The following are excerpts from Ann Voskamp's excellent blog http://www.aholyexperience.com/. If you have been here before, you may know that I will only ever ask you for prayer and not money. There is however, an organization which works to set girls like the one talked about below free from sexual slavery. Links below, or from Ann's blog, will connect you to this wonderful organization which I have just found out about today. You can help support them by purchasing their products which are produced by the very girls they save.
“I’d like to plant one apple tree somewhere.”
Because there was this tree in India and there was Kundulla and when you get wrinkles, you get thinking about roots and limbs and how we are all connected.
Kundulla and I are both the oldest, daughters of farmers.
While I was watching the trees growing in the orchard here, Kundulla was getting beaten and gang-raped under a tree in India. She was 13.
Her father had married his little girl off to an older man and now her mother-in-law had supposedly sent her to the field to work.
Only she’d actually sold Kundulla’s hardly-woman body to a bunch of young men for the afternoon. There are things you want to forget. A leaf given to the wind.
What do you do when you are 13 years old and the mother of the older man your father married you off to – sells your skin to be used and taken and discarded? Who in your family do you trust when you are robbed of dignity and left for dead?
Shamed and betrayed, Kundulla didn't run back to her father or mother, or her husband’s family, but to an uncle. He took her in and cared for her.
And then said, since she had brought shame on the family, it’d be be best for him to find her a job and a new life in Calcutta. So her own uncle, whom she trusted, sold 13-year-old Kundulla into a brothel to begin her new life….
There are days that the only thing a family tree seems good for is firewood.
For years, Kundulla stood alone and “in the line” of Sonagacchi, Calcutta’s largest red light district, men buying the use of her thin body for their own momentary lusts.
For years, the trees out in the orchard reached a bit to the sky.
Kundalla, unfortunately, is not an isolated case. There are many thousands of girls like her sold by their own parents to become toys for men to play with and then toss aside. Please join my 3:15 PM prayer initiative so that the Lord can bring child sexual abuse to an end.
“I’d like to plant one apple tree somewhere.”
Because there was this tree in India and there was Kundulla and when you get wrinkles, you get thinking about roots and limbs and how we are all connected.
Kundulla and I are both the oldest, daughters of farmers.
While I was watching the trees growing in the orchard here, Kundulla was getting beaten and gang-raped under a tree in India. She was 13.
Her father had married his little girl off to an older man and now her mother-in-law had supposedly sent her to the field to work.
Only she’d actually sold Kundulla’s hardly-woman body to a bunch of young men for the afternoon. There are things you want to forget. A leaf given to the wind.
What do you do when you are 13 years old and the mother of the older man your father married you off to – sells your skin to be used and taken and discarded? Who in your family do you trust when you are robbed of dignity and left for dead?
Shamed and betrayed, Kundulla didn't run back to her father or mother, or her husband’s family, but to an uncle. He took her in and cared for her.
And then said, since she had brought shame on the family, it’d be be best for him to find her a job and a new life in Calcutta. So her own uncle, whom she trusted, sold 13-year-old Kundulla into a brothel to begin her new life….
There are days that the only thing a family tree seems good for is firewood.
For years, Kundulla stood alone and “in the line” of Sonagacchi, Calcutta’s largest red light district, men buying the use of her thin body for their own momentary lusts.
For years, the trees out in the orchard reached a bit to the sky.
One hot-baked summer, a business designing and sewing
jute bags, Freeset, reached out to Kundulla, and trafficked women like her, and
offered her a way out, a way to support herself, a
way to Christ.
In India, Kundulla makes herself the G.I.F.T.. When her parents die, she inherits a small plot of land — and she asks Freeset if she can give the land as a G.I.F.T. to them, to start another place for discarded and trafficked women to join Freeset, to have an opportunity to be grafted into an eternal family tree, rooted in the One who hung on a Tree to hold them close forever.
If you really are part of the family tree of God – you have to go out on a limb. You have to be the Giving Tree.
If you really are part of the family tree of God – you have to go out on a limb. You have to be the Giving Tree.
Kundalla, unfortunately, is not an isolated case. There are many thousands of girls like her sold by their own parents to become toys for men to play with and then toss aside. Please join my 3:15 PM prayer initiative so that the Lord can bring child sexual abuse to an end.
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