Reshma's Story // The Beginning
Hello to YOU!
As my first blog post, I ask that you bear with me. I am not an english major and most of the time I type so fast a million conversations appear on paper that I don’t even remember thinking about.
What I do want you to know is that what you read is raw and real. Straight from my heart, through my fingertips, onto this document that I pray infects you in a way that urges you to DO MORE.
Raw and real though happening now: Whoa, this is scary. Once this information is out, it’s REALLY out there.
I have typed and deleted a million different things for this first post but why not start from the beginning? To understand my heartbeat for Reshma’s Home, you have to have a small look into my heart. Most of you have seen the video “My Story Matters” which has drawn international attention to Reshma’s Home, but there is SO much more. I’ll do my best below to let you in.
Life for me started on the run. My best childhood memories would be your childhood traumas.
I remember the white van we rolled through cities and states in. When we ran out of gas, mom would pretend we were taking a vacation. She encouraged us to embrace our surroundings. Sometimes a beach, sometimes a highway, and we would play iSpy when the cars would pass. Since I was the youngest of five, I had to sleep on that brown, cold floorboard. I can’t tell you how much fun this was to me. I loved the adventure and thrill of not knowing what we were going to eat, who we were going to meet, or where we're going to park the van to sleep that night. You see I didn't know then, but we were fleeing a man whose thoughts were set on keeping us or killing us. A man who should have led in love, led our family into torture rooms. A man that should have taught my brothers how to fish instead of teaching his oldest son how to turn your anger into a mental or bipolar rage and schizophrenic outbreaks. He should have been the man that taught his little girls how guys should treat us, not the one to show my sister what guys would do to her when they were alone with her.
I remember escaping these things, I would escape to a swing set playground outside. Man, I loved that wooden playground. Isn’t it funny how we remember certain toys from our childhood? I guess I remembered it for the good, until it turned bad. Until it became his next tool of choice for torture towards my mother and her children. You see, that white van was our safety net, our ticket out of the wrath of our father.
When I grew up, that white van became parties, alcohol, and fake friends in high school. I made sure I felt loved, even if it meant compromising everything my mother told me to stay away from. The memories of parking roadside to play iSpy was quickly replaced with parking roadside for bad decisions and broken hearts. I most definitely landed on the floorboard most nights after blackouts and I didn't love the cold feelings on my skin anymore.
When I’d run out of gas, “my vacation” was found at the bar. I didn’t know that at this particular bar, I’d meet a guy who would tell me everything about him was the opposite of my father. He’d be the one to protect me, to honor me, to show me what it meant to be loved. Surely? No. In fact, the very thing I’d been running from since I was a little girl, married at 19. As most of you can probably guess by now…this won’t end well.
Though this marriage brought abuse I can't erase from my memory, it was also the van that brought me to Bangladesh in October in 2016. I was at an all time spiritual low. Don’t get me wrong, I had a great paying job, friends who encouraged me – bad or good – and I was “right where I was supposed to be for a girl in Mississippi.” I told God I was done. I was so numb and I didn’t believe in whatever power I kept hearing He’d give me. But mission work in Bangladesh, I could do that. I just wanted to go love on women and children and not really talk about Jesus. I mean…where was He for me in all of this? After all, I only chose Bangladesh because it was close enough to home in India where I knew girls were being abused by their fathers and husbands, but far enough away that my father couldn’t reach me. Again, here I am running. But this run was different.
In Bangladesh, I strategically placed myself with the children so that I wouldn't get called out for not knowing God, like my team and leaders did. When we reconnected, my team of four very strong men, told me about a 17 year old girl who they couldn't hold down. She was hitting and yelling while my four teammates and most of the Bengali men in that room couldn’t contain her. One of my team members, Philip, told me it was a demon. Inside I laughed. But also…somehow, “stupidly” prayed to God – “Ok, if this is what you want to show me, don’t show me through the words of my peers. I better see it.”
In our break from sessions, a friend and I were walking through an open area, full of people. I can still see the girl with the disfigured jaw line, bold eyes, and gnashing teeth leaving her group of friends and coming straight to me when we locked eyes. Immediately I said “Hey Steven, I think this girl is coming for me, we gotta run.” But, something in me changed that day. Instead of running away, from my fear, I ran to it. This was it. This was God showing me that power I laughed at. This was God using me to cast this very demon out of the women. Not once, but two times that day. I don't remember a lot from that day, but I'll never forget hearing this uneducated women, whose husband left her because she was barren, speak perfectly clear english, and say “I HATE YOU.” All I could tell it was, “We’re fighting FROM victory, not for victory. We have already won. God has already won. So you can consume this girls body, but you’ll never consume her. She’s marked and claimed and wanted. You may be strong, but you’re not strong enough. You’re not welcome here.”
It was after that experience that my team set me down and reminded me of the words I had spoken over this girl. Except they weren’t my own. I would have never spoken to it. I sure as heck wouldn’t have RUN TO it to begin with. But I realized it wasn’t just God talking to this demon, it was God talking to me. He was telling me I am marked. I am called. I am wanted. I am needed. I can be used, no matter how much I've abused my own body and mind. It was Him telling me I’m coming from all of this to help the women just like me here. Who couldn’t run from their fathers or husbands.
Our mission partner had asked Philip to please allow me to come for an extended period of time to help the women. He said that he had seen some type of independence in me that the women fed off of. He saw it in me before I had even seen it in myself. He invited me to come back to Bangladesh as soon as I could, for as long as could.
But I couldn't, I was finally ready to run into freedom, but I was held captive by the very thing I ran to – my husband. “No you can’t go. Someone else will do it. You need to stay here and focus on me and our future family. You can’t say anything to them that someone else can’t. You can’t help them any better than another girl. What do you have to offer?”
I did what any normal girl would do when her husband says she can’t do something – I got home and on the Monday after my return, I put in my two weeks notice at work. I knew I had to go back, I just don't know how I would. At midnight that same day, breakbone fever (dengue) crippled my body. I was hospitalized for those two weeks I was supposed to finish out my time at work. I couldn't talk or see anyone, so I used that time of anguish to talk to God. He told me He’d get me out of that bed, but that I had to commit myself to His plan for me. While I was confined to that automatic bed, annoying beeps from the statistics monitor shared with the doctors if I was near death. I was isolated by walls that wouldn’t let anyone in because I was too sick to be around. God started showing me dreams of the guy who was holding me captive, my husband, holding another woman in the way he should have been holding me from the very beginning.
After a month of bedrest I was finally well again, and having been denied permission from my husband to follow what I felt was God’s call on my life, I began working for Vertical Church. It wasn’t long before I realized that the dreams of my husband holding another woman weren’t just dreams, they were warnings, and they were true.
Once again, I was on the run. This time, instead of a white van, it was my red jeep and my red suitcase in the back, and this time I Knew exactly where I was going. Madison, Mississippi. I never looked back. I was fleeing another rage filled man, but this time I wasn't pulling over when the gas ran out. I traded that white van into a plane ticket and accepted our mission partners offer to move to Bangladesh. Three months with no English, three months of protesters who kill, three months of no friends or family. Three months of all of this in a normal person’s mind would look like a very dangerous place, but I knew I was safer 9,000 miles across the ocean than I was in my own bed, hoping that the man I fled wasn’t outside my door.
It was a burning building at first, but it turned into deep waters that I was crossing. I had one girl in my arms and three others following me. We had to keep running. We were running from things that should have and would have killed us if we didn’t keep going. They were just dreams, but these dreams persisted. I only shared them with those who sat around the conference table at work with me at first, but a week before my departure, my mother called me in a panic, she had this dream multiple times. She tried to call me, but she couldn’t reach me. She was in a panic because in her dream, I was trying to save others, and she watched me go under. She watched me die saving my girls.
Three weeks later, on a boat, in a deep river, 40 miles from the orphanage I was living in, we invited 25 kids whose job everyday is to look for “work” in the rail stations. These kids are selling things for people or even worse, selling themselves to people. They have no mothers. Sometimes no family at all. I was just happy to know we had room to comfortably sleep 15+ boys at a safe house we had nearby. I couldn't wait to serve them food, and tell them stories that night. But only boys could come. But there were 25 kids? 21 boys, and 4 girls on that boat that day. What about the girls who heard of this safe place to finally have food and to sleep under a roof, so they didn’t have to stay awake in wonder of when the owner would come to them for pay back, for him allowing them to sleep in his place? What about these girls I was supposed to have in my arms, running from those very things? What about those 4 girls who were in my dream, who were now sitting by me eating jalebi, cuddled up because their sweatshirts they found on the street have holes in them and they just wanted to feel a mothers love?
In anger I wanted to see where these girls were sleeping if it wasn’t under the same safe roof I had that night. So I went, back to the rail station. One was on the cold concrete right by where the train parked, this time her pink hole filled sweater was her blanket. Two of the older girls were walking into a dark alley, that led to darker work that I wasn't allowed to enter. The other was holding the hand of a man in his 50’s, and no, it wasn't her father. These kids didn’t have fathers. But at least she’d have shelter right? She was ready to do anything so that she could have what she needed. And our hands were tied.
The next week I visited the brothel, where the women told me how they grew up in rail stations. Some of them were in the very rail stations I just left, where I didn't give a single ounce of hope to the girls who were already selling themselves. They said “Over there we didn’t have a bed, and over here we have a bed, but multiple people are in and out of it before we ever lay down. I don't want this life for my kids – we don’t plan to have these kids but we can’t help it. We don’t know who their father is so they can’t go to school without a last name. So my girls will grow up and take my position in this bed, and my sons will grow up and find the men to go lay down with their sisters. Thank you for coming to talk to them about Jesus, but He’s not here. This hope thing that you people talk about isn’t here. This is life for us, and we’ve accepted it. The only way out, is if someone gives us a way out. But until then, we have to get back to work.” Their pagers went off so frequently, I couldn't even get a word in. I couldn't even share hope if I wanted to, what was I going to tell them? They were right. There was no way out, was there??
25 girls. One widow woman as a “house mom” and one woman as cook. They will have school, and learn about Me, but also learn about how to do basic things in a work environment or as a housewife. You will raise them. You will teach them. You will support them, and then they will grow up and do the same for the other girls. Draw out this plan, it’s my plan. This is the way out.
Waking up with rage, I thought, I CAN'T do that. I'm newly divorced, with no money, HOW could I even find a building? I don't have the time. How could I be here for these girls? I have a job back home. Whatever. I’ll write Your stupid plan out, but it's going to take YEARS for this to ever come to life.
I brought my journal and bible to the table. I met with our mission partner, who by then had become my father figure (or Baba in Bangla), every morning for bible discussion and planning. This morning was different. With tears pouring down his face, and bible not open, he looked at me and said “I had this thought last night. We love you so much. You’re our daughter. The villagers love you so much. You’re their sister. You will build a girls home. You will start small at first, but God’s going to help it grow. 25 girls first. You will hire one widowed woman to be the house mom since guys are not these girls favorite people to be around. You will hire one woman to cook for them. These women can also teach them basic things, and you can put them in the same school as our children here at the orphanage so that they have a chance at a life outside of what they are born into. This is the building I'm thinking..”
As he started drawing the building, I couldn't contain it. It was just like what God had shared with me in that “stupid dream” the night before. His wife had sat down by this time, and said “for this thing I have prayed, and you are here. God sent you for these women and girls that we can’t reach. You can. You have to help them. You have to help our girls.” and Baba spoke up, but this isn’t just any girls home, we will call this Reshma’s Home. You need to know your home is here, too. I’ll give you the land. Don’t worry about that. I’ll help you because you have helped us so much.
I was running when I went 9,000 miles across the world, but I ran into my purpose this time. I ran from two wrathful men, to a man who is now like a father to me, who God used to show me that those dreams I was having, had to come true. I do have to go get my girls off that boat, and out of the train stations, and remove them from the brothels. I have to carry some in my arms and others will follow so that they can grow up and lead. At first I was accepting the invitation to come to an unknown area to have safety, but I left knowing that I was adopting the mission of motherhood.
I know I have to do this. Not because it’s my job, but because it’s my calling. I want to be a mother to the motherless and I know I'm not the only woman who feels like this. I know there are more of us out there. God is using our negatives to bring us to a place of fulfillment through helping other women and little girls around us. Some women are blessed to leave a legacy with those that they gave birth to and raised, I've chosen to leave a legacy by stepping in the absence of strong women to raise up broken girls in a deteriorating world. In a world where we can just walk away because we aren’t “given” motherhood, we need to step up and be mothers for those who have none.