These girls are beautiful. Vietnamese. Cambodian. Raven hair, olive eyes. From eight years old to mid-teens. Spunky, graceful, delicate. Each one glowing from the inside out. These girls are the most loving, the most adoring girls I’ve ever met. Twenty-five of them, beaming, hugging, grabbing my hands and nestling their sweet faces under my arms. Exhausting every English word they know to ask us questions, giggling and offering to teach me words in Khmer. Their joy is magnetic. These girls are full of life, energy, excitement, hope.
These girls are survivors of brutal sex crimes. Some were rescued from trafficking, where adults sold their tiny bodies daily to the highest bidder. Some were auctioned by their parents to locals who believe sex with a virgin can shield a man from HIV. Others lived in homes where mom, desperate for extra income, allowed ravenous men to visit them and their sisters regularly.
These girls were the victims of rape. And not “rape,” as the director explained to us carefully, but “RAPE.” Violent, malicious, horrifying, all-capitalized rape. I feel nauseous now as the thought sweeps my mind. Several will never have children, their insides have been so brutally maimed.
Adults took the lives, the bodies, the spirits of these innocent girls and exploited them. Today, vendors along the streets sell cheap dvd’s of horrendous child pornography – some displaying these very children. The experience of the girls is disseminated through communities like poison. Cambodians watch the videos in their open shanties, and the whole family sees. The children see. The neighbors see. And the fathers decide to try what they saw. Another child. The cycle is poison.
I can’t express the rage, the heartbreak, I feel at the thought of what men could do to these beautiful girls. It wrenches me, beyond what I’ve ever experienced, to comprehend the human capacity for evil.
And all the while, hope. These girls now have light in their eyes. One once described her life as that of the lotus flower. It grows out of dirty water, a dark and painful past. But it grows through it, out into the light. Its stalk is sturdy, strong; and the flower blossoms grand with color and beauty.
The girls, glittering in silken costumes and elegant up-dos, performed a dance for us that represented this transformation. They began, poised with innocence as the lotus, and were slowly broken down by snakes and snails. Only to be comforted and brought together again by the saving fish, until they blossomed tall once more. At the end of the performance, the director asked a volunteer to tell us what the dance meant. A girl stood with confidence, and the eyes of her and her friends filled with tears as she relayed the metaphor in her native Khmer.
The director then asked me to respond on behalf of our visiting group. I stood before these young girls who’d just displayed their pain and their lives before us, and struggled to express the life-long impact their expression would have on each one of us. As their instructor translated, I told them why we’d come. Why we wanted the rest of the world to know their stories and their hope.
I’ve never felt loved quite so fully and immediately, as we headed to ice cream afterwards. I was hugged again and again by these adoring girls, each looking half a decade younger than their age. I sat at a table with four of them wanting to know my favorite color, if I was married, if they could walk around the supermarket with me. They spoke barely any English, and I spoke even less Khmer! But it’s astounding the depths that a smile can say.
The shelter at Hagar, which these girls now call home, reaches out to the poorest and most destitute women and girls in Cambodia. This children’s shelter is only one facet of their remarkable programs and business initiatives. The girls are put through intensive schooling, two grades in a year, so that they leave with a full education. For as dark as their pasts are, it’s difficult to realize that these girls will end up leagues ahead of their Cambodian peers with the care they now receive. Today, they are the blessed ones.
Hagar offers holistic aftercare. As the girls go through healing and counseling, study and play, they are also enriched in a wonderful Christian community. In a culture that’s left them believing the pain of this life is caused by bad karma of the last, the girls are welcomed into the reality that an everlasting Father desires to love and redeem them from the sins of a horrifically fallen world.
Before leaving with a thousand “God bless you!’s,” the girls I sat with told me their dreams for the future. One wanted to be a singer. The youngest, a hairdresser. The third, a doctor. And the fourth, when it reached her turn, jumped from her seat and ran to the next table. She came back with the warmest grin. “NGO,” she told me.
“That is just what I do!” my heart overflowed. “You will make this world a better place,” I told her, and I know without doubt that she will.
