This Christmas I am making a wish. I want you to join me

I woke up feeling very sorry for myself this morning. My litany of complaints was long.

• My son was going on camp today and as much as he was excited, the control freak in me was hugely out of sorts with the idea of having no contact with him for five days.
• It is ridiculously hot
• I have been having the most terrible nightmares and therefore not getting nearly enough sleep
• On a scale of one to ten of cranky I was an 11

Possibly to make things a thousand times worse I had to venture to the shop to buy a Christmas present for my cleaning lady who I want to buy the world for but I can’t package it (or afford it). So I went to the worst place you can go five days before Christmas – the hell that is the shopping centre.

I only got more irritated as I failed to find a gift that would convey my love and appreciation without seeming tacky or flashy.

As I walked through shops full of plastic junk and toys made just for Christmas I started to feel a bit how I imagine Sarah Wilson feels when she walks past this vast consumerism that our shops have become. There was all this plastic shit just going to waste, plastic toys probably made by hugely exploited and disadvantaged kids in a sweat shop for over indulged kids to open up on Christmas morning and discard at 10am on Christmas day.

My cranky factor was at about 13 on a scale of one to ten.

I was missing my son and he had only been gone for two hours. I was hot. I was plagued by my nightmares and I was hot.

And then I looked at all the shit toys again and I thought of the children on Nauru.

This from News Limited about Senator Hanson-Young’s four-day trip to Nauru

The camps, located in the middle of a phosphate mine, house single adult males and families separately in conditions Senator Hanson-Young described as “harsh”.
There was no grass or shade at the facilities, or space for children to play.
“They live 24/7 on gravel, housed in tents, where it is upwards of 40 degrees,” she told Sky News on Thursday.
It improves immunity and http://www.midwayfire.com/opdiv.asp order generic levitra relieves you from tension and anxiety. Improvement in Reliability Preventive maintenance programs adopted by companies also help in 5mg cialis making them more reliable for their business partners. In this type of situation impotence isn’t usually viagra free sample a lasting problem. This will get you into such a state is called Pseudo sclerosis cialis 10 mg midwayfire.com of cavernous tissue which leads to the inability to have children. “They can’t escape that.”
Senator Hanson-Young decried the fact that so close to Christmas, children in the centres had no toys or a school to attend and were confused about why they were being detained.
All detainees she encountered referred to the facilities as prisons, reflecting the “horrendous reality” of the offshore detention policy supported by the federal government and Labor.
“The reality is we are destroying the lives of these children,” she said.

Senator Hanson Young is collecting toys to send to the kids on Nauru (read more here).

I stood in front of the plastic junk and realised how much it would mean to a child that had nothing.

How do you buy toys for kids who have nothing? Pink princess dolls seem crass, toy soldiers are frightening, everything just seems so “in your face”.

I thought of my child and how I was worried about him going on camp on such a hot day and there was no pool. First world problems. I thought about my bad nightmares and the fact that I have them in a king sized bed in an air conditioned bedroom. First world problem.

I thought about the relentless heat on Nauru and the lack of escape from the sweltering temperatures. I thought about the nightmares that these people’s live are. Nightmares from which they can’t escape simply because they were born into a far worse circumstance than me or my son.  These people that have fled the most horrendous life in their country of birth have landed in an unimaginable never-ending nightmare. I am embarrassed to be Australian right now but I want the kids on Nauru to know that not every Australian is a monster.

I filled a basket with toys and went straight to the post office.

 

 

If I can bring someone some light in that concentration camp this Christmas, all my Christmas wishes will have come true.

Although I don’t technically celebrate Christmas I am taking a wish just this Christmas and I’m wishing it with all my might