Week 2 Prompt #2

In the chapter The Jewels (pgs 87-93), Iraq bombs Abadan, Iran. Marjane's mom is worried because one of her best friends lives there. When they get home her mom tries to call her friend, but no one is answering the phone, this makes Marjane's mom even more worrisome. A few days later her mom’s friend, Mali, shows up at their door in the middle of the night with her husband and two boys. After a while Marjane starts to get annoyed with the boys because they are very bratty and a bit stuck up, they are used to getting everything they want and living in a huge house. Marjane's father also isn't very fond of Mali's husband because he is extremely materialistic. Even though the boys were pretty hard to deal with, Marjane felt that Mali's mother was the worst of the family to deal with because she complains often and is judgmental. In the end Mali has to sell the only thing she had left, her jewelry, so that her family could start over again. This part of the story I can relate to the best out of the chapters we read this week because at times in my early childhood my parents had friends stay with us or we’d stay with them. Though it was normally just the mom and her children, I remember not enjoying theirs or ours stay. Because I didn’t have siblings around my age or was never put around children I didn’t get along with, I always had problems with the children I had to deal with when we were in these situations. Sometimes our parents could also get into fights with each other or with the spouse, it wasn’t always the best situation for any of us. It was always a relief when we'd find a new home or the family staying with us would find a new place to go.

As far as why Marjane decided to add this story into the book, I think it really impacts the story because it shows the violence and how frightening the state of the country was in at the time, and she wanted to share that with the reader. The big cities are getting bombed, people that Marjane's family may know may be hurt or dead, and they are extremely worried. It shows how families who survived these bombings had to relocate and stay with friends till they could afford to find a new home (I’m sure there were many who had no food, nowhere to go, and had to stay on the streets). Sometimes families like Mali's lost everything they had worked so hard for; they lost their huge home, the boys lost all their toys, and their father lost all the money he had earned. She shows the difficulties many of her people had to endure because of the government and war. At the end of the chapter Mali’s mother tells them how women in Abadan had started prostituting to make money. She looks at them in disgust, but I think it shows that in a country where a women’s body is very precious to them they wouldn’t start doing something like that for no reason, these women had to go that far to survive.

I think Marjane and my reactions towards the situation were quiet similar, we both were annoyed by the situation, but dealt with it because we knew there wasn't anything we could really do about it. Our parents had to help out our family and family friends when they needed us most.