FertilehealthyAiming for success, not perfection…

I love Louise Hay and her book, You Can Heal Your Life, has been a lifeline for me… I can’t wait to see the movie!

This is Alison.

On the evening of  December 17, 1994, Alison was a happy, carefree, 27-year old stockbroker, living in the friendly coastal city of Port Elizabeth, South Africa.  She spent the day with close friends, first at the beach and then at her apartment.

Alison gave her friend a ride home and returned around 1 am on Sunday morning.  The streets were quiet and she had no inkling of danger when she parked her car.

The next moment a man jerked open her car door, held a knife to her throat and ordered her to move over to the passenger side.  The events that followed changed her life forever and shocked the nation.

The man picked up a friend and they drove Alison to a remote location where they raped her.  Then they decided to kill her.

First she was strangled, which caused her to lose consciousness.  She came to later outside the car, where one of the men was cutting her throat.  She couldn’t believe that she was still alive, but pretended to be dead so that they would leave.  They decided that “nobody could survive that“, threw some of her clothes out the car and drove off.

At that point, 90% of her wanted to die.  Her situation looked hopeless.  When she felt around her neck, her hand disappeared into her body.  She was breathing through her severed windpipe and was bleeding profusely.  She was a 100 yards from the road, and even if she could make it to the road, there was no traffic at that time of the morning.  She wrote the names of her attackers and a message to her mother in the sand.

But 10% of her felt that her life was not over yet.  She decided that she had to try.  For her own sake, for her mother’s sake and because those two men did not deserve to decide when her life should be over.

She lifted herself to her hands and knees and made another horrifying discovery.  Her intestines were hanging outside her body.  She had been disemboweled.

She tried to stuff them back, but there was just so much.  She felt around her and found her denim skirt.  She bundled her intestines inside the skirt and pressed the gruesome “parcel” to her stomach.  Then she began to crawl towards the road.  After a while she realized that the crawling was too slow and exhausting.  She was going to have to try and get to her feet and walk.  When she did, her head fell back between her shoulder blades.  The muscles had been cut.

With one hand holding her intestines together and the other holding her head up, she stumbled toward the road.  She fell countless times, but each time she got up again.  Eventually she made it to the road and lay down on the dividing line, hoping that someone would drive past.

For Tiaan, a young man from Johannesburg, this was his last night of his vacation in Port Elizabeth.  At 2:30 am he and his friends were returning from a night club to their camping spot outside the city.  They found Alison and called an ambulance.

Tiaan stayed with Alison, covering her with his shirt, talking to her, keeping her conscious and reassuring her for 90 minutes until the ambulance came (Africa!).  Because she couldn’t speak, they devised a system where she squeezed his hand once for yes and twice for no.  In this way, he managed to gain information about what had happened to help the police.

When the ambulance arrived, Alison would not let go of Tiaan’s hand and he did not want to leave her either, so he accompanied her to the hospital, where he promised that he would wait until she came out of surgery.

The medical personnel could not believe that someone could have survived with her injuries.  Yet, before receiving anesthesia, she was able to write her name and her mother’s contact details.   She was in surgery for hours.  Her intestines had been covered with sand, twigs, leaves and all kind of dirt and had to be washed more than once to get them clean.  There were many nicks in them that had to be repaired.  Her neck muscles and windpipe had to be reattached.  Despite slashing her throat sixteen times, her attackers had missed the carotid arteries, which is why she hadn’t bled to death instantly.  Despite one or two small nicks to her uterus, she would still be able to have children.

The police had a fair idea of who was responsible for this attack and Alison confirmed their suspicions when she came out of surgery.  They were arrested that same Sunday.  The shocking news was that they had been on bail for rape.  When they learned that their latest victim had not died, they both made full confessions.

Frans du Toit and Theuns Kruger claimed that they had been possessed by demons, but that claim was refuted by experts, who said that their testimonies and statements were very detailed and showed premeditation.   Not surprisingly they were found guilty.  In sentencing, the judge said that he would be shirking his duties if he did not remove them from society forever.  Du Toit, clearly the leader, received 3 consecutive life sentences and Kruger one life sentence and 25 years.  Both will never be eligible for parole.

I lived in that region at the time of these events, so I saw the P.E. newspapers every day and followed the story closely.  We were horrified, spell-bound and cheered when the judgment came down.  Yet, I think deep down we felt that surely the young woman, who had by then been identified as “Alison” and whose picture appeared in the paper for the first time on the day following the judgment, could never recover emotionally from something like this.

Alison did indeed go through a deep depression.  In her book, I Have Life, she quotes from her diary:

I really want to cry.  I want to cry for the Ali that is lost for ever.  I want to cry for the emotional heartache and torment that I have gone through and that I will go through for the rest of my life.  I want to cry for my body.  I want to cry for the carefree life that I had that I did not appreciate enough when it was there.  I did appreciate it, but I never thought it was not always going to be that way.  I always believed that tomorrow is another day, never once stopping to contemplate that this day could be my last.

Because she never shied away from telling her story, she was interviewed quite a lot and eventually she started getting invited to speak at events.  In time her depression lifted.  She knew that she hadn’t crawled and stumbled 100 yards holding on to her head and her intestines to live half a life.

Today she is one of South Africa’s best-loved motivational speakers.

About a year after the incident, she met and fell in love with her soul mate.  They married in early 1997 and have two children.

Tiaan, the young man who held her hand and kept her going while they were waiting for the ambulance, was so moved by the events of that night that he decided to go to medical school.  It was Dr. Tiaan, still a close family friend, who performed the C-section that produced Alison’s second son.

Both Tiaan and Alison received many citations and awards for bravery and courage.  Alison has had trauma centers named after her.

Last week I wrote about staying locked in fear, or choosing life, and all that that entails.  Then I thought of Alison and the choice became clear.

I choose Life.

I know I’m a terrible blogger these days, but I did warn you that I needed some time to reflect…

And boy, am I reflecting!

Of course there are many truths being uncovered and recognized and today I would like to share one aspect with you.  This  is not the full picture and the picture is by no means static…  It’s just an insight that I think may resonate with some of you.

For a long time I have been afraid to live.

Of course I’m not happy with the half-life I have, but to my sub-conscious mind it’s infinitely safer than than the world out there.   Out there I may fail, be rejected, make a mistake, fall on my face, hurt someone or be hurt.

Here, in my fat body, I am in control.  Here I feel safe.  Insulated.  Protected.  Anchored.

Sure, it’s uncomfortable, unsightly and unhealthy, but the deep down the benefits of being fat totally outweigh (pun intended) the benefits of being “normal” and healthy.

Healthy Hanlie would have to look life in the eye and live.  She would have to participate and take risks.  She would have to make decisions, take responsibility and venture forth.  She would have to meet expectations – her own and those of others.

Fat Hanlie can just sit here and never amount to anything.  She can nurture her wounds and wallow.  She can remain helpless and frozen in fear.  She can distract herself endlessly with books (even ones about healthy living), the internet, shopping, daydreaming and computer games so that she never has to think or feel anything.

Or, she can start to look for the courage to change.  To let go.  To heal.

She can recognize that the courage is inside her… that she doesn’t need a knight, a guru or a fairy godmother.  The courage is there.  I has always been there.  It just needs to be nurtured and allowed to grow.

This could be interesting.  In fact, this WILL be interesting.

Halloween…  Not something we ever paid any attention to in South Africa, but these days we’re definitely part of a the global village and to our great surprise we were invited to a Halloween party on Saturday night.

We rented costumes… and turned out to be one of only three couples who bothered to dress up. There was a separate party for the teens and we thought that it was good that they at least dressed up… until we realized that apparently teen girls these days always dress like prostitutes!  Honestly, I was shocked.  The dresses were tight and very short, with plunging necklines.  And these girls were only 15!  I know I sound old-fashioned, but this is just wrong… and I’m quite relieved that I don’t have a daughter. Some of the men were making very inappropriate comments.

One of the moms, an artist type, seemed to be as high as a kite.  She made quite a spectacle of herself.  At one stage she was talking about her anorexia.  Then she turned to me and said, “I don’t know how you live with your fat, because I’m only 8kg overweight now and it’s affecting my quality of life.  I don’t know how you do it!  Life must be unbearable for you.” I just laughed, because I wouldn’t want to be like her! (She also made a scene about another lady’s enhanced breasts…)

We left when they started playing drinking games… The whole party was just not our scene!

Call me boring, but next Halloween we’ll just rent a movie and stay home…