This Girl is Rising

" Those who have done good, will rise to live." [John 5: 28].


I recently went to see a new documentary film, Girl Rising, directed by Academy Award nominee Richard Robbins.

This film tells the stories of nine girls, in nine different countries, who beat incredible odds, in order to not only survive, but to thrive.

The girls' voices are narrated by actresses such as Anne Hathaway, Cate Blanchett, Selena Gomez, Salma Hayek, Meryl Streep, Alicia Keys and Kerry Washington.

A young girl, Wadley, from Haiti, sees her life change dramatically after the earthquake of 2010.  Her family can no longer afford to pay for school. But she insists on returning to class. She tells the teacher, "I will come back to school every day, until you let me stay."

Suma lives in Nepal. She is sold as a girl, by her family, into Kamlari, a bonded servitude. Every day, a group of young women come to her master's house to argue with the master, "Set. her. free!"

Yasmin lives in Cairo, Egypt. When she is about six, she goes off to market with a friend. A man  takes her to a dark place and assaults her. Yasmin tells the police, "I fought him. I am a superhero."

Azmera is a girl who lives in Ethiopia. When a young man, much older than she, tells her family that he wants to marry her, she says, No! She says, "What if a girl's life could be more?"

Amina is a girl from Afghanistan. When she was barely a teen, she was forced to begin wearing a birka that covers her from head to toe. She was given in marriage to a man she did not know. The dowry money given to her family was used to buy her brother a car. Amina says, " I WILL speak."

Sokha is a young girl from Cambodia. Her job is to pick through the garbage in a dump, to find metal cans or anything of value. She says, " But I will not be thrown away."

Senna is a girl from a mountainous mining town in Peru. Her father named her after Xena the Warrior Princess. Senna says, "I am strong." Senna won a poetry prize. She says, " Poetry is how I turn ugliness into art."

Mariama is a teen from Sierra Leone, with her own radio show. She says, "If you try to stop me, I will only try harder. There is nothing to stop me."

I am a girl rising, myself. Only, I grew up in America. I was not from a poor family.

I was hit, I was not fed, I was called ugly every day, I was called a failure. I was abandoned because I was the victim of a crime. I was not allowed to go to church. I was told what color to wear and how to wear my hair.

I stopped feeling any emotions, I stopped eating from my family's hand, I stopped sleeping, I stopped speaking, I stopped having any opinions. In the narrative in Girl Rising, it is said that from these harsh experiences, it is as if these girls are split and torn into two, and become ghosts. I became a ghost, floating around quietly, not speaking, gradually turning into a silent wisp-- thin, invisible, irrelevant.

But, my family made a few "mistakes" along the way with me, at least from their perspective. First, they educated me. And so, I quickly figured out that how they were treating me was wrong. And I was thereby made smart enough to take care of myself. 

My family's other mistake was that they took me to church as a tiny child. By the time they refused to keep taking me to church, I already believed in God. After awhile, I started to think, 'God cannot hate me as much as my family seems to. He does not make junk.'

I said to myself, "You may not feed me, but I refuse to starve."

I said to myself, " You can take away church, but I still have my Faith deep inside me."

I said to myself, "You can hit me, but I will leave the house and go by myself to sit under the sweet pine trees."

I said to myself, "You may forbid me to have my own opinions, but I will read the dictionary after school and memorize all sorts of learned words. I wilol make myself smarter than anyone."

I stopped speaking for several years. But I WILL speak. Now I am speaking to the World!

I will not be beaten down by physical abuse, starvation, denigration, verbal abuse, rejection or neglect.

I WILL RISE.

 In America, husbands physically hurting wives is not all that uncommon. There is a practice in some cases of husbands and boyfriends branding their women with tattoos, as if women can be owned. Women who are educated are sometimes labeled "man haters", or worse.

And so, I ask the World, How are you treating your wives, your mothers, your daughters, your sisters, your nieces, your aunts, your grandmothers, your godmothers?

God is in all of us. If this is how we treat the women in our World, then this is how we are treating God!

"Girl Rising" will be aired on CNN, on June 16, 2013, worldwide! Check local listings in your area. Or go to www.10x10act.org/girl-rising/, for more information.

(c) Spiritual Devotional 2013. All Rights Reserved.