Unique Rescue

<a href="http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/ethiopia_guarded_by_lions">Lions Rescue, Guard Beaten Ethiopian Girl</a><br />n<br />n<blockquote>A 12-year-old girl who was abducted and beaten by men trying to force her into a marriage was found being guarded by three lions who apparently had chased off her captors, a policeman said Tuesday.<br />n<br />n"They stood guard until we found her and then they just left her like a gift and went back into the forest," Wondimu said.</blockquote><br />n<br />nWhat's the old saying, the truth is stranger than fiction and this falls right in there. Three lions rescuing a little girl. That's something. <br />n<br />nThere is one very disturbing thing in this story though.<br />n<br />n<blockquote>Kidnapping young girls has long been part of the marriage custom in Ethiopia. The United Nations estimates that more than 70 percent of marriages in Ethiopia are by abduction, practiced in rural areas where most of the country's 71 million people live.</blockquote><br />n<br />nSo to get married a man kidnaps a young girl. They call this a marriage custom. I call it sad. What really needs rescued is all the poor young girls being forced into marriage.<br />n<br />n<b>To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify. And we will have to allow them the choice, without fear of death: that they may come and do likewise or that they may come and that we will follow them, that a little child will lead us back to the child we will always be, vulnerable and wanting and hurting for love and for beauty. June Jordan</b>