every six people between the ages of 15 and 49 is infected with the virus in the surrounding Gaza Province. Of the town's 43,000 residents, 1,583 are orphans. One in four primary school students has lost at least one parent, according to Pedro Mausse, headmaster of the primary school.
Flora's parents furnished their two-room reed house, which has a corrugated metal roof, with a wardrobe, dishes and two upholstered chairs.
Flora said she remembers how her father's earnings from work in South Africa's mines kept the family supplied. After he died in 2000 at 36, she said, her mother's earnings as a cook for a Bible school - the equivalent of less than $35 a month - did not go far enough.
She could no longer afford to hire a tractor or a pair of oxen to plow the family's two fields. "It was hard to get food and clothes and soap," said Flora, a short, plump girl with a ready smile, curly lashes and ebony skin.
The whole situation made her more susceptible to Elario's blandishments, she said. "Actually, I was cheated," she said, smiling in embarrassment, as she waited for donated food outside a Unicef-financed organization. "He is a big liar."
Flora's mother, Ester, was still working as a cook in a Bible school last October when a relative told her Flora was pregnant. "At first I denied it," Flora said. "Then I started to cry. Then she started to cry. She said: 'I warned you against this. Now you are going to find out for yourself.' "
Her mother's death on May 9 is vivid in Flora's mind. That morning, she said, Ester called Flora and her 7-year-old brother to her bedside and ordered them to eat breakfast.
"I am told you are not eating, that you are spending all your time crying," Flora recalled her saying. "Whether you cry or not, I am still going to die. And I don't know who will provide for you."
Although Flora's body is unwieldy after eight months of pregnancy, she still looks like a typical adolescent. Her face is covered with acne, her black polyester blouse is frilly, her plastic thongs a cheerful yellow. But there is nothing childlike about her life anymore.
Her father's relatives have abandoned her and her brother because her mother kept her husband's possessions after he died, flouting the tradition that says that a man's relatives, and not his wife, should inherit his wealth. Her mother's sister, a widow with five children, can offer little help.
So it was Flora who, one Wednesday in May, hauled home a 66-pound sack of unmilled corn, 7 pounds of beans and a quart of cooking oil from a Unicef-supported center run by Reencontro, a Mozambican charity that assists people with AIDS and orphans. The next day, she balanced a 55-pound pail of water on her head and trekked half a mile home from the township's well.
"There isn't anyone to help," she said, soaked to the skin from the pail's sloshing water, as she struggled to set the bucket down. "The responsibility is in my hands, so I have to do it."
Workers for Reencontro are urging Flora to return to school, and Flora, who says she used to get good grades, is interested. "But I don't know who would pay for the textbooks," she said.
Flora is but one of 639 orphaned girls here identified by Reencontro.
Two years ago, a worker found Lisario Mariquele, already pregnant at 13, caring for her ailing mother and three younger siblings. Her father had died at least four years earlier, apparently of AIDS.
Although a younger brother had made it to third grade, Lisario had never been to school before. What she knew was chores: hauling water, cooking over an open fire, kneeling over a wooden bowl with a heavy stick and pounding kernels of corn into paste. Her work multiplied last year after her son was born and her mother died of AIDS.
One recent morning, Lisario stopped pounding corn long enough to chat, her arms and blouse spattered with white flecks of paste. Her son, Vincente, slept nearby on a dirty reed mat, anemic and plagued with diarrhea. The dirt yard around them was strewn with beer bottles, shoes, rags and other debris.
Her son's father is named João, she said. She never learned his last name or his age. She agreed to have sex, she said, because "he promised to take care of me."
"It was a mistake on my part," she said. When the baby was born, she tracked down João in a nearby township. She said he told her: "The baby is yours."
Under pressure from Reencontro, she has now enrolled in first grade. Every other weekday afternoon, she lashes Vincente to her back with a strip of cloth and hikes to the school, where a two-hour class for adults is held under a tree.
She is ill-equipped and unsure of herself there. One recent Wednesday, she had to borrow a pencil and a sharpener. She repeatedly checked her notes on elementary Portuguese, Mozambique's official language, against those of a classmate.
"I learned a lot of things," she said the next morning, hurriedly wrapping a cloth around her naked baby. "But I can't remember them now."
Parents are a problem for recruiters.
Growing Problem for Military Recruiters: Parents
By DAMIEN CAVE
Rachel Rogers, a single mother of four in upstate New York, did not worry about the presence of National Guard recruiters at her son's high school until she learned that they taught students how to throw hand grenades, using baseballs as stand-ins. For the last month she has been insisting that administrators limit recruiters' access to children.
Orlando Terrazas, a former truck driver in Southern California, said he was struck when his son told him that recruiters were promising students jobs as musicians. Mr. Terrazas has been trying since September to hang posters at his son's public school to counter the military's message.
Meanwhile, Amy Hagopian, co-chairwoman of the Parent-Teacher-Student Association at Garfield High School in Seattle, has been fighting against a four-year-old federal law that requires public schools to give military recruiters the same access to students as college recruiters get, or lose federal funding. She also recently took a few hours off work to stand beside recruiters at Garfield High and display pictures of injured American soldiers from Iraq.
"We want to show the military that they are not welcome by the P.T.S.A. in this building," she said. "We hope other P.T.S.A.'s will follow."
Two years into the war in Iraq, as the Army and Marines struggle to refill their ranks, parents have become boulders of opposition that recruiters cannot move.
Mothers and fathers around the country said they were terrified that their children would have to be killed - or kill - in a war that many see as unnecessary and without end.
Around the dinner table, many parents said, they are discouraging their children from serving.
At schools, they are insisting that recruiters be kept away, incensed at the access that they have to adolescents easily dazzled by incentive packages and flashy equipment.
A Department of Defense survey last November, the latest, shows that only 25 percent of parents would recommend military service to their children, down from 42 percent in August 2003.
"Parents," said one recruiter in Ohio who insisted on anonymity because the Army ordered all recruiters not to talk to reporters, "are the biggest hurdle we face."
Legally, there is little a parent can do to prevent a child over 18 from enlisting. But in interviews, recruiters said that it was very hard to sign up a young man or woman over the strong objections of a parent.
The Pentagon - faced with using only volunteers during a sustained conflict, an effort rarely tried in American history - is especially vexed by a generation of more activist parents who have no qualms about projecting their own views onto their children.
Lawrence S. Wittner, a military historian at the State University of New York, Albany, said today's parents also had more power.
"With the draft, there were limited opportunities for avoiding the military, and parents were trapped, reduced to draft counseling or taking their children to Canada," he said. "But with the volunteer armed force, what one gets is more vigorous recruitment and more opportunities to resist."
Some of that opportunity was provoked by the very law that was supposed to make it easier for recruiters to reach students more directly. No Child Left Behind, which was passed by Congress in 2001, requires schools to turn over students' home phone numbers and addresses unless parents opt out. That is often the spark that ignites parental resistance.
Recruiters, in interviews over the past six months, said that opposition can be fierce. Three years ago, perhaps 1 or 2 of 10 parents would hang up immediately on a cold call to a potential recruit's home, said a recruiter in New York who, like most others interviewed, insisted on anonymity to protect his career. "Now," he said, "in the past year or two, people hang up all the time. "
Several recruiters said they had even been threatened with violence.
"I had one father say if he saw me on his doorstep I better have some protection on me," said a recruiter in Ohio. "We see a lot of hostility."
Military officials are clearly concerned. In an interview last month, Maj. Gen. Michael D. Rochelle, commander of Army recruiting, said parental resistance could put the all-volunteer force in jeopardy. When parents and other influential adults dissuade young people from enlisting, he said, "it begs the question of what our national staying power might be for what certainly appears to be a long fight."
In response, the Army has rolled out a campaign aimed at parents, with television ads and a Web site that includes videos of parents talking about why they supported their children's decision to enlist. General Rochelle said that it was still too early to tell if it is making a difference.
But Col. David Slotwinski, a former chief of staff for Army recruiting, said that the Army faced an uphill battle because many baby boomer parents are inclined to view military service negatively, especially during a controversial war.
"They don't realize that they have a role in helping make the all-volunteer force successful," said Colonel Slotwinski, who retired in 2004. "If you don't, you're faced with the alternative, and the alternative is what they were opposed to the most, mandatory service."
Many of the mothers and fathers most adamant about recruitment do have a history of opposition to Vietnam. Amy Hagopian, 49, a professor of public health at the University of Washington, and her husband, Stephen Ludwig, 57, a carpenter, said that they and many parents who contest recruiting at Garfield High in Seattle have a history of antiwar sentiment and see their efforts as an extension of their pacifism.
But, he added, parents are also reacting to what they see as the military's increased intrusion into the lives of their children.
"The recruiters are in your face, in the library, in the lunchroom," he said. "They're contacting the most vulnerable students and recruiting them to go to war."
The access is legally protected. As recently as 2000, said one former recruiter in California, it was necessary to dig through the trash at high schools and colleges to find students' names and phone numbers. But No Child Left Behind mandates that school districts can receive federal funds only if they grant military recruiters "the same access to secondary school students" as is provided to colleges and employers.
So although the Garfield P.T.S.A. voted last month to ban military recruiters from the school and its 1,600 students, the Seattle school district could not sign on to the idea without losing at least $15 million in federal education funds.
"The parents have chosen to take a stand, but we still have to comply with No Child Left Behind," said Peter Daniels, communications director for the district. In Whittier, a city of 85,000 10 miles southeast of East Los Angeles, about a dozen families last September accused the district of failing to properly advise parents that they had the right to deny recruiters access to their children's personal information.
Mr. Terrazas, 51, the father of a Whittier High School junior, said the notification was buried among other documents in a preregistration packet sent out last summer.
"It didn't say that the military has access to students' information," he said. "It just said to write a letter if you didn't want your kid listed in a public directory."
A few years ago, after Sept. 11, the issue might not have gotten Mr. Terrazas's attention. His father served in World War II, his brother in Vietnam, and he said that he had always supported having a strong military able to defend the country.
But after the war in Iraq yielded no weapons of mass destruction, and as the death toll has mounted, he cannot reconcile the pride he feels at seeing marines deliver aid after the tsunami in Asia with his concern over the effort in Baghdad, he said.
"Because of the situation we're in now, I would not want my son to serve," he said. "It's the policy that I'm against, not the military."
After Mr. Terrazas and several other parents expressed their concern about the school's role in recruitment, the district drafted a new policy. On May 23, it introduced a proposed opt-out form for the district's 14,000 students.
The form, said Ron Carruth, Whittier's assistant superintendent, includes an explanation of the law, and boxes that parents can check to indicate they do not want information on their child released to either the military, colleges, vocational schools or other sources of recruitment. Mr. Carruth said that next year the district would also prohibit all recruiters from appearing in classrooms, and keep the military ones from bringing equipment like Humvees onto school grounds, a commonly used recruitment tool.
He said that some of the information from the 11-by-17-inch poster that Mr. Terrazas sought to post, including how to verify recruiters' claims about financial benefits, will be part of a pamphlet created by the school for students.
And at least a dozen other districts in the area, Mr. Carruth added, up from three in November, are considering similar plans.
Unlike Mr. Terrazas, Ms. Rogers, 37, of High Falls in the upper Hudson Valley, had not thought much about the war before she began speaking out in her school district. She had been "politically apathetic," she said. She did not know about No Child Left Behind's reporting requirements, nor did she opt out.
When her son, Jonah, said he was thinking of sitting out a gym class that was to be led by National Guard recruiters, Ms. Rogers, who works part time as a clerk at the local motor vehicles office and receives public assistance, said she told him not to be "a rebel without a cause."
"In this world," she recalled telling him, "we need a strong military."
But then she heard from her son that the class was mandatory, and that recruiters were handing out free T-shirts and key chains - "Like, 'Hey, let's join the military. It's fun,' " she said.
First she called the Rondout Valley High School to complain about the "false advertising," she said, then her congressman.
On May 24, at the first school board meeting since the gym class, she read aloud from a recruiting handbook that advised recruiters on ways to gain maximum access to schools, including offering doughnuts. A high school senior, Katie Coalla, 18, stood up at one point and tearfully defended the recruiters, receiving applause from the crowd of about 70, but Ms. Rogers persisted.
"Pulling in this need for heartstrings patriotic support is clouding the issue," she said. "The point is not whether I support the troops. It's about whether a well-organized propaganda machine should be targeted at children and enforced by the schools."
Another book-war.
A Town's Struggle in the Culture War
By BRUCE WEBER
MUHLENBERG, Pa. - In April, at an otherwise mundane meeting of the school board here, Brittany Hunsicker, a 16-year-old student at the local high school, stood up and addressed the assembled board members.
"How would you like if your son and daughter had to read this?" Miss Hunsicker asked.
Then she began to recite from "The Buffalo Tree," a novel set in a juvenile detention center and narrated by a tough, 12-year-old boy incarcerated there. What she read was a scene set in a communal shower, where another adolescent boy is sexually aroused.
"I am in the 11th grade," Miss Hunsicker said. "I had to read this junk."
Less than an hour later, by a unanimous vote of the board (two of its nine members were absent) "The Buffalo Tree" was banned, officially excised from the Muhlenberg High School curriculum. By 8:30 the next morning all classroom copies of the book had been collected and stored in a vault in the principal's office. Thus began a still unresolved battle here over the fate of "The Buffalo Tree," a young adult novel by Adam Rapp that was published eight years ago by HarperCollins and has been on the 11th-grade reading list at Muhlenberg High since 2000. Pitting teachers, students and others who say the context of the novel's language makes it appropriate for the classroom against those parents and board members who say context be damned, it is a dispute illustrative of the so-called culture war, which, in spite of its national implications, is fought in almost exclusively local skirmishes. The board was set to meet the evening of June 1 to reconsider its decision.
"We're absolutely middle-American," said Joseph Yarworth, the schools' superintendent for the last nine years. "And we're having an argument over our values."
According to the American Library Association, which asks school districts and libraries to report efforts to ban books - that is, have them removed from shelves or reading lists - they are on the rise again: 547 books were challenged last year, up from 458 in 2003. These aren't record numbers. In the 1990's the appearance of the Harry Potter books, with their themes of witchcraft and wizardry, caused a raft of objections from evangelical Christians.
Judith Krug, director of the library association's office for intellectual freedom, attributed the most recent spike to the empowerment of conservatives in general and to the re-election of President Bush in particular. The same thing happened 25 years ago, she said. "In 1980, we were dealing with an average of 300 or so challenges a year, and then Reagan was elected," she said. "And challenges went to 900 or 1,000 a year."
Muhlenberg is a township of modest homes and 10,000 people or so, a bedroom community for the city of Reading, in the southeastern quadrant of the state. It is conservative politically and almost entirely white, and there are a growing number of evangelical Christians. Miss Hunsicker had just returned from a two-week church mission in Honduras when, encouraged by her mother, she made her public complaint.
But the town is not militantly right wing. It is significant that even the more vociferous opponents of the book did not insist it come off the school library shelves (though thieves apparently took care of that). In fact, on April 14, as soon as Dr. Yarworth discovered that an overzealous underling had had copies of the novel stored in the school vault, he ordered them returned to storage in classrooms so it could still be read by students who sought it out.
"I wanted us to comply with the narrowest possible interpretation of the board's decision," Dr. Yarworth said.
What followed was a period of unusual activism here. Students circulated petitions. Teachers prepared defenses of the book, and their local union prepared a defense of the teacher who had assigned it. Letters on both sides appeared in the local newspaper, The Reading Eagle, which published a number of articles about the dispute. In May a column appeared headlined "The Upside of Censorship," by a regular columnist, John D. Forester Jr., who wrote that after reading only "passages" of "The Buffalo Tree," "I am actually applauding the efforts of parents to have books banished in their school libraries and classrooms." A few days later, an editorial took the opposing view.
On May 4, the school board met for the first time since banning "The Buffalo Tree" and about 200 people attended, 10 times the usual number, Dr. Yarworth said. The president, Mark Nelson, apologized for his vote to ban the book, not because he approved of it in the curriculum - he admitted later he had not read it - but because he felt the decision had been hasty and in violation of the board's policy for book challenges, which says a challenge should first be heard by a committee of teachers and administrators before the issue goes before the board.
Another member, Otto Voit, who had read the novel, responded that the board, as the ultimate authority, was within its rights in removing the book from the curriculum.
Over the next two hours, some of the rhetoric on both sides became inflated. Some declared that dirty words are dirty words, and that with novels like "The Buffalo Tree" being taught it's no wonder American society is going down the tubes. And others, not allowing for the genuine discomfort that some readers of "The Buffalo Tree" feel, invoked the specter of Nazi book-burning.
Several students spoke with more reasonable passion about the value of the novel, and one high school senior, Mary Isamoyer, offered to replace the missing library copies of "The Buffalo Tree" with her own.
"Do not insult our intelligence by keeping this book from us," she said.
Tammy Hahn, a mother of four and perhaps the most outspoken of the book's opponents, responded that the students' view was irrelevant. She was not about to let her daughter take part in a classroom discussion about erections, she said, adding that it amounted to harassment to subject a girl to the smirks and innuendoes of male classmates who would have no sympathy for her discomfort.
"This is not about a child's opinion," she said of the students' defense of the book. "This is about parents."
Afterward, Joan Kochinsky, a board member who had not been at the previous meeting, moved that the ban be rescinded. But wary of making another decision in haste, the board postponed the vote for a week.
On May 11, it met for another tense, well-attended session that lasted until nearly midnight. This time there was much discussion about the particulars of Miss Hunsicker's unhappiness with the book.
School policy allows for alternate reading assignments when a student or a parent objects to a book on religious or moral grounds, but Miss Hunsicker never did that; her mother, Tammy, said she would have made those specific objections if she had known it was necessary. Miss Hunsicker had simply asked for something else to read because she didn't like "The Buffalo Tree," and her teacher, Luana Goldstan, refused.
"No one is more critical of literature than English teachers," Stacia Richmond, a colleague of Ms. Goldstan's, told the board. "Do you really think we as educators choose literature in terms of its titillation? Do you not realize we are battling the same immorality you are?"
Dr. Yarworth then suggested that confusion could be avoided if a more explicit policy for book challenges were given to parents, including a synopsis of all books on the required reading lists. If that were done, he asked, would the board consider rescinding the ban on "The Buffalo Tree"?
An informal poll was taken, and by a 5-to-3 vote the board indicated it was ready to reverse itself. It was unclear how many members had finished "The Buffalo Tree"; at least two had, at least three had not. But the lengthy debate seemed to prepare them to change their minds.
After the meeting, however, Mrs. Hahn said she felt her arguments had been given short shrift, and she met privately with Mr. Nelson, the board president, to push the idea of a rating system for schoolbooks, similar to what the Motion Picture Association of America does for films. And on May 18, the board rejected the English department's new policy for book challenges and asked that Mrs. Hahn's requests be accommodated: that reading lists made available to parents include a ratings system, plot summaries of all assigned books, and the identification of any potentially objectionable content.
Teachers adamantly opposed these strictures, Michael Anthony, chairman of the English department, said, adding that they would undoubtedly result in more frequent challenges. Dr. Yarworth, who is trying to broker a compromise between the board and faculty, said he had already heard a few grumbles about "Of Mice and Men" and "Catcher in the Rye."
In any case, Mr. Anthony said, " 'The Buffalo Tree' isn't coming back anytime soon."
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-06-04 09:05 am (UTC)And this? "And others, not allowing for the genuine discomfort that some readers of "The Buffalo Tree" feel, invoked the specter of Nazi book-burning." Weird wording. Sounds like they're saying anyone for the book is an insensitive ass--instead of someone who might recognize discomfort and still believe banning books is wrong.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-04 09:10 am (UTC)As for the rest, I know. I don't comment on the stories unless they're funny, though.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-04 09:25 am (UTC)That just about describes those las two articles there. Never mind what our children think, it's not important! Even though our desitions have the direct on them, their opinions are not important!
I'm not sure about required reading books anyway. Then again, not many kids today are in to reading for fun. Sorry, I guess I can't say anything here.
But doesn't it just show you something that most of the members on the board didn't even read the book? This is just like people. "I haven't read the book, but I am certain it is full of brainwashing filth and must be banned." Oh, god...
no subject
Date: 2005-06-04 09:31 am (UTC)I'm not so sure that is true.
Even if it is, I'm not so sure that it's a matter of "kids today" as in "kids throughout the history of widespread literacy".
no subject
Date: 2005-06-04 09:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-04 10:26 am (UTC)I don't think that the percentage of avid child readers has gone down in recent years, nor do I think that the percentage of avid adult readers has changed. Many people - not just kids! - don't read for fun. And that has always been the case. However, many people do.
Additionally, we weren't talking about specific books. Look at the popularity of the Harry Potter books. You think that kids aren't reading those for fun? That they somehow became popular because children don't read?
no subject
Date: 2005-06-04 05:11 pm (UTC)Lots of literacy all over the place. It's kinda nifty really.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-05 11:02 am (UTC)What I was saying was that, maybe, for some people the required is the only way they're going to read. Never mind, I know that's true. But these same kids don't even to read the required reading. So if only the avid readers are going to read the required reading, I don't really see the point of it. Putting "Interresting" books is a way of getting highschoolers to read I guess, but if the book is required, wouldn't that make him less likely to read it-despite it being interresting?
no subject
Date: 2005-06-04 07:43 pm (UTC)Hell, when I was still in the juvenile/YA section of the library, I went along the shelves scanning for the little "theme" stickers the library used to use to classify the books--a dog's head for "general animal-related", a horsehead for horse books, a spaceship for science fiction....
no subject
Date: 2005-06-04 09:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-04 03:30 pm (UTC)Funny that parents don't want their kids killed or crippled (physically or psychologically), how selfish of them.
But I do like the argument that if you want to keep your child out of the war, you should send your child into the war to prevent a draft... now that's logic.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-04 09:05 am (UTC)And this? "And others, not allowing for the genuine discomfort that some readers of "The Buffalo Tree" feel, invoked the specter of Nazi book-burning." Weird wording. Sounds like they're saying anyone for the book is an insensitive ass--instead of someone who might recognize discomfort and still believe banning books is wrong.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-04 09:10 am (UTC)As for the rest, I know. I don't comment on the stories unless they're funny, though.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-04 09:25 am (UTC)That just about describes those las two articles there. Never mind what our children think, it's not important! Even though our desitions have the direct on them, their opinions are not important!
I'm not sure about required reading books anyway. Then again, not many kids today are in to reading for fun. Sorry, I guess I can't say anything here.
But doesn't it just show you something that most of the members on the board didn't even read the book? This is just like people. "I haven't read the book, but I am certain it is full of brainwashing filth and must be banned." Oh, god...
no subject
Date: 2005-06-04 09:31 am (UTC)I'm not so sure that is true.
Even if it is, I'm not so sure that it's a matter of "kids today" as in "kids throughout the history of widespread literacy".
no subject
Date: 2005-06-04 09:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-04 10:26 am (UTC)I don't think that the percentage of avid child readers has gone down in recent years, nor do I think that the percentage of avid adult readers has changed. Many people - not just kids! - don't read for fun. And that has always been the case. However, many people do.
Additionally, we weren't talking about specific books. Look at the popularity of the Harry Potter books. You think that kids aren't reading those for fun? That they somehow became popular because children don't read?
no subject
Date: 2005-06-04 05:11 pm (UTC)Lots of literacy all over the place. It's kinda nifty really.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-05 11:02 am (UTC)What I was saying was that, maybe, for some people the required is the only way they're going to read. Never mind, I know that's true. But these same kids don't even to read the required reading. So if only the avid readers are going to read the required reading, I don't really see the point of it. Putting "Interresting" books is a way of getting highschoolers to read I guess, but if the book is required, wouldn't that make him less likely to read it-despite it being interresting?
no subject
Date: 2005-06-04 07:43 pm (UTC)Hell, when I was still in the juvenile/YA section of the library, I went along the shelves scanning for the little "theme" stickers the library used to use to classify the books--a dog's head for "general animal-related", a horsehead for horse books, a spaceship for science fiction....
no subject
Date: 2005-06-04 09:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-04 03:30 pm (UTC)Funny that parents don't want their kids killed or crippled (physically or psychologically), how selfish of them.
But I do like the argument that if you want to keep your child out of the war, you should send your child into the war to prevent a draft... now that's logic.