“I am lucky that I get helped on the first time”

I am thirteen years of age.  I was repeated in form one twice because of missing school too much.  There were ten of us children in the family.  My parents separated and my mother was having a de-facto relationship with children of her own while my father was having a de-facto relationship with another woman with children of their own.  My father took four of us, myself and my twin sister and two of my brothers, while my mother took five.  One of us died from an accident in a very young age. 

My stepmother sometime sends me and my twin sister to sell leis (kahoa) instead of going to school.  She would make us stay home and babysit her babies; we would do the house work, including cooking and washing.  If she thinks that we’ve been misbehave than we will go without dinner that evening.  We tend to run away a lot from home to our grandparents, but she would come and get us back and warn us and sometimes make our father hit us not to go to our grandparents.  We then run away and live with other people but she would find us eventually and bring us home.  People thought that she loved us when she indents to find us and bring us home but it was only so that we come home and do the work.

As we run away, we do robbery sometimes in order to survive, and we weren’t interested in school anymore.  Along the way I got raped three times, the first two rapes they were strangers, I did speak up but no one believed me, the third time, he was the neighbor who happen to live together with his girlfriend and when I told her about him raping me, the girlfriend went to the police and report it.  I was then taken to the Safe House.  While I was at Safe House I was given help so that I can be able to see things clearly and can be able to see my future ahead of me.  Now I regret not going to school, and realize what happens to me when running from home, most likely I will be access to abuse of any kinds.  Now I can’t wait to go home and start a new life and go back to school.

Without the Safe House, maybe I was still being out there experiencing different kinds of abuses.  I count myself lucky that I did get help on the right time, because something worst might happen to me if it was not reported to the police.