Imagine you are a 9 year old girl living with your paternal
grandparents, your big sister, your dad, and your mom who is several months
pregnant with your little brother. Life
is good. You are happy. One day your dad gets a bad headache and goes
to lay down. The headache never goes
away, but your family has no money to take him to the doctor. Less than 2 weeks later, he dies. As is customary, you leave your paternal
grandparent’s home to move in with your mom’s parents. This other grandfather is not loving and
kind; he is strict and mean, sometimes beating you over trivial things. You try your best to stay out of his way; that’s
easier since you’re in school. Eventually
you finish 6th grade though and you know no one has the money for
you to keep studying. Then a miracle
happens—a lady your mom knows offers to pay for you to finish school! It’s a FULL scholarship—she’ll even give you
money so you don’t have to skip lunch! You
are so happy you can’t contain your huge smile!
But it doesn’t take long for it to all fall apart. Grandpa says no. “There’s no point in educating a girl,” he
says. “Your only job in life is to marry,
have children, and take care of your family.
In the meantime, you can keep my cornfields clean.” You are angry. It’s so unfair! You plead with your mom to change his mind,
but she’s just as stuck as you are. Without
grandpa’s help and home, you would have nowhere to go. You cannot defy him, so you are forced to
turn the scholarship down. Life goes on.
Then it gets worse.
You leave to work the coffee plantations with your mom, earning
next to nothing. One day you and mom hop
out of the bed of the pick-up you were riding in, thinking it was safe to do so,
that the truck was in park. It was not,
and it rolls backwards and over your mom.
Fortunately, mom escapes with only some bruises and nightmares. Everything goes back to normal, except that
you now realize how close you came to losing your mother too. What would become of you if that
happened? You feel trapped. Held back by your grandfather. Scared of losing your only remaining parent. You can see the writing on the wall. You will end up chained to a life of poverty
and servitude that you didn’t choose because that’s just what happens to girls where
you live. The anxiety wells up inside
you; you have no release. But anxiety
will always find a way out, and it gets you during the night when you least
expect it. You grind your teeth SO hard
while you sleep that you wake up swollen and with a pounding headache. You are
unaware that you do this during the night, so you don’t understand why you feel
so bad every morning. Maybe you’ll die from
this headache just like your father did.
How is it that your life just continues to get worse? You are in prison, and there is no. way. out.
I wish this was just a poorly written piece of sad fiction,
but the fact of the matter is that this is Silvia’s life. I recently took her to a neurologist
thinking she had something horrible; her head was very visibly misshapen. Bite hard while your hand is on your temple. Feel that muscle move? Silvia has been biting
and grinding her teeth so hard in the night that her muscle had grown just like
your biceps would if you worked out every day.
Obviously we are relieved that the situation wasn’t life-threatening, but
the only way I can see to fix this—really fix it—is to offer this family some
hope by getting them out from underneath grandpa’s rule and into their own
place. If that happened, I could put Silvia
in the scholarship program so she’d have some chance at a future. Mom could work and NOT have to turn over
every cent to her father. They could begin
to dig themselves out of this depressing hole they’ve been forced to live in.
If you’d like to help me bless this family with a simple,
one-room home that has actual beds and a vented stove, visit www.cten.org/lynnannmurphy and click on the donate button. This
type of home only takes a couple of weeks to build, and I’d love to be able to
get it done before school starts up again in January. Wanna help me?
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