“Please God, send someone to save me”
“Please God, send
someone to save me”*
The Columban Fathers/PREDA (People’s Recovery, Empowerment, and
Development Assistance Foundation)
*Based on the story of Isabel and Irene**
**All
names have been changed
By Julie L. Rattey
“There she is. That’s my daughter.”
Standing in the doorway of a small, crowded room, Mariefe** pointed to 16-year-old Isabel. At the sight of the woman who had raised her and her twin sister Irene, then sold them into prostitution. Isabel Qualified. Crammed into the room with the other young girls, she looked like one trapped bird among many picked out for sacrifice.
She ought to have had hope: Irene had escaped from the house only days before in order to get help. Maybe it had arrived: In the other room she could hear the pimps arguing with the police. The police had found the fake passports, the flight schedule pinned on the wall. They knew that this house full of abused and broken girls would be empty soon, once the girls were shipped from the Philippines to Japan, to trade one life of hell for another. But Isabel was afraid to hope. Here in Manila the sex trade was rampant and the pimps were powerful – they even had their own mafia. Was Mariefe here to save her, or to punish her for trying to escape?
Looking at Marife, Isabel couldn’t understand how someone who called herself her mother could care about her so little. She couldn’t forget the past…
About
the rescuers
Founded in 1974, PREDA protects the dignity and human rights of the
Filipino people, especially sexually-exploited and abused children.
Director Shay Cullen has worked in the Philippines since 1969 and is a
priest with the Missionary Society of St. Columban. To learn more about
PREDA, and to help children like Irene and Isabel, visit www.preda.org
or call the Columban Fathers at 402-291-1920. To contact Fr. Cullen,
write to Preda Children’s Home, Upper Kalaklan, Olongapo City,
Philippines 2200. To learn more about the Columban Fathers, visit
http://st.columban.org.
Eleven-year-old Irene emerged shakily from a bedroom in the family’s shack in Olongapo. In the bedroom was John, Mariefe’s live-in partner, who had finally dismissed her from the bed. Determined not to awaken Mariefe, who was passed out nearby, she stepped gingerly around the mess — empty bottles, tiny plastic bags emptied of powder — left from last night’s party. Every week it seemed her mother and John had another one. Isabel crept into the bed she shared with her Irene, who hugged her in silence. Irene didn’t have to ask what had happened; she already knew.
“He said he’ll kill us if we tell,” Isabel trembled. “Isabel, what if he finds out we already told Nanay (Mama)?”
“I don’t think that matters,” Irene said. “Nanay doesn’t believe us.”
So they were safe from death, but not from nothing else. Which was worse?
Human trafficking: A GLOBAL PROBLEM
According to estimates:
• 12.3 million people are enslaved in some kind of forced labor at any given time. (International Labor Organization)
• Some 600,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year, with 14,500 to 17,500 trafficked into the United States; about 80 percent are women and girls; up to 50 percent are minors. Most are trafficked into commercial sexual exploitation. (2005 U.S. State Department annual report [www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2005]
Which was worse? was the same question Isabel was facing now: Go with Mariefe, home to the abuse she knew, or to Japan, to abuse she could only imagine? Suddenly Isabel noticed that there were other people with her mother. In their eyes, Isabel saw something that was a welcome as it was unfamiliar: They looked like they wanted to help. Her heart leapt as she heard them explaining that they were a rescue team from a group called PREDA. A neighbor who knew the twins’ story had contacted PREDA for help when Irene returned home. The strangers had come, they said, to take Isabel away.
Isabel let out a sob. For years, she and Irene had prayed that something like this would happen. It had been so long since they’d left Olongapo at 14, driven away by two strangers to what they hoped would be a better life.
Where are they now?
“In
the PREDA Home for Girls,” Father Cullen wrote in an article on the
twins in the magazine Columban Mission, “Irene and Isabel were provided
basic needs such as shelter and protective custody, legal assistance,
education, and emotional release therapy.… They both gradually released
the pain and hardship buried deep inside.” Mariefe, whose maternity of
the twins has never been sufficiently proven, attempted to coax the
girls into running away, but ceased after PREDA offered her job training
to help her become self-sufficient. The twins are now 18 and in college.
“One day,” writes Father Cullen, explaining their plans, “they will be
back at the PREDA Home for Girls as social workers, rescuing abused
children and saving those children trafficked and enslaved as they once
were.”
“How much will you give me for them?” Mariefe demanded of the pimps. The balding man in black with the gold chains proffered an answer and Mariefe let out a screech. “That’s it? My partner and I just had to sell our house and all our appliances. We’ve got nothing.”
“That’s not my problem,” the man replied. “One hundred dollars each, down payment. Take it or leave it.”
The man’s partner, a woman with keen eyes, leaned forward on her chair.
“I think you’re forgetting,” she put in, with a sneer slathered in honey, “how much money your girls will bring in for you. We run a sophisticated training school. They’ll start out billed as models and escorts, wearing stylish clothes and sharing a decent apartment with other girls. When they begin working, all they’ve got to do at first is get customers to buy drinks, from which they’ll get a commission. They might make $50 a day.”
“And that’s before any action,” the man added pointedly.
Mariefe’s eyes widened. “You have a deal.”
Please, God, send someone to save me. The prayer had become as natural to Irene as breathing. Every time she was being used by a customer. Every time all hope of escape was squashed by the reminder that they were always watched. And now, when in a few days they would be sent away to Japan, the twins were praying harder that ever.
“I have an idea,” Irene told Isabel. “I’m going to beg them to let me visit Nanay one last time before we leave. We always do what they say; they’ll let me go. Then, I’ll get help somehow.”
Isabel’s eyes filled with tears. “What if you don’t make it? What if I get sent on alone?” The thought of being forever separated from Irene filled her with the greatest terror she had ever known.
“I think,” Irene gulped, “we have to trust. All these years we’ve been praying God would save us. This has to work. I don’t know how. But it has to.”
The sisters hugged fiercely, each praying Irene was right.
I’m going to see Irene again!
As she slipped out of the house with the rescue team, Isabel’s
heart thumped with fear and joy. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw
the pimps waving their hands angrily at the police. Then there came a
shout. She had been seen.
“Hey! That girl belongs to us; we paid good money! Isabel, you little —”
Slam. The PREDA van door shut, and the van pealed away to freedom.
To report trafficking crimes, call the U.S. Department of Justice at 888-428-7581.
-End-
