Dijle Studies

Anyway, she follows it up with, “My husband and I just recently won our custody battle with our foster daughter and she means the world to us. She’s a beautiful African American girl and her hair looks a lot like yours. But I’m afraid because I don’t know what to do with her hair. It’s a lot different from mines and our other children and we are at a total loss. I’ve tried looking up the YouTube videos and my husband went to the braiding shops so they can teach him how to properly braid her hair, but he’s still pretty new and it will be a while before he gets used to it. Do you have any tips you can give me? If you don’t have the time, it’s okay, really! I just needed a little advice because I want her to look beautiful.”

Y’all. swear I almost started crying on aisle 6. So for the last 30 minutes, I spent my time talking to her and what products to use and how to properly detangle and comb her hair with the proper tools and what not to do with natural hair. And I showed her a bunch of easier to follow natural hair tutorials on YouTube and saved them for her. (I also had to create a YouTube account for her so she could save it for later.) but omfg, she was so sweet, and I could tell that she listened to every single thing I had to say and she took little notes on her little notepad.

And what really filled my heart was the fact that her husband actually taking classes from African braiding shops. And she showed me a picture of him wearing a little sweater vest and loafers in a little shop surrounded by beautiful black women showing him how to braid black hair and even the lady he’s braiding on is guiding his hands. And omfg. Bless these old white people and their black daughter who I know have new loving parents because they are willing to step out of their comfort zone just to make her feel and look beautiful.

24 / 100 days of productivity

january 13, 2018

It was on ‘The ethics of abortion’, and I was sorta expecting a lecture tip-toeing around the different viewpoints without offending anyone. But our lecturer slayed!

- she started out by saying how the ‘pro life’ side always get emotive pictures of babies and foetuses etc, and that there’s hardly any for pro choice. So she put up a photo of a woman lying dead on the floor, after bleeding out from an unsafe abortion her partner tried to perform on her

- she showed us statistics on how abortion rates are lower in countries with safe, legal access to abortion

- she showed us more statistics on how high maternal death rates and deaths from unsafe abortions became when countries made access to abortion more restricted 

- she put up photos of discarded babies in streets and rubbish bins in countries where abortion is illegal 

- she talked about a case in the US where a woman was ex-communicated from an ethics committee at a catholic hospital, after the committee allowed a woman with life-threatening complications to have an abortion, then our lecturer commented that ‘it’s funny how it was wrong for her to do that, yet child abuse is apparently ok’ 

- she went through cases of more women who were so desperate to have an abortion that they seriously harmed themselves

- she ended the lecture on the photo of the woman who died, and said ‘whatever your stance on abortion, the fact is that if a woman has made up her mind that she doesn’t want to be pregnant, she will do whatever she can to get an abortion, even if it puts her life at risk’

Abortion is the choice to kill your child.