Gajra

Gajra 🪷

'Huge' fall in FGM rates for African girls

Activists say female genital mutilation is still common in Africa - but a study finds it is falling.

There’s been a massive fall in FGM rates across the African continent for girls under 14.

The figures are all taken roughly 20 years apart, in the mid 90s and then in the late 2010s. The rate in Western African has gone from 74% to 25%, in Northern Africa it’s gone from 60% to 14%.

Across the continent the overall rate has gone from 71% to 8%. 

This is just huge. I’m finding it difficult to wrap my head around the scale of it, the number of children those percentages represent. It feels like such a huge shift. It’s millions of girls growing up safer and healthier. 

And the researchers are saying their mothers are the driving force.

FIVE THINGS I HAD TO CHANGE IN ORDER TO HEAL MY LIFE...

1] I had to delete social media. Exclusively Instagram. IG was consuming my life, the constant posting, the energy I was receiving was not in anyway positive. I knew my time was being wasted on the app and I couldn’t seem to help myself. It was an addiction. I first started deleting the app each day and reinstalling each time I wanted to check it. When got sick and had to have an emergency surgery last summer I knew in order to heal and stay mentally sane I HAD to delete the app. I have not gone back since. This singlehandedly removed so much toxicity out of my life. 

2] I quit watching the news / reading the news. Those nightmares, those fearful thoughts, all programmed into my subconscious day-by-day by the repeated messages of fear and worry. And while my heart breaks for what is going on in the world, it was bringing me down - without any purpose. So I removed myself. 

3] I got real serious about my connection with God. This transformed me. From someone who struggled with saying the word ‘God’ to Now knowing the love and guidance is something I receive daily, the transformation has been real. This looked like working with a spiritual coach, daily prayers, listening with intent during mediation to any messages. I started 1 hour mediations listening to God and although mostly silent the wisdom would pour in always from above. 

4] I changed my diet. I quit carbs. This single handedly changed my life. No more extreme hunger even though I just ate 2 hours ago, no more carb crashes. I removed all the carbs and started a protein and veg diet with some fruits. I invested in a juicer, I started studying nutrition. I also quit alcohol. Learning about balancing my hormones through removing glucose (carbs, starches, sugars) has impacted me in ways I never knew possible. 

5] I started running. As someone who works from home, it was very easy for me to be completely stagnant all day, and believe my dog walks were equivalent to exercise. In order to keep a healthy flow of blood, and maintain heart health, I needed to give my heart some work. This meant running. I started running down the road and back with many breaks in-between. I now run on the treadmill in the gym 3-4 times per week along with a little resistance training. When you start to show your body love, your confidence grows, you sleep better, your energy is replenished. It’s a win win. 

With every one of these five steps. It took a while. I didn’t just stop eating carbs. I quit and I went back and realised going back to the old way wasn’t working. My relationship with God took time, I would skip my meditations and then realise how much I benefited from them. I had to delete and re-install instagram multiple times a day. The point being, sometimes you got to slip-up. But make sure you’re falling forward. 

tired of cannibalism as a metaphor for love or sex. can we get into cannibalism as a metaphor for colonization.

when the academically challenging degree is indeed challenging you.

works in India. I added it to my firfox webbrowser on phone. This is how you do it:

Open your firfox and press the three buttons. Go to settings. There, in general you got the search option and within that your default search engine is selected, Google, Bing Yahoo whatever.

Within that, what you do now is, add the new search engine udm14. While adding a new search engine it gonna ask you a name for the search engine (udm14) + what is the search engine website url when you do search something. Add the following to the url part: (https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14) and you're all set!

Select udm14 now as your default browser and you're good to go!

Google de-shitification

Do you use Google? Do you want to search without the always-wrong AI inserting itself and fucking over your search results?

https://udm14.com/

This is an easy way to add &udm=14 to your Google query, which will remove the AI and also put it very much like it would have been back when it actually did not suck.

Note that it just submits to Google with &udm=14 at the end of the URL. If you know how to edit URL's, you can just add it yourself and it should have the same effect.

Doesn't work in all regions, for all users, etc. but it worked for me.