Working as a family therapist for Fundacion Cristo Vive, a site that attends to families where violence is present – I have seen several cases of domestic abuse over the past four months.  Last month, I had the opportunity to walk alongside coworkers and clients, peacefully communicating women’s rights to live safely – protesting violence of all types.  As I share the photos of the day (several are clients’ children who walked alongside us – which I just think is powerful for little boys, future men, to be holding signs speaking on behalf of their mothers, sisters, and future wives) – I promised to share the story of a client of mine.  What proceeds is my translation of her story.  I am putting it in quotes because it is from her voice, but it is not exactly what she has told me (as we’ve met now 5 times and I cannot remember word for word and then correctly translate from Spanish to English):

“When I was 18, my mom sent me to live with her cousin – he lived in Lima and was a professional and promised that he’d be able to find me a job.  After months of not really doing much for me, one night, on the way home from a family party, as it was raining, he took me to a hotel . . . 

I was so ignorant at the time – he told me that it was his friends house – but when we got in there, we had our own room and bathroom and it was obviously a hotel.  He was 30, a policeman, and very intense.  He took out his gun and pointed it to his own head and said that if I did not accept him sexually, he would kill himself – and I believed him. 

I cried the whole time – it was my first time ever being with anyone.

After that, he started to beat me and control me and not let me leave the house.  He’d try to come on to me and when I would push him away, he’d beat me up and then have sex with me.  It was horrible . . .

7 years of hell. 

And out of those years were born my two oldest sons. 

When I was finally able to separate from him, I started to sell fruit in a local market.  I could barely feed us, the money just did not last.  So I started working in a restaurant – but it was hard to watch my boys.  Finally, a friend convinced me to enter the field of prostitution – and for 10 years I worked in that, miserable, but able to provide for my boys.  

 

It was in that line of work that I met my daughter’s  [6 years old] dad – he was a client – and he was different.  He wanted me to leave that work and get married. 

So, we moved.  And my time with his was the first time “that I felt like a wife.”  But after four months of living together, I found out that he was married and had no plans to separate from his wife.  So we separated, while I was pregnant with my third child.

After she was born, I went back into that line of work.  Leaving my daughter with her two older brothers who were living in the house of their father.  

Four years later, I met the father of my baby [a nine-month old little girl] – he was also a client . . .”  

(Again my patient put her faith in a man who would eventually fail her, as he was also married with no plans to leave his wife … in therapy we have talked about her seeing men as saviors in her life, people to pull her out of her world, but when she’s meeting them as clients – where does she really think that they’ll take her?)

“Last year I decided to stop working as a prostitute.  I planned to commit suicide.  I wanted to make my most recent partner suffer as I was suffering.  So I planned to throw myself in front of his car.  But, before doing it, I decided to read my bible, as I always felt, even in the filth I was living in, that God was real and present.  I opened my bible to Isaiah 44 and I felt as if God was talking to me:

 

²¹ “Pay attention, O Jacob,
for you are my servant, O Israel.
I, the Lord, made you,
and I will not forget you.
²² I have swept away your sins like a cloud.
I have scattered your offenses like the morning mist.
Oh, return to me,
for I have paid the price to set you free.”

 Now, the five of us are living here in Cuzco.  We share one room.  I am not returning to that life of prostitution like before, and I am free from the disappointments and abuses that men have brought me in the past – but, we are really struggling economically.  My boys are wondering why I don’t make the money that I did before and keep asking me to go back to work, now that my baby is nine months old.”

The client whose story you just read continues to come for individual and family therapy.  One of the things we’re working on in individual counseling is her abilities and likes…and seeing if within those we can carve out a new type of work.  With the family, among several things, we are working to validate and then heal hurt pasts, as both of the older ones have feelings of abandonment from years of mom leaving them with dad or friends, for work or other men.

What I have seen in working with the battered women at Cristo Vive, specifically the ones living in our hidden house who have actually decided to leave their violent homes – is that they too struggle economically.  And often, for years, they put up with abuse and mistreatment because of the financial security they have living at home.

I don’t really know how to end this except to say – thanks for listening to her story.  If you’re a prayer – pray for these women that I have the honor of working with – and pray for me – that God would use me to reveal His plans in their lives.

Choose peace instead of violence.  Love instead of indifference.c