Ten days ago I walked into a house here in the Roma (gypsy) community and met a mother named Mosa and her daughter Angelica. I have not been able to stop thinking about this mother and her daughter since we left.
As was usual during our home visits, four American women sat down across from one St. Lucian man and one Roma woman. The daughter turned on the gas container, boiled some water, and brought us each a small cup of thick coffee. The hour commenced.
We soon realized this visit was anything but ordinary.
Clement, our St. Lucian ministry host, translated for us as we listened to Mosa and asked questions.
What are some of your wedding traditions?
That initial, innocent question led to a much deeper conversation about girls and marriage customs within the Roma culture. It led to way more than what we thought we asked for.
In the Roma culture marriage is a significant event, just as it is everywhere else in the world. They have a ceremony, parties, dancing, and gift giving, and the marriages are arranged with the best of intentions and the purest of hearts. But the greatest difference between what is right and what is pure lies in the moral compass of the culture, and that is where this story deviated.
Our girls are married around 11-12 years of age; the youngest we’ve seen has been 9. Almost as soon as a girl begins developing and a boy takes interest, his parents offer a marriage proposal and we have very little choice other than to say yes. It is disrespectful – it is offensive – to turn down a marriage proposal in our culture.
There is no friendship between adolescent girls and guys. There is no dating. Only marriage.
Mosa continues. My daughter-in-law was married young. The wedding was fine; everything seemed normal. But not too long after the wedding the husband told her parents he was ‘sending her back to them.’ He said he wouldn’t ‘keep’ her because he didn’t think she was a virgin. So she went back to them and was quickly married again. Not too long after that, however, her second husband called her parents and said she ‘couldn’t cook well enough’ so he was ‘sending her back.’ This happened two more times before she finally married my son.
That is not the only such story in this community. Once they reach adolescence it’s almost as if the men view the girls more as goods to be bought with a dowry and returned at will than as thinking, feeling, breathing beings. While their parents desire simply for them to be provided and cared for, the reality of that desire has emerged with a much different outcome.
Since we’ve become believers, however, our desires and thoughts about marrying our girls so young has changed. We don’t want to marry them so young; it’s not good for them. But that is hard to follow through with in this culture. Our youngest daughter is 16 and not yet married. When she turned 14 we decided not to let her leave the house so that boys would not see her and men would not call. But they have still called so many times – it is hard for us to keep turning down marriage offers. But we are going to wait. We want to do the right thing for Angelica.
So while the teenage boys are free to continue socializing within the community, the girls seem to disappear. Seldom do you see unmarried teenage girls outside their homes; Angelica hasn’t been outside of hers in two years.
What does Angelica do at home?
She cleans, cooks, helps me around the house….
Those Disney princess stories are true; just not the parts we imagine to be true or would want to be true. But they are true nonetheless. Rapunzel – locked in a room at the top of a tower. Cinderella – confined to the stairways, halls and rooms of her house.
Angelica steps no farther than the front gate. She is a prisoner of her own home.
Her mother is motivated by love, but operating out of fear. She is operating out of the only way she knows how. She is a believer living in a culture that doesn’t know the Truth. She is a mother trying to raise her daughter by the Truth and in the Truth to the best of her abilities, just like so many others around the world. And in that moment, sitting there in her house in a whirlwind of thoughts and emotions, the Father opened my heart to see his grace and love for her.
Yes, this is a story of injustice and brokenness and bondage. It is one of pain and sadness. It burdens my heart to hear stories of girls and boys forced into marriage, leaving their innocence and youth behind before they ever had a chance to live it. It makes me cringe to hear about young girls being forced to do things they should never have to experience. It makes my heart heavy because Angelica can’t leave her home.
But in the midst of all those thoughts and emotions, this is also a prayer for freedom and healing and redemption. For new hearts and new minds in Christ. For value and dignity to be placed upon every individual in the love of the Father.
It is a prayer for Kingdom to come in this place and in these people.
These days I rarely know what to expect when I walk into a place, but what I do know is that every time I’ve stepped outside of myself I’ve stepped into more of the Father and his heart.
What have you stepped into lately?
