STORIES THAT INSPIRE A FIGHT FOR FREEDOM
Rejection... one of the most heart wrenching realities of women living in poverty.
Often this rejection leads to a lack of self worth, a lack of hope and the inability to have a foreseeable future for oneself. It’s out of this desperation for a sense of value that we stand in the battle against slavery. We’re realizing, over and over, that women in poverty have faced the deepest kind of rejection. Without someone to care or to show them they’re worth fighting for, slavery creeps itself into their lives.
Let me explain.
Samphors is one of the most remarkable young women we’ve ever met. She smiles like there’s not a care in her world. She’s simultaneously playful and shy. She’s petite and often wears her hair in a long braid. She is a young teenage girl, who balances school, her employment at LandMine Design and caring for her family.
We learned very quickly that the pressure this young girl faces in addition to deep rejection is more than one teenager should ever have to carry. Samphors lost her mother to a disease; a disease Samphors now battles herself. There is an extreme amount of pressure on Samphors to provide for herself and her father as they are very poor ... but there never seems to be enough. Her father deeply battles the realities of poverty. He struggles to know how to love his teenage daughter, leaving Samphors feeling unloved and rejected. Rejection also comes for her by way of her peers and friends at school when they find out she is sick with a disease and treat her poorly.
It takes so much courage for Samphors and others like her to rise above poverty because in addition to the pressure of poverty, she has to face and battle the lies she’s been hearing all her life. Lies that she will have no future because of a life threatening disease. Lies that she’s not enough. Lies that education won’t amount to anything and she should do what her society tells her to do and quit school to work across the border illegally where the potential of being enslaved or abused is much too great.