Stories

I wanted to use this post to share a few stories. I have personally met some of these people, and others are people that knew someone I met in India. I hope these stories can make the Dalit oppression and slavery a little more real and alive in the minds of anyone reading this blog.

This story occurred a few years ago.
A 42-year-old Dalit woman was gang-raped and then burnt alive after she, her husband, and two sons had been held in captivity and tortured for eight days. Her crime? Another son had eloped with the daughter of the higher-caste family doing the torturing. The local police knew the Dalit family was being held, but did nothing because of the higher-caste family's local influence.
A side note to this story... It has been estimated that only about 5% of Dalit rapes are reported in India, and over 30% of these reported rapes are dismissed by the police as false complaints.

These were two beggers owned by a pimp trying to get money from people on the street.

One of the teachers in the DEC's (Dalit Education Center) that I met told us her story. She was a Dalit and I think her name was Salima. She told us that when she was five, her parents made her start sweeping streets for a living. Her parents decided that Salima wasn't bringing in enough money, so when she was seven, she was sold to a Brahmin (upper-case) for about $30. He made her beg the streets for money. All the money she and the other child slaves made, they gave to him. At age seven, Salima was determined too old to beg, so she was sold to another man as a sex slave. She was sold over fifteen other times by the time she was twenty. As a sex slave for thirteen years, she was then moved to a brothel and worked as a prostitute for a pimp. She escaped the brothel at age 22 and found DFN (Dalit Freedom Network). They took care of Salima for several years. It turned out that she had over 5 STI's (Sexually Transmitted Infections), including AIDS, and no one is sure how long she will live with the diseases. However, through DFN's help, Salima was able to gain self-confidence and told us she was determined to teach the Dalit children in the DEC's everything DFN had taught her. She was committing her life to trying to help the kids break out of their caste system and have a better childhood than she had.

I was astonished how even though Salima was crying while telling her story, before and after the story, she seemed to be one of the happiest people we had encountered on our trip. That's what DFN did for her, and why I believe that this is such a worthy cause.

We met a Christian pastor who told us that his church had been burnt down. We came to find out that a few Hindu, upper-caste extremists told one of the other pastors of this church that they wanted to meet with him and his family at the church to discuss Christianity. When the pastor and his family got there, they locked the doors and burnt the church down.

One day we were playing with the kids at one of the DEC's. A teacher asked one of the Dalit students why he wouldn't get near us. He told her that he thought we must be upper-caste people. She assured him that we had no caste and that it was ok to play with us. The student explained that an upper-caste lady once told him that if he ever got near one of the upper-caste children, he would get them extremely sick and dirty because he was a Dalit, and he would be beaten.