Nervous 1

    The world has always been unfair to women, this is true in all cultures. The sad part of the fact is that no matter where you are you will never escape it. This is one of the main ideas that stick out to me in the novel Nervous Conditions. The main character in the story is a young girl who is growing up in a struggling African family. Like most families, this family is struggling with money. The sad fact is that injustice comes to the main character, because she is a girl her family was going to choose to take her out of school in hopes that they could then support her brother in his education. Due to this, the little girl grows her own produce so that what she sells she can use to send herself to school. Sadly, her brother takes much of the crop and gives it away.
   I relate to this story because of my mother, she was a young woman when she had her children, she had to raise and feed her two young boys on the waitress' salary. This was especially difficult because she was only nineteen at the time, and where was the father? Gone, he was abusive so she left him. I must state then that I do believe that women do have harder times in society, in the sense that if people become truly desperate and have to pick and choose who to send to school or whatever it will likely be the boy.
   The story of my mom helps me to identify with the universal fact that many women have been put in situations that are unfair. Many women have to struggle to survive, support their families, or make a living. Simply, even with all the advancements of women in America women can still struggle like the women from Nervous conditions. The women in Nervous Conditions are tough, this seems to be the same with the women around the world like my mother. The women have had to learn to work hard, to work harder than anyone else just to feed the family, or pay for her education like Tambu from the story. Plainly, the story of my mom helps me to identify with the struggle that Tambu and the women in her life had to face.
Andrew Asimus