Rosie Scribble

At seven the world should be a happy place #ShareNiger

Something got to me yesterday. Really got to me. And it wasn’t that I was late adding my entry to this week’s gallery. It was much much more than that.

It was a tweet. This tweet:

The reference was to a lady called Fatima Soumana who lives in Niger and saves children who are sold as wives.

That’s children, CHILDREN, being sold as wives. 

Hard to comprehend isn’t it?

The word children just does not sit comfortably next to the word wives. I’m still struggling with it today. 

There is no them and us ...

I've complained this week. A lot.

It's a long list, but for the purpose of this blog post here’s a shortened version:

• I've had to lug endless boxes of toys down the stairs so that our decorator can paint IJ's bedroom.
• I've had to put all my books into boxes so that my bedroom can be painted too.
• I forgot to charge my iPhone so couldn’t reply to emails during a trip out.
• Added to that, my Internet connection then went down for two whole hours.
• And did I mention we ran out of milk?

There's a word for all of this. Well, three actually:

First world problems.

Hardly the end of the world are they, really?

I could in all honesty survive without my phone for a week. If Facebook wasn't accessible and Twitter locked me out for a month I'd still be here at the end of it. In the grand scheme of things, they are not that important. And these things are luxuries to others. How easy it is to forget.

I saw children in Africa touch an iPhone for the very first time and stare in amazement at the sight of a camera lens.

Nine

With IJ’s ninth birthday exactly two months away, I’m already feeling nervous. IJ is happy and confident with a nice group of friends and she’s happy at school. But things changed for me at the age of nine. 

It was the year I started to get anxious and struggled to sleep. I’d worry about anything and everything, and if I had nothing to worry about I’d worry about that too. It wasn’t a great time and the start of a downhill spiral.

I want things to be different for IJ.

Thankfully there is often a reason why life becomes difficult and factors that contribute, and in this case they are not shared by IJ.  Without going into the gory details, I had ear surgery, which left me some permanent hearing loss. So for quite a number of years, and at a fragile age, I couldn’t hear what was going on around me. 

My confidence took a knock. You can’t join in with conversations if you don’t know what’s being said, but at nine you want to fit in and hearing loss makes that difficult. The world can be a confusing place when you can’t communicate properly. Agony for an already shy child. 

Worrying times

The new roof at Kings Cross has little relevance to this post except to illustrate the fact I was in London last week.

I was there for an interview for a social media role in the charity sector. I had high hopes for the future when I took that photo on the journey home, but it’s a highly competitive marketplace and on this occasion it wasn't to be.

Looking for work in a double dip recession is time consuming and demoralising and I’m feeling the strain.  So I'm going to take some time away from this blog. I don’t want it to end up full of doom and gloom, and it’s hard to write when the pressure feels full on. I need to keep my head together and concentrate on more pressing issues right now because I’m running out of time.

Give up clothes for good

The idea here is not that you stop wearing clothes completely and rely only on a daily application of strong sun cream to protect you from the elements. At least, that's what my daughter initially thought – or hoped - when I suggested she set aside the clothes she no longer wears.

She thought the idea of giving up clothes for a good was a brilliant one, so I had to explain this is all in aid of cancer research and there’s no nudity involved at all. 

This is a light-hearted introduction to a difficult subject. We don’t like to think of children having cancer, but thanks to the organisations like Cancer Research UK as many as three out of four children with cancer will now beat it.