By Analiz Schremmer
I felt helpless. I was in an orphanage in Vietnam to report the work of missionaries, but what could I offer these children? I’m just a reporter.
A 12-year-old orphan sat in front of me, crying.
“My father sold me for $7 after my mother was arrested for drug dealing,” she said. “It was so he could buy food. The family I was with forced me to beg for money, and when I didn’t bring back enough, they would beat me. One time, I didn’t make enough, so I stayed outside a patio. I was freezing there, and so two ladies asked what my story was and I told them. They told the police and that’s how I ended up here.”
Her 7-year-old friend listened and cried, too.
“My mother and I were beggars,” she said. We slept in the train station at night and then the police brought us here.”
Her mother also lives in the orphanage, the translator explained. She is in the area for special-needs adults.
I cried with the girls and took notes on what they said. We took pictures together and they became my friends. I asked the translator to tell the first girl that I was sorry that she was sold for $7. And that even though her father gave her away for the cost of a small meal, she was worth more than all the money in the world.
She sobbed.
There was another child that I spoke to the next day. She had been molested, she told me, by several different men. Her parents weren’t there to take care of her, and she kept running away from the men, but they always found her. That’s how she ended up here.
“All I’ve ever wanted is a mom and a dad who love me; who won’t hurt me. That’s all I want.”
She was looking into the camera I was holding, and I had to use both hands to keep from shaking when she said, “Isn’t there any way that you can be my mother? Can’t you take me home?”
I don’t know how to tell you how much I wanted to be that child’s mom. And how completely impossible it really is. First of all, Americans can’t legally adopt Vietnamese children right now. And secondly, I’d have no idea how to care for a 12-year-old who has undergone so much sexual abuse. I couldn’t afford counselors. My husband and I both work full time and are just getting started on our lives together. We don’t even own a house yet.
“I wish I could,” I told her.
Another girl came up to me, crying. She said that after she heard me talk about being a story teller, she went to her room and spent three hours writing her story to share with me.
“My mother abandoned me when I was a baby because of poverty. And my father hated me so much that he would hit me with anything he could find. He took two other wives after my mother left because all the women he was with kept having girls and he wanted a boy.
“When the boy was finally born, he hated me and my sisters even more. One time, he hit me until all my face was full of blood and once I fell unconscious, he threw me into a lake. But a man found me and pulled me out.”
She went on to talk about how she ran away, leading her siblings back to their respective mothers. But her mom couldn’t be found. So she made her way to an orphanage.
The next couple of days, I noticed that the girls who had opened up seemed to have the most interest in being with me. We couldn’t communicate with each other, but I played with their hair and they liked taking me by the hand and showing me the different parts of the playground.
They cried when the team said goodbye—almost as fiercely as they cried when they shared their stories. And I realized then, that maybe I did have something to give them after all. I listened to their stories. I wrote them down like they matter. And I loved them.
