I’m torn up. What happens to girls here tears me up and I can’t put it away. I founded this home because I know what it is like, but sometimes it hits me in the face and I’m just torn up. Over the years we have had two girls who re-connected with their families. In each case the family found a way to basically sell the girls. In one case the girl had been sold as a child already. Getting her back meant they could sell her again.
Yesterday we had a visit from another of the girls who had pushed every possible limit and who we finally simply could not safely manage. That was four years ago. For privacy I won’t say much but she is trapped now. The concept of the “arranged marriage” often involves an unwritten contract between the families, and usually money is part of the arrangement. Usually it is dowry and the girl’s family pays. In this case the family could make a case for an educated girl who speaks English and the groom’s family had to pay. The life she has now is everything she was running away from…. It’s complicated, so complicated. She hugged us and cried and told her sisters here never to make the same mistake she did. When she left today I tucked my business card in her blouse, as I have done each time she left as we tried to find solutions for her behavior.
The promise I made to the girls when they came is that they would forever be a part of this family, even if I could not manage them here. Shishur Sevay is the “mother house,” the place you return to when things are bad. She came home to her mother house. She knows she can stay but she had to leave. The biggest part of the battle is within her. None of this is about danger. It’s about who she wants to be, what she wants for her future, and whether she has the strength and courage to wage what would be a family and social upheaval. Or does she say, “This is my lot,” and give up on her dreams. That’s the norm……
There really isn’t an in-between.
When we first started Shishur Sevay, and for a long time afterwards, there was huge local resistance to our home. Many in the community believed I’d come here to make money, that I was raising and educating these girls to be sold for a high price abroad. But now I understand better why they might think that.
Written well past midnight, I’m torn up.
mh
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