Sister
Caridad Paramundayil embodies many years of hard work to help girl victims of human trafficking and sexual exploitation. This Indian woman arrived in Madrid as a novice of the Adorer Sisters Order at the age of 17, where she encountered “a different world” without having an inkling of what she was going to devote her life to. ‘One of the nuns explained it to us, but I didn’t understand’, she recalls. Now, in 2015, she emphatically says that she would not change her life for anything.
Sister Caridad recently returned to Madrid to provide support for the organization
Manos Unidas, and to lecture on the subject she knows most about:
providing decent livelihoods to the daughters of the prostitutes who live in some of the most economically depressed neighborhoods in India. Often, these girls are abducted by mafias that sexually exploit them. Even as young as 12, the girls often live in extreme poverty, overcrowded in slums, with no hygienic measures whatsoever, and hand over almost all the money they make to the “madames” who manage their business.
Fear and disgust. Those were the feelings that shook the missionary’s body the first time she went to a slum in Calcutta. Bachpan Bachao Andolan, an Indian organization that fights child labor, estimates that more than a million prostitutes in India are minors and that their numbers are ever increasing. Even if prostitutes want to have a different job, they often cannot manage to get one, mainly because they know nothing else to do for a living.
Because of the difficulties that rehabilitating adult women entail, Sister Caridad’s project pays more attention to the daughters of prostitutes. According to the nuns, their work includes
preventing girls from following in their mothers’ footsteps, which is very common because they lack any kind of education or training. Schools do not usually accept them because parents do not want their children to come in contact with them. Sponsored by Manos Unidas, Sister Caridad contributed to the creation of Shelter Homes in various states in India.
Since the project started,
almost 400 girls and teens have learned to read, write, run a business, sew, etc. The hardest part, she says, was dealing with gangs and pimps who even had brought them to trial -paradoxically accusing them of promoting prostitution- from fear of seeing a drop in their income. At first, it was difficult for prostitute mothers to trust the nuns, but they began to do so once they saw they were there to stay.
Now,
the most difficult challenge is for the young girls to stay until they finish their training. One of the most difficult moments for the missionaries is to accept the fact that some of these girls will leave, sometimes without saying goodbye. Even if this happens, Sister Caridad says: ‘I prefer to believe that no one is bad. Something will stick from everything we've given them, and someday they will realize it. That is my hope’.
Source: elpais.com
