****Warning!****

As with last week's post this one also deals with mature subject matter and is not meant for those who are squeamish or sensitive. It is a first hand account of a tragic story with adult themes. I have tried to be very careful in my wording and description, but make no apologies for introducing some of the "hardest" work for us to you.

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Last time I dealt with the very, very hard work of facing the emotional drain of raising kids overseas and seeing them struggle when returning home; today I’d like to talk about the hard work of ministering in a culture that is completely devoid of the value of women and to speak to the horrific pain and grief they deal with every day. Often times the effort that goes into this kind of work can be so overwhelming that it leaves one feeling physically drained and run down… let me explain what I mean.

I can only speak to the situation in our host country, but have heard that this kind of behavior exists all over that part of the world. So I think I can say that what I’m about to describe is widespread and very real. If you are squeamish or sensitive, please be warned that the following paragraphs will not be easy to read, and will perhaps be so utterly foreign that they will be hard to comprehend. The following stories (I’ll share a few over the next few weeks) were gathered from firsthand sources of very close friends of ours- those with whom we spent much of our time counseling, praying with, and mentoring.

“Gretchen” was perhaps one of my dearest friends. We spent many hours a day with each other, and over the years she opened her life story to me, partly to share as friends do, but also to help me understand the culture we lived in better. She was, in what overseas workers’ circles call it, my “culture broker”. As a young girl of 18, she had just finished “college” where she was trained to be a repairwoman of train cars. Her job would be to replace things like lightbulbs, repaint the sleeping cars, sew new curtains, etc… She never made it as far as getting a job in her field- which she had absolutely zero say in choosing in the first place. With most things in life there, you do what you are told without questioning authority, especially if you are a woman.

Late one night while walking home with some girlfriends, a car pulled up beside them. Two young men got out of the car, picked her up, and put her in. She was driven to one of the young man’s parent’s home where she was raped and basically held prisoner. The man who’d taken her as his wife had seen her on a few occasions and knew her a bit through mutual friends. There was no prior relationship or friendship.

Eventually, her parents were called and were told that the family would like to bring a tidy sum for the bride price of several animals and money to them for her. The option of her going home was non-existent, so she was bought like a piece of property. The shame of her being “stained” was too great for her own family to welcome her back, so there she was stuck in a remote village with no one she knew, no way out, the trauma of being assaulted on every level, and having to bear the burden of being thrust into the role of wife overnight.

Let me insert a paragraph here before I continue her story about the statistics of this exact same scenario playing out all over the country we were in. We’ve been told by anthropological researchers that studied this area that upwards of 80% of marriages begin precisely like this. But even before that, around 75% of young girls are subjected to incest in their own homes by relatives or friends of the family. So you can see that violence is no stranger to the women we dealt directly with every day. Most of this is suffered in silence as it is seen as a great shame and burden to these young girls. The blame is placed on them, and for their entire lives they feel dirty, unforgiven, and hopeless.

Over the next months, she becomes basically what amounts to the “slave” of her mother-in-law. Her days began at 4:00 AM when she was told to get up and begin the job of making the morning breakfast/tea for the family. That included making bread, tending the samovar ( a tea urn that is heated with a fire in the center pipe), and setting up the low table with seating pads around it, with jams, butter, bread, and perhaps leftovers from the night before. After her early start, her day moves on to include ALL the laundry done by hand, cooking at least 3 more meals, shopping at the bazaar, and caring for the older sister-in-laws’ children if necessary. Day after day after day. By tradition, this young woman will not be allowed to see her own family for about a year while she is “trained” by her mother-in-law. If she is the wife of the youngest son (which my friend was) she has a special title in the family, and although not translated as such, carries the meaning of “slave”. If she is a worthy wife a young bride will get pregnant right away, which my friend did. Now, not only was she saddled with feeling horrible from being overworked, lonely, shamed, and violated, she was made to continue all her normal chores and workload. By being beaten.

Not long after this barbarian stole his bride, he began to follow the cultural norm and took up drinking- heavily. Entire aisles of the shops are lined with bottles of wheat in the form of clear liquid; vodka, the decided choice of beverage among all citizens, but mostly men. With drinking comes violence in many cases, and for reasons far too complicated to go into here, the men of our host culture almost always took out their violence and anger on their wives. Black eyes, bruises, and even more serious injuries were VERY common to see and no one talked about them because once again, those were “her fault”. My friend had more than her share of this abuse, and put up with far more than any human being should ever have to.

Eventually, it was time for her to deliver her child, and in those days, as it continues to be today, the mother was checked into the hospital. There she was strapped down, gagged, and then berated for showing any sign of weakness or pain throughout the process of having her baby. The archaic medical system is unsafe for all involved and some cases deadly, as it was for her child that day. For some reason which was never explained, the baby’s neck was broken at delivery; she was never shown the child or allowed to hold and grieve over its body. Of course she grieved quietly, alone. But wounds such as those never quite heal.

After another year of living hell, she decided she had had enough. She somehow managed to call her parents, they took pity on her and came and got her with a few male relatives of her own. At that point, she was nearly useless to the groom’s family since she had not yet borne them a male baby, and clearly he did not love, or even like her, anyway. They let her go without too much fuss, but by then the damage was already done.

I wish I could say this was an isolated case of horror, but I cannot. We personally knew no fewer than 10 women who endured this exact same scenario (minus the tragic death of her infant), and this particular friend actually was stolen twice-once more not long after she got home from the first marriage. Her daughter from the second marriage was my girls’ best friend over there. That marriage too ended with divorce and brokenness.

So now you know the kind of deep hurt that most women where we lived and worked harbored. To bring a message of hope to those who had not heard the Good News yet was nearly impossible- the walls they had built around themselves to protect and hide behind were so high and thick they were almost impenetrable. There were others though who had a Living Hope within, but breaking the bonds of grief, resentment, pain and distrust were continual subjects of prayer in our work with them. To sit and listen to stories like these was certainly hard work, and work we are gladly taking a break from!