Under an old foam mattress in one of Monrovia’s slums, Niome David keeps a dark memento — the underwear her nine-year-old daughter was wearing the night she was raped. The mother refuses to wash out the blood stain, keeping it as proof of the brutality her child endured. In a nation inured to violence, the fact that she knew to preserve evidence is also, somehow, a sign of hope.
She struggles under her own weight, lumbering up the stairs, her thighs shaking with each step. Once she reaches the top, it will take several minutes for 50-year-old Mey Mint to catch her breath, the air hissing painfully in and out of her chest. Her rippling flesh is not the result of careless overeating, but rather of a tradition of force-feeding girls in a desert nation where obesity has long been the ideal of beauty.
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/ 30 November 2004
When Emma Agger turned six, her father Simon, a die-hard European soccer fan, decided she was old enough to watch the game in its native habitat. So last summer, they packed their bags in their home not far from Nike’s Beaverton headquarters and headed to Britain.