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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.
