Monday, May 18, 2015

About that junior varsity

Ann Voskamp gives us her second post on her trip to Iraq.
ISIS sells nine year old girls in slave bazaars.

Click away, turn the other way if you want, but those girls are wild to turn and escape — and they can’t. They are categorized. Stripped. And shipped naked. Examined and distributed. Sold and passed around like meat. Livestock.

You can walk into any mall and buy a pair of NIKE running shoes for what they are buying a Christian or Yezidi girl from 1-9 years of age — $172 dollars. And she’s yours. For whatever you want, for as long as you want, to make do whatever you want. Sit with that. Yeah, we’re all done living in a world where a pair of shoes can last longer, have more worth, be treated with more value, than a fondled, raped and discarded 9 year-old-girl.

The United Nations reports this week that at least one young girl’s been “married” over 20 times — and forced at the end of each violation to undergo surgery to “restore” her virginity.

So it could be ripped open and destroyed by the next highest bidder.

Look — We’re all done with keeping up with the Kardashians or whatever flash of skin is being flaunted on red carpets — when there are little girls being devoured on bare concrete floors and we will keep company with Jesus and be the ones who do something about the things that breaks His heart.

I sit with 4 Yezidi mothers in a shipping container where they sleep.

They need someone to have enough courage to not turn away. That is us.

Sozan holds a swaddled baby in her lap on the floor.

No furniture. No beds. No running water in a shipping container.

She leans forward and whispers to me: “Our life was normal before. Our children went to school. Our families had homes, we worked hard.

ISIS takes everything. ISIS destroys our homes. We lose everything.

Now we’ve had to run here for our lives. We don’t speak the language here. We have nothing here.

Our children can’t go to school here. Our children wake with nightmares here — about everything that happened there.”

Sozan, Marwa, Leyla, these mothers sitting here — not one of these mothers were ever allowed to go to school — because they were girls.

Not one of them can read. Not one can write. Not one of them can even read or sign any letters of their name. They have been made invisible. Made invisible prey.

...How do you just sit on the floor of a shipping container and just let these women carry this kind of terror alone — how do you turn away and go back to your neat little life of wheaties and news reels and how does the church not stand up and howl?

...“We had to choose…” Sozan looks up at me. Mawra’s eyes are squeezed tight — like she’s trying to forget.

“We had to choose which children we could take — and which we had to leave behind.”

It’s like the air’s sucked out of the shipping container, out of the membranes of my lungs.

True, you’ve got to shoehorn yourself into the car because the baby needs you running liquid into their hunger as milk — but how do you turn to your boy and say — “We can’t get you in, Son. There’s no more room, Son.” There are words you lose in translation. Who in the world has categories for this?

No water anywhere — for any of our children. There is no food. Six of the children with us — six of my nieces and nephews” — she holds up her fingers — “six of them, they die. No water, no food.”

“We have to leave their bodies on the mountain. We have to cover them with stones. We can’t get dig down, we can’t down into the mountain to bury them. Too hard.”

I am trying not to see the faces of my own children.

Why in God’s holy name are we born into North American ease?
Read more here.

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