Majlinda, in River of Innocents, is a fictional character. It’s hard for us to read her story even though we know she’s fictional, because it’s a hard story–but its message is profoundly hopeful, and she is valiant. She’s a heroine. She’s someone who shows us the strength we can find in ourselves when others need us, someone who acts as a surrogate mother to the stolen children around her because they need her to, someone who is broken but also forges herself into someone incredibly strong. We are proud of her, and feel terrible sorrow for what she endured even when we see the dream of a world without slaves that her suffering is for. And we know, fundamentally, that she is a fiction–a realistic one, one we can believe in, and someone who is real to us, but still a fiction and a character whose sorrows are meant to do good. She suffers to show us the reality. It wounds us to see it, but it also makes us stronger. It gives us the hope of truly building that world without slaves, it gives us the hope of moving beyond a place where we buy and sell our kindred spirits for tuppence and a stiff drink.
But Majlinda’s name comes from someplace simple. The month of May. Springtime. A taurus. A name with a feminine ending so it doesn’t sound masculine to an American ear, but a name that sounds strong when it needs to be, like the summer wind. An Albanian name, because she’s an Albanian character.
I came across this today. A story from the guardian about another Majlinda. An Albanian girl, thirteen instead of seventeen, trafficked to Greece, brought back to Albania and taken to Italy by speedboat, a year in Florence, moved by car to Amsterdam. Trapped sometimes physically, sometimes psychologically, and enduring the things we don’t like to talk about. Dark things, like Majlinda. Beating. The first rapes, the twenty clients a night.
After having a baby, she went to a group of Catholic nuns who reach out to prostitutes. They helped her back to Albania, but her family was ashamed and told her she was dead to them. She was in a shelter in Tirana when the article was written. She was also seventeen years old after four years of being a slave. That’s as old as River’s Majlinda was when she began her story.
The truth is, every victim is River’s Majlinda. Every survivor, every person who goes through this terrible crime. We let this continue, and we don’t have to. Ask yourself what you can do, and you’ll find an answer. It’s not nothing. It’s something. Even if it’s something small.
These stories make me sick. They make us all sick. These young women and men are our kin, born in a slightly different life and walking down a slightly different road, and then…
The rest is not silence.
It’s slavery.
So make a difference. Stand up, and make a difference. Talk, shout, scream, do, volunteer, donate, teach, ask, believe–even believing we can end slavery is a step–believe you can make a difference and then do. Even a small one. Isn’t the chance of freeing a slave worth a little effort?
