The Girls From Malawa
© Marie HaldWhile wars are going on all over the world, and countries fight each other with soldiers and weapons, a large group of especially young people are fighting a completely different war. A war against themselves.
In a world filled with perfectly photoshopped super models, the normality of plastic surgery and a vice of controlling your own destiny, it is hard to find your way as a teenager.
The boundaries are even harder to find, when you are possessed with the voice of “Ana”, as many anorexia patients call the illness.
Listening to the nurses and therapist seams wrong when the voice inside your head tells you you look fat, and that thinner is always better.
Eating disorders are not only about being thin, as many may think. Control is a key word. And in a teenager’s sometimes stressful life, what is easier to control than the intake of food?
Eating disorders are the third most common disease amongst teenagers, and worldwide one out of five suffer from eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia which eventually can lead to heart failure and malfunction of the internal organs, causing death.
In the small village Malawa in the south of Poland, a little yellow house is settled every year with struggling young boys and girls, getting treatment and trying to get well enough to at one point go back to a normal life.
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