Alone - A Guest Post From My Daughter

Yesterday I was going through the things my daughter took out of her backpack from school.  A majority of the papers get thrown away and I must admit that she comes home with so many writing assignments that I don't read each and every one.  But yesterday, one of her papers grabbed my attention and I stopped to read it.  I'm so glad I did, because it was really good. 

So good that I want to share it with all of you today.

She said it was simply a creative writing assignment.  They could write about any subject and it could be a story or a newspaper article or any other type of writing.

I am impressed by her creativity and how closely it relates to girls who are at risk for trafficking.

From an 11 year old girl...

Alone

It's my 14th birthday and here I am out on the streets hungry, scared, lost, not knowing why bad things have to happen to anyone.  I can still remember the day my mother died.  It was the worst day of my life.  I was eight years old.  My mother was the only one who worked in the family.  She was on her way home from work one day when she got in a really, really bad car wreck.  Only a few that were there survived.  My mother was not one of them.

My Dad didn't always smoke, but ever since my mom died he started and couldn't stop.  My Dad never did get a job.  In fact, he never even tried to get a job.  But he needed money for his addiction.  So his solution to get money was to rob the bank.  I told him it was the wrong idea, but he just ignored me and kept on doing what he was doing.  In case you were wondering, he did get caught.  Anyways, my Dad was taken away from me and brought to jail when I was just 10 years old.  In a way I was forced to leave my home and everything I had.  And ever since then I've been out in the cold.

Four years I've been out here.  Cold, Hungry, Lost, digging through garbage cans searching for leftover scraps of food.  Very rarely will I ever find anything.  Every once in a while, only if I'm very lucky, I'll find a few dollars on the ground and I'll be so happy and Ill run straight to the Super Market and buy as much food as I can with the money I have found.  All the change I get I save up to buy a big, big, perhaps even a lifetime supply of food.

I've made a little, yes I mean little, shelter in the woods, but it keeps warm enough in the winter.  Back home I used to watch that survival show.  I've learned many things from that show like which berries are poison and which berries are safe to eat and how to build a nice warm campfire.  It's pretty lonely around here.  I have nobody to talk to.  Not that I had any friends back home either.  I just hope that I won't always be as alone as I am right now.