In which Sarah discusses two things that have disturbed her this week

1. Reports from Baghdad about the recruitment (ie: massive exploitation) of people from psychiatric hospitals as suicide bombers - particularly disturbing was the description of two Downs Syndrome women who were strapped up with remote control bombs, led into the markets and blown up. That's fucking revolting. On so many different levels. I read about this in a newspaper in a cafe and my stomach churned and I felt like crying - another way to exploit people's trust in their caregivers. As tho' the recorded rapes and beatings worldwide weren't enough.
2. And I just read something upstairs in the ATL in a 1969 tourist/history publication, about re-burying Maori dead - moving bones from a burial cave where they had lain, undisturbed and protected by custom and tapu for hundreds of years. Because the author believed that they should have a European-style Christian burial - reburial from a culture and religion completely alien and meaningless. And why? Who knows. Cynically I suspect in order to use the caves as some kind of marketing prospect.