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The Promise
Where a daughter is viewed as an escape to poverty
A novel based on true events
1
I always thought I was cursed from my birth. That I should’ve not been born into this
world, country, community, family….I should’ve not been born as me. I don’t even have a
proper name for others to call me. My family calls me “girl,” “sister,” or “daughter.” When I was
four, I asked my mother why I didn’t have a name. Ah, that look, the pitiful, sorrowful look she
gave me when she heard my question! I would never forget. After staring into my dark eyes for a
while, she answered,
“Child, that’s who we are. We don’t need a name because as soon as we can talk and
handle ourselves, we will be ravaged by strangers and that’s the life we will be living, no matter
how hard we try to escape from cruelty.”
I didn’t understand her then, so I just cried, tears dripping from my eyes, and loud enough for
everyone in the house to hear. My mother bent down and hugged me in her arms, crying with
me. I knew my father will be annoyed and he will eventually come in and rip me from my
mother’s arms and beat me, but at that moment, I didn’t care. I guess my mother felt the same
way as I did, realizing how much her entire life is already ruined and is controlled by a violent
predator who all wants from her is sex.
Soon enough, my father came rushing into the kitchen, and took me away into my
room—it was closer to a decaying tent that was at least ten years old than an actual room—and
started to beat me, and yelling at me how a huge burden I was to the whole group of my family.
My mother threw herself between my father and me, taking the next hit instead of me. She
screamed for the first time. In the past, she never screamed, or made a sound, when my father
abused and raped her. She knew how to lay low, so the abuse didn’t happen that quite often, as I
remember, but when it did, my mother was so calm and obedient. She gave what my father
wanted, and did what he told her to. So I found her quite surprising when she screamed like she
was facing death at the moment.
“Keep her quiet until it’s her time to leave, or else.”
My father spit on both of us, then went back into the house, probably to check on my brothers.
“Mother…”
I called her. She turned around and hugged me again, but she refused to cry this time. Instead,
she whispered in my ear quietly, so no one else could hear what she was saying. But I heard it
clearly, too clearly that I questioned what I just heard, because it was a word, and it was the most
