My Eyes Have Been Opened

Why I thank God every day that I was born in America!

The other night, my husband and I decided to watch a movie and the one that won out the vote was "Blood Diamond". If you don't know of this movie, it stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Connoly, and Djimon Hansou (spelling?) they are all in Africa in the late nineties. The movie is about African conflict diamonds and what the people of the African nation have to go through so that diamonds can be provided basically for everyone but themselves. It mainly tells of the story of a man, Djimon Hansou (the d is silent) who is ripped apart from his family and forced to work in the diamond mines of Africa. While working, he finds a beautiful pink diamond the size of a birds egg and tries to hide if for himself so that he can get his family back and not ever have to worry about being plagued by the civil wars of his country. Well, the movie goes on to show his struggle and along the way meets Leo's character, a diamond smuggler, who also wants the diamond mainly for himself. I won't go into too much more detail about the story cause my purpose for this blog if for you to go out and watch it, but I will comment on the horrors that I saw. Now, I'm sure that for this movie they upped the gruesome parts and exaggerated a few things, but I'm pretty sure that for the most part it was dead on. This movie showed what awful horrible tortures that most of the African people must go through in order to meet the world's diamond need and it was heart-wrenching! Families ripped apart, children with missing arms and legs, mother being shot and killed right in front of their children and the worst part was the ones who were doing the killing, young little boys! These boys were taken from their families and brain washed with drugs and lies into believing that they families and countrymen were the enemies and that they should shoot and kill whoever is not in their "army". I know the magic of Hollywood can be disillusioning, but I am pretty sure that there was very little exaggeration for the horrible things that were depicted in this movie. After viewing what other people, mainly children, have to go through in order to provide me with a pretty piece of jewelry, I no longer wish to have diamonds. Now, I'm not saying I'm going to get rid of my wedding rings, but no longer will I ask or purchase diamonds for myself or anyone else. I urge everyone who reads my blog to go out and rent this movie and see what others are put through in order to provide us with something that is definitely not a necessity. This will be a difficult movie to watch, but in the end you will appreciate being made aware of the horrors that others have to go through and hopefully if enough of us pray and refuse to buy conflict diamonds then perhaps something will change. And just to add a little actual truth to this post, at the end of the movie they stated that there were still over 200,000 children soldiers!!! Little babies used to kill!