I think often of all the people who put their life on hold when ours was turned upside down. All the people who loved us and wept with us. People who sat with us in grief for weeks and months and in some cases, even years. People who helped soften the painful blow that hit over and over and over again. So many who wished they could rewrite our story and return our little boy to our broken little home.
I’m humbled by it really. In many ways, it doesn’t seem fair. The fact that we had so many loved ones. Such an outpouring of support. What did we ever do to deserve such a vast support system? Such a huge, compassionate community?
At the end of a long, dirt road in a remote area of India is a community of another kind. Ashwani’s village is a place that some girls at Mason’s Place used to call home.
The team from Mason’s Place visits various villages every week. They share a time with the kids, telling them about Jesus, communicating the story of hope and redemption. They build relationships here, offering love and another alternative than the curse of poverty.
So often, the poor are left with few options. The despair they attempt to survive every day leaves them vulnerable. This is where Mason’s Place starts. By building relationships with these people. Single parents who lack the means to care for their child. Desperate, and sometimes apathetic guardians of orphans hanging on by a thread, ready to slip away into a statistic. Our director, Joseph, and the team from Mason’s Place present them with another possibility. Their girls can come to Mason’s Place where they will be cared for, educated and loved. He reasons with them about how, in the long run, this education will help them far more than the few dollars to be earned from selling them in desperation.
Ashwani’s small village is one of the hardest to visit. It is known as a sex trafficking village. It’s filthy and dark and the spiritual oppression is tangible. The destitution and misery etched onto the faces peering out of doorways speak to horrors unimaginable. The girls in this village are birthed on a dark path that is headed straight for a life of sex trafficking. This path has few exits.
Girls here are sold by the hour in nasty run-down shacks to men who venture down the dirt road. Their lives are sold to traffickers who drag them off to vile brothels in overwhelmed cities. They become nameless, faceless victims to fall somewhere into those statistics, that number with all the commas and zeroes that makes child trafficking just too impossible to comprehend.
Ashwani is 16. Probably. It’s hard to know for sure. Many of the poor don’t know their birthdays. If your mom plans to sell you to a pimp someday, she certainly isn’t keeping track of your birthday and lighting the candles every year for your cake.
Ashwani begged to come to Mason’s Place. Anytime our team would pull up outside the village, she would be waiting. Asking for someone to please talk to her mom, please convince her to release Ashwani from this life, please permit her to live at Mason’s Place.
Her mom always refused.
Why?
Well, that’s not an easy question to answer. Mason’s Place offers security and education. Food and shelter. Hope and a future. It is an escape from what is virtually inevitable in this depraved village.
Joseph would beg her mom. Allowing Ashwani to go to Mason’s Place costs her nothing yet offers her so much.
Her mom not only refused, she became hostile. She called other men in to threaten Joseph to leave her alone. Like the other girls in the village, Ashwani would one day be sold. That’s just the way it is in these poverty stricken places. Children here are not born with a spark of hope and possibility. They are born into a cursed and desperate place.
Poverty is a concept lost on so many of us. We can’t comprehend an environment with such little regard for humans, such distaste for girls that their life can be sold for less than our weekly Starbucks tab.
Over 1,000,000 children are trafficked for sex. That’s a lot of zeroes. A lot of torture and abuse. A lot of hopelessness. A lot of kids without someone protecting them, fighting for them. It’s so much evil and desperation. To truly attempt to comprehend the magnitude of this is simply too overwhelming for the senses.
It’s easier to look away. To say “How sad,” maybe offer a prayer and beg God to stop it, and then try not to think about it. It’s truly unbearable. Especially when the daily reality of it feels so far away from us. What can we even do? It feels so helpless.
When the lockdowns started in India almost 2 years ago now, Joseph and the team worked tirelessly to visit these villages. Desperate situations became even more dire in the face of a pandemic. They delivered food, helped people find work, did all they could to show the love of Jesus to a people without hope.
He visited Ashwani’s village often. He continued to invite Ashwani’s mom to see her daughter’s potential. To open her mind to entertain the idea of hope.
He never gave up. Joseph is faithful like that. He relentlessly pursues each child he can. He would rescue every single girl from these horrors if he could.
Recently, Joseph visited Ashwani’s village and she wasn’t there to greet his car. She wasn’t walking the dirty streets, waiting for his arrival, begging yet again to be allowed at Mason’s Place.
Joseph was informed that Ashwani had been sold. The pimp had arranged for her to be taken to Mumbai.
I’ve been told the brothels of Mumbai are one of the worst places for trafficking. (Although my mind fails to imagine what would prevent any such place from being the worst…)
Joseph shared this news through his sobs. He feels as though he failed her. The leadership team of Hope Partners feels as though they failed her.
How could we not rescue this one girl? How could we have convinced her mom to say yes to hope and opportunity, not sacrifice her own child on the altar of depravity? Her own child! I can’t even comprehend it.
Truthfully, I don’t want to comprehend it. I want to bury my head and plug my ears and not imagine the horrors that Ashwani is facing at this very moment. An innocent 16-year-old girl who begged for another life. Who heard the stories of Jesus shared on those Friday afternoons in that small meeting area in the middle of a filthy village. Who desperately reached for another option, only to have the door slammed in her face.
The injustice of it all makes me so angry.
The truth is, the statistics are easier to live with when one of them doesn’t have a name. And a face. And a story.
When Mason died, our friends and family stopped living their lives so they could help us keep living ours. Our needs and wants were met for months by people who cared so deeply. I still hear about how people prayed. How lives were transformed, hearts turned over to Christ. Focus and perspective clarified all because God didn’t waste our tragedy. One little boy’s life inspired so much.
I would have done anything to get my son back. I would have moved the heavens and the earth if I could have. I would have paid any amount of money, I would have traded spots with him, just to see him take his next breath. Just to see his pulse start again on that lifeless monitor.
What kind of mom doesn’t fight for her kid? What kind of mom allows her child be dragged away down a dark tunnel of torment and horror? And what kind of life does this girl have that no one stands up for her?
The parallel of Mason’s life to Ashwani’s is so desperately unfair. An army of people wanted Mason to live. An absence of people allowed Ashwani to be sucked into a life of torture and abuse.
God’s redemptive story with Mason is still being written. He isn’t finished using the pain of losing my 6-year-old boy. God wastes nothing. And I believe that his redemptive story is still being written for Ashwani too. That there is still an army of people who will fight for her.
Ashwani’s story isn’t finished yet. She has worked her way on to prayer lists of people around the world. Her face has become an image to remind us that evil and wickedness exist and while the dark alleys of India seem far removed from our safe world, our prayers can do battle that will move Heaven’s armies to fight for this innocent girl and the countless more just like her.
Will you join me in fighting for Ashwani? Will you write her name where you can see it daily and plead with God for her rescue?
I know all those statistics are overwhelming. But this one has a name. There is always hope when God is writing the story. Please fight for Ashwani with me.
If you would like to learn more about Hope Partners and how we fight for children not to become statistics, please click here.
