Reply #37: well, I'm certainly not an expert on Papau, New Guinea - I just heard some real hair raising stories

[Douglas Carpenter]

- actually from some Australians who lived there - things that I certainly never heard of even when I worked for a few years in the very remote Asir region of Saudi Arabia, near the Yemen boarder. I also recall one survey that listed Papua, New Guinea as the most sexist country in the world followed by Bangladesh at number two.

The fact is we live in a world full of outrageous cruelty and inhuman conditions. I can think of a shocking example in Christian Philippines, where I do live part of the year. Children, who for some reason are forsaken and no longer have parents to take care of them, will usually and I say again usually end up spending their entire childhoods and adolescence living with a family as servants who are expected to do whatever their "adoptive" family wants them to do. There will rarely even be a pretense that they are equal to the other children or have the same rights and they certainly don't expect it. They are there to serve and obey whatever is wanted from them. They will quite frequently sleep on the floor and have little or no time for fun and the normal things of childhood. And to make it all the more sad, they usually feel damn grateful, because the alternative of living on the street is far, far worse. There are some occasional kind souls who do accept the children as if they are their own. But that is the exception. Most of the time, these abandoned children - and there are millions of them - do not end up in that condition because of the death of one or both parents. Usually it is because the parents broke up or they were born out of wedlock and the mother cannot find a new husband unless she ditches the kids. This is nothing exceptional about the Philippines. This is really how life is in a great deal of the world - probably most of the world - and was once how life was in much of the western world.