Things Fall Apart

when women were stronger than strong

Flamingos can survive in low oxygen, high altitude, high temperatures, low temperatures, high alkaline, they can and will drink boiling water and they can be completely frozen at night and still get up the next morning

(animal death) this is a real undoctored photograph (*though the body was stood up for the shot) of a dead flamingo on the surface of lake natron, a lake so salty and so alkaline that it’s naturally carbonated like soda and would eat through your stomach lining if you drank from it.

When this photo went viral years ago, most people assumed this poor flamingo must have been killed by the lake.

It is actually the lake where 75% of its global population are hatched. This is a photo from the same lake:

RATING: RELIABLE

Flamingos can survive in high altitudes, hypersaline conditions, and caustic lakes.

Source: ‘All flamingo species have evolved to live in some of the planet’s most extreme wetlands, like caustic “soda lakes”, hypersaline lagoons or high-altitude salt flats.’

They can survive water so alkaline it burns human skin.

Source: ‘More than a million lesser flamingos breed in Tanzania’s Lake Natron, for instance, a lake fed by hot springs with water so alkaline that it can strip away human skin (one pioneering flamingo researcher named Leslie Brown spent months in Nairobi General Hospital after burning his legs wading out to observe where the birds nested).’

They can drink water at near-boiling temperatures.

Source: ‘They can drink water at near boiling point to collect freshwater from springs and geysers at lake edges. If no freshwater is available, flamingos can use glands in their head that remove salt, draining it out from their nasal cavity.’

The lakes they inhabit can freeze overnight, and the flamingos can survive once it thaws in the morning.

Source: ‘The birds may seem to epitomize the tropics, but they also live in the Andes, 15,000 feet above sea level, where they rest on lakes that freeze around them overnight.

“You’ll see them sitting there like snowballs, frozen on ice,” Dr. Arengo said. “And as the temperature warms up, they thaw out, fluff themselves up and go about their business.”’

The photo is indeed from Lake Natron, taken by photographer Nick Brandt. The content of the lake chemically preserves animal corpses that die there. You can see more photos of this here.

It is also true that 75% of Lesser Flamingos are hatches on Lake Natron.

Source: ‘The lake’s landscape is surreal and deadly—and made even more bizarre by the fact that it’s the place where nearly 75 percent of the world’s lesser flamingos are born.’

Some species of Flamingo eat cyanobacteria or algae.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: August 7, 1962--

In 1960, Kelsey was hired by the FDA to review drugs. Thalidomide was one of her first assignments. You know how people new to a job, especially women in the patriarchal-as-hell 1960s, might be afraid of making waves? Frances said fuck that.

Thalidomide was being used as a tranquilizer and painkiller, and the manufacturer was pushing it as a treatment for pregnant women with morning sickness. It had already been approved for use in Canada and almost two dozen European and African countries. The drug’s German manufacturer, Grünenthal, pressured her to approve the drug for use in the United States, but she was concerned about it crossing the placental barrier, an area Kelsey had expertise in due to her previous work with malaria drugs.

And so, she told the company she needed more data to show the drug would not be harmful to the fetus of anyone who took it. This critical delay caused by Kelsey demanding further studies allowed time to see the horrifying effects of the drug in countries where it had been approved. Her instinct to withhold approval was correct, because the drug did cross the placental barrier and caused myriad serious birth defects.

It was estimated that approximately 10,000 people were affected by their mothers taking thalidomide, of which roughly 40 percent died at birth. The effects on those who survived included limb deformities, as well as problems with the heart, eyes, and urinary tract.

Kelsey was celebrated on the front page of The Washington Post for her tough stance. She said that her assistants and supervisors deserved credit for backing her up in her refusal to approve the drug. On August 7, 1962, she was awarded the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service by John F. Kennedy.

NOTE: This piece was researched and written by a human, not some bullshit "ai" plagiarism software.

The Warsaw Uprising was fought, in part, by children. Girls and boys carried messages through the sewers, hauled ammunition across streets swept by machine-gun fire, and worked in the basement hospitals where the wounded were brought in faster than anyone could treat them. The youngest of the nurses was a girl of eight named Róża Goździewska, whom a surviving photograph shows in a Red Cross armband, improbably, smiling.

The uprising had begun on this day in 1944, when the Polish Home Army rose against the Germans who had held the city for nearly five years, expecting to sustain the fight for a few days until the Allies came to help. The help never came, and the uprising lasted 63 days instead, through which the city's supplies of food, then water, then morphine, dwindled toward nothing. Róża worked in a cellar beneath 11 Moniuszki Street, in a field hospital run by the Home Army's Koszta Company, while in the courtyard above her civilians filled sandbags against the German shelling.

There was little that a child of eight could do for men whose wounds there were neither the hands nor the materials to dress properly, and so she did the things that remained to her: she carried water to those too weak to reach it, drove off the flies that had descended on the hospital in plagues, and moved among the cots speaking to the men, so that those still capable of it smiled back at her. It was for this that they called her Różyczka, "Little Rose."

She had arrived at that cellar already shaped by the war in the way that so many Polish children of her generation were. Her father had been shot by the Gestapo the year before; her family's house had burned; and as the uprising wore on, the Germans killed the city's civilians on a massive scale -- by the end, an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 of them -- while reducing Warsaw itself methodically to rubble, until some 85% of the city was gone.

The photograph that fixed her in memory was taken in early August by Eugeniusz Lokajski, a former Olympic javelin thrower who spent the uprising as a soldier and its foremost chronicler, making more than a thousand exposures before a collapsing building killed him that September. Of all the images he left -- of barricades, of the dead, of the exhausted young insurgents -- it is the one of the grinning child in the armband that people remember, in part because it is among the very few photographs of a Polish child smiling in that terrible summer.

Róża survived the war. She grew up to become an engineer, moved to France, married and had two children of her own. She died in 1989 at the age of 53. But the image the world kept was of the eight-year-old who shined with courage and hope in the midst of devastation -- and through her, of all the children the uprising swept up: the couriers who ran the dispatches, the boys and girls who carried ammunition through the fire, the small nurses, most of them never photographed, and many never grown.

For a gripping middle grade novel set during the events Róża lived through, "Uprising" by Jennifer A. Nielsen follows twelve-year-old Lidia, based on the real Polish resistance fighter Lidia Durr Zakrzewski, who smuggles food to the Warsaw Ghetto, carries weapons and messages as a courier through the occupied city, and takes up the fight when the Warsaw Uprising begins, for ages 10 and up at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9781338795080 (Bookshop) and https://www.amazon.com/dp/1338795082 (Amazon)

For a powerful book for adult readers about the women who worked for the resistance in the Jewish ghettoes of Poland, we highly recommend "The Light of Days" at https://www.amightygirl.com/the-light-of-days -- which is also available in a Young Readers Edition for ages 10 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/light-days-young-readers

There are also two excellent young adult novels about an earlier uprising in Warsaw by the Jews imprisoned by the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto: "Resistance" for ages 12 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/resistance) and "28 Days" for ages 15 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/28-days)

To introduce kids to Irena Sendler, another hero of the Polish Resistance who led a secret operation that successfully smuggled 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto and saved them from certain death, we recommend "Jars of Hope: How One Woman Helped Save 2,500 Children During the Holocaust" for ages 7 to 11 (https://www.amightygirl.com/jars-of-hope) and "Irena's Children: A True Story of Courage" for ages 10 to 14 (https://www.amightygirl.com/irena-s-children-young-readers)

For an extraordinary biography for adults about Irena Sendler's efforts to save the children of the Warsaw Ghetto, we recommend "Irena's Children" at https://www.amightygirl.com/irena-s-children

For more books for children and teens about girls and women who lived during the Holocaust period, including more stories of other heroic resisters and rescuers, visit our blog post "60 Mighty Girl Books About the Holocaust" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=11586

And for books for tweens and teens about girls forced to experience the harsh realities of life under authoritarian regimes, visit our blog post "The Fragility of Freedom: Mighty Girl Books About Life Under Authoritarianism" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=32426

Greek women represent:

These photos show Greek women doing the type of physical labor they would perform more often than not. At the luckiest working conditions for rural women (aka most of the country) they would start working the fields as children and when they got older they would work the same fields with their own babies on their backs.

On the way home from the fields, sometimes the women would carry the wood and the mule would carry the man so he could rest.

Of course, we can talk about the manual labor that is rubbing cloth and metal for hours on end, chopping and carrying wood to light a fire for a large cauldron your size, and stirring it for hours.

But we can also talk about how it wasn't for them to break and carry rocks in baskets for the making of new roads. They would gather salt, olives, and grapes and carry them on large baskets filled to the brim. For salt they carried thirty kilos each trip, doing fifty trips each, stepping shoeless on the grains of salt.

Carrying water was also their job, often moving large barrels with all the water a house of 10 needed upon hills that horses and mules had trouble ascending.

(more photos for salt mining and carrying here)

It's no hyperbole to say these women carried their incomes and households on their backs. "The good she-housekeeper is a slave and a lady" the old Greek saying goes. A "good woman" was a woman who could be strong and work at home and in the field, often described with the qualities of a mule. Men took their wives out in the fields so much that some who were a bit more educated had to make their husbands sign that they wouldn't ask them to work alongside them in the fields! (source in Greek)

Some of these photos are also from 1970. I'm missing a photo from Leukada showing women carrying baskets of the stones they broke, and I'll add it here when I find it.

Basically, women were out of the house forever. A woman who got to stay home and never perform any labor had some type of privilege (wealth, status etc). Same as the many privileged men around the world who didn't perform any labor at all.

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Also one income was NEVER enough to sustain a family. This was possible only in some cases and for a few decades, like... in the 1% of cases in Human history. Normally the whole family had to work!