Sold

i just finished reading Sold by Patricia McCormick.  It's the story of Lakshmi, a 13-year-old girl from Nepal sold into the sex industry in India.  Afterward, while i was making my lunch, the knife felt viciously sharp.  Squeezing the limes felt cruel and brutal.  Everything feels gluttonous and disgustingly self-serving, even the sun (such a stranger) is wasting its energy to make the plumb leaves gleam like rubies.  What a waste! So much energy goes for what?  Have i ever been starving?  Have i ever been beaten repeatedly?  Have i ever been drugged and raped over and over (times 1,000)?  And yet, i am making a picnic lunch.  I am taking a warm bath.  I am scratching the belly of my dog, who seems content and full.  The ferocious inequality of this is defeating.

And yet...

I get an email from my student with whom I am reading Sold.  She writes, "It hit me right in the heart.  I want it to stop." Yes.  So much Yes, I too want it to stop!  But what can I do?  How do I change the fate of so many Lakshmis?  Root causes.  I assuage my catapulting questions with direction.  The root cause for Lakshmi was the dire poverty in which she lived with her family.  There are organizations (more research needed here) that are working to attend to such poverty, to such criminal systems as sex slavery.  That is not my job.  i am not called to go to Nepal and India.  I am not called to tackle, headlong, these root causes.

My root cause to tackle is apathy.  To provide the stories--the raw reality--of our most vulnerable  into the hands of middle-class kids who might begin to give a care about our world.  Who might find that their calling takes them to Nepal.  Or closer.  But they find that they are hit to the heart with something raw and real and something that they can work to help change.

I can be responsible with my resources to give to such organizations.  I can be responsible to my students to raise the curtain of comfort and provide tools for action and change.  I'll keep you posted.