Reality Check!

It just crossed my mind yesterday…I am 16 years old. I live an impoverished life in Cuba. My family is desperately in need of food. I run into a gentleman at the market who is in need of women to work as maids in a hotel in the States. He says that with the money that I would make I can support my family. I agree to go over. In total ignorance I am sucked in. For soon I find out that I am not to work in a hotel at all but, rather, I am now one of their new slave prostitutes being smuggled illegally into the country. I have no rights. I am not free. I cannot escape. I am beaten and raped and used.

Now I am 12 years old. I live in Africa. My dad makes 30 dollars a month to provide for our family. Our housing consists of a grass hut and our food of rice. I go to the nearby pond to draw water for drinking. Little do I know that a worm will enter my body. It will nest in my stomach and, at the end of one year, emerge through a blister that will form on my abdomen. The experience will be agonizing and the worm will twist its way through my body and grow up to 3 feet long. It will wrap itself around the muscles in my leg constricting them like a Boa does its prey. I will have to get medical help from the nearby facility run by people from another country. It will take many days of pulling the worm out inch by inch before I will be cured.

Now I am a baby girl in China. I was just born a few days ago! There’s only one problem. My mother doesn’t love me. She doesn’t want me because I’m not a boy. So I am sent to live in an orphanage with hundreds of other girls whose parents don’t love them either. I am small and utterly vulnerable. No one holds me. No one sings to me.
No one loves me. They think I won’t remember. They don’t know how wrong they are. This will scar me for life.

Now I am 26 years old. I live in America. I am a stay-at-home mom. I live in a $150,000 house that has air conditioning, heat, electricity, clean running water. I get to shower every day if I feel like it. I have food galore. I am well educated. I have a soft queen sized bed to sleep in and down pillows in which to sink my head every night. I am rich beyond my wildest dreams and I don’t even know it. I have a wonderful husband who loves and respects me. Sometimes my children drive me crazy. Sometimes I tire of cleaning the same rooms over and over day in and day out. Sometimes I have a bad attitude because I feel that my life is hard and unfair. I gripe and complain when I am having a bad day because things just aren’t going my way.

O how I need a reality check! Or maybe a change of perspective! I gripe and complain like I live in a third world country. I whine like an unloved baby! But nothing could be further from the truth!