THE ORGANISATION

Meena was late for school. She had had to get her younger sister ready for school but she’d not wanted to change or eat and so now Meena was late.

As Meena ran towards the bus stop, she tried to stay calm. But if she got late, she would miss the school us, and she had a test that day. Her teacher would beat her if she didn’t take the test and wouldn’t let her take it again.

Meena ran as fast as she could but by the time she’d got there, the bus had left. Meena stood still; her heart pumping. Without her knowing, tears started sliding down her eyes. What was she going to tell her parents, and her teacher would definitely beat her.

She looked around, trying to find way out. She couldn’t find any, and then she began to cry in earnest.

The man stood from a distance, watching the little girl cry. She was quite pleasant-looking, with her thick hair and pointy face. Her body was small, but she knew from experience that they tended to fill out. He walked towards the girl.

‘ ARE you lost little girl?’ the man asked Meena.

Meena looked at the man standing in front of her. She shook her head, she didn’t like the man very much. Then she thought of her teacher.

“ I was late, so I missed my school bus,” she started sobbing again.

“ My teacher will beat me,” she cried, rubbing at her eyes.

The man smiled down at her, and he said, “ Don’t worry, I’ll bring you there. Don’t cry.”

Meena eagerly nodded and followed the man to his car.

The man did not bring her to school. He gagged her and brought her to a warehouse where many other girls huddled together, and huge, loud men stood at guard. Meena was thrust in there. Some time later, they were all told to get out.

No one moved, they were too scared. The men began dragging them out, grabbing whatever they could reach to pull them into the truck. They quickly learned to go themselves.

Meena was huddling inside the truck when she heard a commotion. A girl, she might have been 16, was struggling with one of the men. She was refusing to go with them.

The man grabbed her long hair and pulled, but with a shriek she clawed his face. The man let her go. The girl turned around and began running.

Everyone was quiet as they watched her running. Waiting to see if she would really escape.

Meena held her breath, hoping that she would make it. Then she could get help.

“ You #####!” the injured man screamed. He pulled out a gun.
Meena opened her mouth to scream, but it was too late. The man had fired the shot.

“BAM,” Meena would never forget the way the gun went off like that, the way the girl turned around in shock, the way her she gasped when the bullet hit her, or the way she collapsed to the ground.

That was the first day of Meena’s life as a child prostitute. At ten years old she had men, old men, big men, policemen, buying her hours a few hours or a night or a day. She fought at first, but the beatings she got because of it were too painful.

Meena would cry whenever she was alone, wondering why her parents had not come to get her yet.

Then one day, a burly-looking man came to her. He wanted her for the night.

This was nothing new, and Meena went. Only, the man was part of an organization. An organization that helped young children like herself. Children who’d been taken away and sold.

The girl read the story and nodded. They had gotten everything right.

“ That’s all in there,” she said, giving the paper back to the burly man who had bought her for a night and saved her life.

Rita ( aka Meena) looked at him, quiet worship in her eyes.

That night, the man had brought her to a safe house, where she had seen other young girls also gathered. They had all been ‘saved’ by the organization, but had no homes to go to. Meena felt very sad for them.

Sure that they would help her, Meena told the man all about what had happened, and than again to the police. They had raided the place but no one was there. They had moved.

The man, Ravi, he’d said, called her parents. Rita remembered waiting there, wanting to talk to her mother again after so long. She’d snatched the phone from his hands.

“ Mama?” she’d whispered, clutching the phone hard.

She heard a muffled sob, then the line was cut off. Her heart had dropped. In that minute, she’d wished that she’d never been saved.

Frantically she asked to re-dial the number, wanting to explain what had happened, but no one picked up.

Rita was in a city she had never actually seen before, except for the brothels. And she had nowhere else to go. No home, no family, no money, nothing with which to survive. It seemed like the only way she knew to survive was by selling herself.

Rita would have died. She had already made all the plans, making sure that no one would be there when she drank a bottle of rat poison she had found in the bathroom there.
But the organization again saved her life. For she quickly learned that the very girls she had pitied were in similar situation. But the organization gave them a home, found them work and helped them get used to their lives there; they gave them back a reason to really live too.

“ What’s that?” Rita asked. Where she came from, a woman’s honor was everything; and once she had lost her virtue her whole family’s honor had been tarnished. There was no more point to her life.

There were so many other girls there like them. Thousands of them who had been taken from their families. They knew what it was like. They knew that it wasn’t their fault such a thing had happened to them and not only were they helping others find that out, now they too had a chance to live an entirely new life.

The organization had given them skills, and a place to live while they worked and saved up money so they could get their own homes and live their lives independently.

It was a fairy tale come to live. Even when she had lived with her family she would never have had such a chance, yet here were people she’d never even met were helping her.

And now she had a chance to help others like herself too. She didn’t need to die, or hang her head down in shame; she could walk with her head held high, proud of what she was doing, like any other woman.

Rita and many others, victims of forced prostitution, were lucky. Most times prostitutes never got to get out, unless they were killed in a fight or some disease that slowly killed them. But that was a relief, from the shame and the pain that plagued them everyday.

Organizations like the ones that had helped Rita saves lives. But with enough resources, they can do even more; by giving these women counseling, job skills and a place to live, they help build new lives, new identities. But they too need help; help we can give with our time, our money, our support.

We can directly be responsible for helping people totally turn their lives around.