In the Time of the Butterflies - Section I - Loss of Innocence/Faith

We have completed reading the first section of Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies. There are four chapters in the first section, each about a Mirabal sister, Dede, Minerva, Maria Teresa, and Patria. We were assigned to write about each of the sisters' loss of innocence/faith from this section.

In her novel In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez reveals loss of innocence/faith as a way of growing up. The four Mirabal sisters grow up in the Dominican Republic where there are issues with the government. As they grow older, they see that their leader isn't the person they thought he was. They also find troubles of growing up in their own home. As for Dede, the second oldest of the four sisters, she finds out that she won't be loved like she used to be when she was younger anymore. When her father asks the girls which one of them wanted to stay home instead of going off to an away from home school, Dede offered to stay. "Dede always was the smiling little miss. ‘I’ll stay and help, Papa.’ Papa looked surprised because really Dede was a year older than me. She and Patria should have been the two to go away. But then, Papa thought it over and said Dede could go along, too.” (12-13) Papa decided he didn’t want Dede to stay home with him all year. Dede finds that she is not as loved by Papa as Minerva is, or as the other two sisters. She also learns that she will not always be loved all of her life, as Papa has already shown her. Now that Dede is growing up, Papa feels that he won’t hide his feelings from her and that Dede has to accept that she won’t always be loved, even if it’s her own father. For Minerva, her loss of innocence isn’t shown through her own life. At school, she becomes friends with a girl, Sinita, whose father, three uncles, and brother that was killed by Trujillo, the Dominican president. As Sinita is telling her horrific story to her, Minerva can’t stand to listen to this truth. “Sinita told me as much as she knew. I was shaking by the time she was through. According to Sinita, Trujillo became president in a sneaky way. First, he was in the army, and all the people who were above him kept disappearing until he was the one right below the head of the whole armed forces.” (17) Minerva never realized that Trujillo was such a bad man. Before, she thought he was a hero based on no knowledge of his life. She figured that since he was the leader of their country, he was a brilliant man. This makes her angry and she learns that she wants to get back at him. Now that she is older, she understands what Trujillo has done wrong and how dangerous living in their country is. This information she learns from Sinita really affects her when a young child wouldn’t understand the issue. She also shows that she’s grown up by wanting to take action. A young child wouldn’t even think about standing up to anyone, especially the president. Loss of innocence for Maria Teresa, the youngest sister, is a matter of helping out others, like Minerva’s was. Minerva has made friends with a rude girl, Hilda at school. Minerva, Hilda, and some other girls go to one of their grandfather’s house to have meetings about politics. They have secret papers that hold their beliefs on it that gets one of them in trouble. Police find some of those papers in Hilda’s car. She first runs away and hides, but is eventually caught. Maria Teresa possesses a diary in which she writes about her daily life. She mentions Hilda and her story in it, which is considered something that might prove Hilda guilty. She learns that she has to bury her diary until the situation is over. “Hilda has been caught! She was grabbed by the police while trying to leave the convent. Everyone in Don Horacio’s meeting group has been told to destroy anything that would make them guilty.” (43) She handles the situation very well, agreeing to give up a loved possession. Unlike a young child, she didn’t throw a fit about giving something of hers up. Instead, she understands that it is important that she gives it up so that Hilda won’t be found guilty and so the other members of their group won’t be caught. Patria is the oldest sister, and is quite different from the others. All of her life she has been very religious. She always had a set dream of becoming a nun. That changed when she married and had kids. Her third child was born dead and she questions if that is revenge for not becoming a nun. She looks at a picture of Trujillo next to a picture of God. She knew Trujillo was a bad man, but then she equates Trujillo with God. “I had heard, but I had not believed. Snug in my heart, fondling my pearl, I had ignored their cries of desolation. How could our loving, all-powerful Father allow us to suffer so? I looked up, challenging Him. And the two faces had merged!” (53) She can’t understand how God and Trujillo allow their people to suffer. She has suffered because the loss of her baby, and she questions God’s trust. For Trujillo, she sees the Dominican people suffer from poor leadership. Since she sees God’s and Trujillo’s two acts as the same, she wonders if God is like Trujillo. She has significantly loss faith of God. Each sister has experiences in their life that forces them to grow up.

Current Reactions

This site www.savedarfur.org, is a very good site to go to for learning about the genocide and to know how to help. I like how organized it is with an article of background information about everything so people can fully understand how much help is needed and so they know what they're donating to. There are also pictures and many other sites about the genocide. I went to this one site that kids in Danbury made. I watched the video they made. I was surprised when I saw it because at first I thought it was going to be all about Darfur, but several times it referred back to the Holocaust. It explained how everyone said after the Holocaust that a genocide like that would never happen again, but as everyone can see those people were wrong. This site is not only an educational one, but lets people decide what they want to do about it also. They have many places where you can donate your money and you can choose how much you want to send. This site really spreads the word around about the genocide because it has all of the information you need on it from what the conflict is all about to what actions have been taken. If awareness spreads, then many people will be interested in saving Darfur.

Darfur- A Deadly Conflict

This is our last assignment for the Human Rights Unit. It is all about the Darfur conflict.

For about four years now, since 2003, Darfur and Sudan have been at war. In Sudan, the conflict has arisen to more than 400,000 murders, the rape and assaults of thousands of women and girls, and more than 2 million people being forced to leave their homes. These innocent civilians have to live in displaced-persons camps in Sudan or in refugee camps in Chad. International aid is the only help men, women, and children in this genocide can rely on for aid. Ethnicity is the problem that has resulted in the killing of thousands of innocent people. The Sudanese armed forces and Sudanese government-backed militia or “Janjaweed” have attacked civilian populations and ethnic groups from the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa. These groups have been targeted because they support the rebels. The rebels want the Sudanese government to address ‘underdevelopment and the political marginalization’ of the Darfur region. The Janjaweed have claimed that this confilct is not genocide, when in fact millions of people are suffering and hundreds of thousands are being killed by other people. Although the Sudanese government says this is not genocide, the Bush Administration states that it is.

“The largest and most complex humanitarian problem on the globe” is the reaction from António Guterres, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. At first, people went with what the Janjaweed said that all of this was ‘ethnic cleansing’. Now everyone realizes this situation is not ethnic cleansing, but genocide. The Sudanese government and the Janjaweed have been blamed for all of the destruction they have caused including the burning and destruction of hundreds of rural villages, the killing of tens of thousands of people, and rape and assault of thousands of women and girls. The Darfur Peace Agreement from May 2006 may help the government of Sudan and one faction of Darfur rebels stop the conflict. The UN Security Council also required that the Sudanese government and the Janjaweed be disarmed. With these actions, the Janjaweed are still free to commit these genocidal crimes with the Sudanese government, just as they had been doing.

There are some who don’t know anything about Darfur, which would be a reason for not helping. The ones who have heard about the disastrous events happening in Darfur usually don’t do anything about it. They may think that one person can’t save the world, but what they don’t know is that they can make a difference. If it’s not that they don’t think they can help, then it’s mostly out of selfishness. Most people wouldn’t want to spend the time or money to help because they have better things to do with their time and money, or they think that since this problem is happening overseas and it doesn’t involve them. People like António Guterresis who states that this is “the largest and most complex humanitarian problem on the globe” is one of the many people who just speak about what they think, but that don’t take any action. Jan Egeland also falls in the category, who states this is "going from real bad to catastrophic,” but hasn’t done anything about his words. The UN is no help when they see what is happening but say that there were no intentions of genocide.

There are many governments and people with the power to halt the genocide, and could have even prevented it. Since, they feel it has nothing to do with them since this is happening all the way over in Africa, they don’t bother. They’d rather not waste their time or money to try and help people who actually need it because they have better things to do, like some average people in the country. We have people left and right describing the horrors in Darfur like Antonio and Jan, but that isn’t making what they’re saying any better by just stating it. Despite these people, there are many who have made an effort. Kids have done their share by holding fundraisers. At our school, T-shirts are being sold to raise money for Darfur. I see many who wear these T-shirts, which is a sign that many are trying to help.

Indifference/Hotel Rwanda Response

For this assignment, we had to write 2 paragraphs, one on how people were indifferent during the Holocaust and the other on the movie, Hotel Rwanda.

With all of the torture and deaths that was happening in the world during World War II, especially the Holocaust, many ignored these tragedies. Some may have been indifferent to the Holocaust because they didn’t care about the Jews. They must have heard what was happening to millions of Jews, but didn’t do anything about it because they just didn’t care about what happened to people they don’t like. Especially in Germany, anti-Semitism was all over the public to praise the hatred of Jews. Signs would be in windows of stores saying that Jewish people couldn’t shop there. Many made cruel jokes about them that weren’t even close to being true. In Life Is Beautiful, directed by Roberto Benigni, Guido had to have “Jewish Shop” written in front of his store. All of these factors were to show everyone’s hatred towards Jews to make them feel poorly for being Jewish and to bring others toward anti-Semitism. Since many were involved with anti-Semitism, they wouldn’t even try to care about what went on in the concentration camps, let alone to save them from their horrors. Indifference of the Holocaust also was in the hands of the Jews. Many Jews heard about the concentration camps from others would were there and knew what was going to happen. No one believed them and was considered to be insane. In Elie Wiesel’s Night, a man was taken away with others not far from town, where they were all shot. This man, Moshe the Beadle, survived this torment and announced to the town what had happened to him. He wanted to warn them that future was going to be horrific. Everybody ignored him and thought he was crazy. Little did they know when they arrived at the concentration camps that everything he said was coming true. At that time they were told what was coming for them, they couldn’t believe that people could be so inhuman. Others in the rest of the world might have also believed the same thing the Jews did, and therefore did nothing about it.

In the film, Hotel Rwanda directed by Terry George, reveals the genocide between the Tutsis and the Hutus in Rwanda, Africa as a story that the audience would think is made up. In reality this movie is a documentary because everything that was put in this movie was very accurate as to what actually happened in 1994. Although the trauma in the movie was what many actually felt during this genocide in Rwanda, the audience watching this movie would be made to believe that it couldn’t happen. The main character, Paul who is a Hutu, tries to save many innocent Tutsis, one including his wife. He uses his hotel as a shelter for them so they won’t be killed by the Hutus. In the middle of the film, Paul once sees a large field of dead bodies covering the ground everywhere he looked. He couldn’t believe what he saw because he never expected so many Tutsis to be killed. The effect this had on Paul is almost the same effect it would have on the audience. Viewers of this film could feel bad for these people who were killed in the movie, but don’t realize that this is a piece of history and what Paul saw was probably very true in many areas of Rwanda at that time. They just think of it as exaggeration because they’ve never seen with their own eyes millions of dead people. This film overall was to show that events like this genocide can happen in the world as it was shown in the movie no matter how traumatizing it may be.