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For her sake

 

Lipstick stained walls that lead to empty “cabins,” where women lead their guests — drink in hand — to temporarily fulfill that awful black hole of a void, continuously emptying.

Why dream, right? We’re stuck here, and the rut is deep. We have no education, no way out. You white Americans have such a good life, and we don’t. I’ve always wanted to go to America. What’s it like?

Casual conversations about their lives, ya know? Her husband only beat her and his other wife for a few years before dying of alcoholism. Her solution to it was selling herself. Some light at the end of the tunnel…

And for another, this supports her 18 month old son, so it’s worth never seeing him because of the crazy long hours, right? She can’t dream for herself, but she sure can for him.

Some of them have left before — in fact, it’s not hard to escape — but they find themselves back in the same place, in the same cycle, because there just wasn’t anywhere for them to go once they left.

Until a couple days ago, I never realized dreaming was a privilege. As we sat and picked their brains, the only thing they’re not used to exposing, I realized a lot about the voids in our human hearts. We long for connection. We all desire to find our place.

And the incapability to dream, the unfathomable concept of what a dream is… That’s hard to fathom for us. It’s a privilege.

As I stepped into this cabin restaurant and heard the stories of women no older than me, I was ripped apart. With a “boss” sitting just behind the counter listening to all of our conversations, we can only hope for the impact to have been deep.

I’m not mad at the men that buy them, I’m not mad at the bosses behind bosses in charge of the madness, and I’m not mad at the women for not escaping when we gave them the opportunity at a life outside of the one they’ve been living. We do not wrestle against flesh and blood.

I’m mad at the lies that have been spoken into and over these women and men and children for their entire lives and the sick cycle of trafficking it feeds into. I’m mad that the perception of their worth is nonexistent and that they don’t even speak in future tense because there just doesn’t seem to be a reason to.

But it is for this reason — their inability to dream — that God has given me the dreams He has. He has given me dream after dream to see an end to this. And it is for her sake that I will not keep silent.

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