22
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
I was outside pushing S and little S on the swings last week when I looked up and saw a young woman staring at me from outside our front gate. Our eyes met and I walked up the front path to meet her.
We exchanged Namaste's.
She was shy but she looked at me straight in the eyes as she spoke.
“What do you do here?” she asked.
“I run this home for children.”
“What kind of children do you keep?”
“I only accept children without any family,” I told her.
I noticed she was drenched in sweat and she kept looking up the road worriedly.
“I’m working there on that house on the corner that they’re building. We only have a short break.”
That explained the sweat and the tired look on her face. She had been carrying loads of bricks and cement all day.
“Do you have children?” I asked.
“Yes, I do. I have a daughter and three sons. My daughter is beautiful and bright, I was working there up the road and someone said you were keeping children here and I wanted to ask about keeping my daughter.”
We have women walk into our compound every day but I noticed something different about her, something in her eyes that resonated with me. I wanted to hear more.
“Come sit down and have a glass of water at least,” I say.
She looked again up the road worriedly but then nodded and walked inside.
I got us both a glass of water and we sat down on the front porch and Ubji, our beautiful cook, brought us each a bowl of noodle soup. The soup was delicious and just off the stove, as it was to be the kids after school snack for later in the day. The young woman looked at the soup and accepted it graciously.
“You have four children?” I ask again restarting our conversation.
“Yes.”
“And your husband?”
“My first husband was a Maoist. He was killed in the uprising. Then my parents gave me to another older man. The month after our marriage he got really sick and he went blind. It’s been about eight years.”
She told me about her two older boys, nine, and seven and then her little four-year-old girl. I noticed how her face lit up again as she spoke about her daughter. And then there was the youngest son, a nine-month-old.
“I do some labor work to support us, but it’s not enough to put them into school.”
We talk a bit more. She tells me more about her life, more about her little girl, and her hopes and dreams of giving her a new life, an education, learning to read and write. I sigh because I know we can’t keep her with us and I know that’s what this woman desperately wants.
“How old are you?” I ask.
“I’m 22.”
I look back at her and our eyes meet again.
“I’m 22 too,” I say.
She smiles a little and things are quiet. I can see in her eyes that she’s struggled. Her life has been so unimaginably different from my own – yet there we were two 22-year-old girls sitting on the front porch.
She told me her name is Mangali.
A few days later I saw Mangali again – on the main road in the market. She was holding the end of a stick guiding her husband who was holding the other end. Our eyes met and we walked towards each other. She introduced me to her husband. He looked a lot older than Mangali. He looked sick. While I was going to my first high school dance in the ninth grade, Mangali had been forced into her second marriage and pregnant with her second child. I shuddered at the thought of being forced to marry someone.
I told them both about the documents they would need to apply for support and invited them to come by the house again once they had their papers ready.
It was strange all week I kept running into Mangali in the most random places and I couldn’t seem to get her off my mind.
I wondered about her parents as I thought about my own– my dad who packed my school lunches every single day for years, took me for bike rides and scheduled his life around my soccer and lacrosse games. In high school, my mom used to come home after a 12-hour workday and help me with my grueling A.P. biology homework. She taught me from the time I was about eight to “wait to get married.” I thought about my grandparents, my aunts and uncles and cousins who are too many to count even on all my fingers and toes; all of them have made my life so rich and so love-filled. I thought about my sports coaches, who taught me that I was stronger than I knew, and my remarkable, extraordinary, and passionate teachers who had given me the best education a girl could wish for.
And then I saw this young woman exactly the same age standing across from me and wondered what her life would have been like if she had had just one person like I had had, who believed in her, who taught her to dream, who taught her that she could do anything and be anything. What if she had lived even just one day in my shoes? What if she had been given one chance, one break? How might things have turned out differently for her?
Mangali is strong and tall. She reminds me of a track star. I pictured her in my high school track uniform, with one of my coaches yelling her splits and holding a stopwatch as she ran the 400-meter dash, telling her to drop her arms and push for the finish line. I imagined her shrieking with my best friends at a sleepover—after the track meet—watching a scary movie with popcorn and lemonade. It’s not that I wanted to plop her in NJ, it’s just that I wished for her to have had all of the support and love and freedom in the world; everything that I have been given.
Things don’t seem fair sometimes.
Looking at this 22-year-old girl, with four children. I felt a deep tenderness. She shook something in me. But, most of all she made me feel grateful. Maybe it was just the fact that she was 22 or maybe it was that I saw something inside of her that reminded me so much of myself.
Mangali turned up again yesterday morning through the front gate, this time, with her husband and her four children behind her. She was holding the documents I’d requested in one hand, and her husband’s guiding stick in the other. Her husband and the baby stayed back at our house, while we went to the market and bought school uniforms, book bags, and shoes, and bargained over prices with shopkeepers. I got to hear more stories about her life. We laughed a lot and came home for lunch, and washed up and then signed paperwork and I handed her 600 rupees, ($8) to enroll her two older sons into school. We’ve decided to put her beautiful little daughter, into nursery school in the same class as M, S, and S, even though we can’t keep her, with us here in our home.
It was a good day. I was reminded just how much I believe in the work I do here. I am so grateful.
And you know that look in Mangali’s eyes? That look that pulled me in?
I think it was hope.
She made me feel hopeful.
She made me feel like maybe it’s not too late to make things better—
One hopeful, 22-year-old girl at a time.
“One of every six people in the world is an adolescent girl living in poverty. That’s 600 million people – twice the population of the United States. Each one could change our world for the better, if given the chance.” —The Girl Effect