Hey Friends!
My name is Reshma Bangar – I am a 25 year old, small town, Mississippi girl. I grew up riding four wheelers, playing sports, and hanging out with my friends in the small town of Laurel, Mississippi. My life on the outside seemed pretty typical, until I tell you where I started.
I am the baby of 5 siblings. Two beautiful sisters and two handsome brothers. We have the best mother a child could ask for. My mother, however, plays a big role in why my heart has ached for the middle east. Lyna is her name, but she is widely known as “Nanny”. When Lyna was 16, she was shipped off on a boat with whom with become the father to her 5 children. Her marriage to my father ended in abuse: sexually, mentally, physically, and emotionally. In the states, we all gasp at this “lifetime movie”, but in the middle east, it’s a common practice. Most women and children in the middle east are treated like animals, or worse. Sex trafficking continues to rise, child abductions are at an all time high, and poverty gets worse by the second. I grew up hearing terrible stories about my father, our neighbors, and our friends.
Surely, with all this behind the scenes information, I would rise up and do something about it, right? Wrong. I went through life as normally as I could. I turned my eyes and ears to positive, and wouldn’t even read the news that came across about the horrific tragedies happening in my own culture.
This all changed when I went back to the middle east for the first time in years. I chose to go to Bangladesh, mainly out of fear of my father knowing I was in India. Little did I know, this trip would change my life. It would cause me to go back for an extended amount of time, have crazy dreams of building a home for the very girls I resembled as a child (with no money to do it), and now be in the FINAL stages of opening up a girls home for girls being rescued from the sex trade.
