In a garden in Bezhanovo, in between grape arbors and tomato vines, two girls, Mariella and Didar, giggled and played while the adults drank coffee and talked in the shade. Mariella is seven, the daughter of church deacons Ivan and Silva, and Didar is nine and Mariella’s cousin, the daughter of one of the leaders of the Muslim community in Bezhanovo. They have long, dark hair and skinned knees and are full of giggles and pouts and rapid exchanges of secrets.
In seven years, both of them will be legally able to marry.
Technically, the legal age for marriage in Bulgaria is 18, but the age for sexual consent is 14. And as I drank my coffee and listened to the adults talking about marriage in the rural villages of Bulgaria, I kept watching Mariella and Didar whisper and wondered how different their lives would be if their parents were desperate. If they had nowhere else to turn.
Sarah*, a pastor at the church in the town, sipped coffee and looked at the ground while Mike translated her words. People are leaving rural areas, moving to cities and to other countries looking for work. Those who remain in villages like Bezhanovo can live in states of abject poverty if they have a bad year for crops, or their horse dies, or they lose their jobs. Sometimes the only way out can be to marry their daughters to older men in exchange for money or goods.
Mike cited statistics which said Bulgarians are one of the highest-trafficked nationalities in the world. Traffickers come offering good jobs in the city, and then force the girls into prostitution. Or families reach the point of desperation.
Selling a daughter sounds unimaginable to me, but Mike explained that the church had lost members over a situation only a few months ago where a family had engaged their 13-year-old daughter to a 40-year-old man. Sarahi and her husband, Mark*, stood against the engagement, saying that it wasn’t something Christians should do. Mike didn’t translate the end of the story, but Sarah looked sad and distant in the beat of silence following Mike’s translation.
What Mike didn’t tell us is that Sarah was married off at 14 so her family could have food. What he didn’t say is that at 21 she left an abusive husband with two children and no safety net.
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A story like this could roll off me like so many other sound-bite tragedies if I hadn’t walked the streets of Bezhanovo with a carefree seven-year-old following on a white bicycle.
If a man who showed us around the city hadn’t spent ten minutes explaining how Bulgarian girls do not have to grow up to be smart if they can be beautiful. The word he used is unpronounceable, but the English equivalent is gold digger.
If I hadn’t hugged a tiny, fiercely strong woman who was married at the age I entered high school.
If the pre-teen girls I walked behind this afternoon weren’t dressed like tiny models and a man’s eyes hadn’t followed them as they passed.
This story will not roll off me. It soaked into the surface of my skin like ink, imprinted in the silhouette of two girls under a grape arbor. Mariella and Didar, they know their worth. But what can I say to the girls married before their fifteenth birthday, the teenagers who think their beauty will be their salvation, the women who live each day depending on the fickle attraction of men to keep food in their bellies?
I want to tell them the story of Deborah and Jael, the woman who commanded an army and the woman who killed a king. Deborah held the power of a nation and Jael held a sharp nail and a hammer. These women looked their fear in the face and walked boldly towards it. They gave the Israelites hope.
I want to hold the hands of Bulgarian girls and face their open palms toward heaven. Tell them that they carry all the fire and force of the sun in their hands.
Those girls, the ones who don’t know their worth, they deserve to know hope. The girls who should be learning about calculus and physics and literature and were married instead, those are the ones who need the message that Jesus brought the most: we are more than conquerors. They need to know the God who is our Mother, the God who is our Father, the God who comes as a pillar of fire and a still-small voice and justice rolling down like waters, is for us.
And they deserve more than an ethereal hope. They deserve our action, we who can enact change. The two girls playing in the garden deserve a future where their friends will live lives as full as their own, spent under bright sunlight and cool green leaves.
*names have been changed
If you want to help end human trafficking, you can donate or volunteer with an organization like https://notforsalecampaign.org/ or get involved in anti-human trafficking efforts in your own community by finding an organization near you: http://www.humantrafficking.org/countries/united_states_of_america/ngos
