Cheers with a tampon for Int'l Women's Day!

Cheers to all you ladies today!

In honor of International Women's Day, I would like to pause and share with you a story.

I heard an interview with Shin Dong-hyuk this week. This man recently released a book that chronicles his life in and escape from a North Korean Prison Camp: Escape From Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey From North Korea to Freedom in the West. The details of his life in the camp sound eerily familiar to the stories we've heard from the Concentration Camps in Europe during WWII.

After describing many horrors he endured, including watching his mother and brother get executed, Shin shared that he has a difficult time existing in North America. He is astounded at the stores here, and said that he gets especially sad when he sees the boxes and boxes of tampons and pads on the shelves. Which caused me pause--what man ever notices feminine products unless their girlfriend or wife won a bet?

But.

Then Shin explained that in the prison camp, 2,000 women worked in one of the many buildings each day. When these women had their period, they had no choice but to bleed through their clothes and drip blood onto the floors.

He sounded like he might cry when he described how he wanted to take all the boxes of tampons off the store shelves and bring them back to these women. He noted that they were lovely women.

As if their beauty makes their suffering even harsher.

And here I live with luxuries and dignity and ambition.

But.

Today I pause to think of so many women who do not.

Then I start to think maybe I'll mail a box of tampons to North Korea, perhaps with a message inside to Kim Jong-un to let him know... well, he's apparently got some nukes, so maybe I won't be so naive.