SAWUBONA

In Nigeria, a perceptive boy understands how back-punishing women's work is in

sweeping inside and outside a village hut with a short-handled broom of natural fiber.

Sympathetically, he builds a long-handled version for his mother and grandmother,

opposing the group's fierce clinging to an absence of support for local women. In

Cape Town, South Africa, a girl dresses like a boy to be safe from unwanted male

attention while fetching water for her household during a city-wide, politically driven

drought. In Zimbabwe, a girl and her younger siblings escape a marriage secretly

designed to undermine their fragile family unit. Forced marriages resulting from a

family's hardship can cause multiple disasters for a native female child. In another

story, a Maasai boy builds a device to prevent lions from killing family livestock.

This story, although fictionalized, mirrors the efforts of an eleven-years-old Maasai

boy, Richard Turere, in Kenya.

All narratives in this collection are fictional, yet grow out of today's real circumstances.

The narratives seek to educate readers about ways in which these children can overcome

cultural obstacles. In living with a six-month-old warthog and vervet monkey, to

her pleasure and occasional dismay, the author learned about conservation issues

surrounding humans and orphaned animals. The two aggressive youngsters have

been woven into two stories highlighting some consequences.