While many people in the West celebrate and speak out about women’s rights on this International Women’s Day, I find myself thinking about the woman in a song called Pearls by Sade.

As writer Joseph Lamour says on Upworthy.com about the song:

The main character in Sade’s story is picking “pearls” off the side of the road. These aren’t actual pearls but grains of rice that have fallen off relief trucks passing by her. To her, they are as precious as pearls because in her life, they are just as rare. Mothers in Somalia’s food situation are forced to live a life where they can’t just pop over to the supermarket to get some food.

Here are the lyrics to the song, followed by a YouTube video of it:

There is a woman in Somalia
Scraping for pearls on the roadside
There’s a force stronger than nature
Keeps her will alive

This is how she’s dying
She’s dying to survive
Don’t know what she’s made of
I would like to be that brave

She cries to the heaven above
There is a stone in my heart
She lives a life she didn’t choose
And it hurts like brand-new shoes

Hurts like brand-new shoes

There is a woman in Somalia
The sun gives her no mercy
The same sky we lay under
Burns her to the bone

Long as afternoon shadows
It’s gonna take her to get home
Each grain carefully wrapped up
Pearls for her little girl

Hallelujah
Hallelujah

She cries to the heaven above
There is a stone in my heart
She lives in a world she didn’t choose
And it hurts like brand-new shoes
Hurts like brand-new shoes

Top photo credit: United Nations Photo via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND