Cowering in the Corner | One Boy’s Journey from Fear to Hope

Cowering in the corner … children in Asia like Bijay are often in need of assistance at home and at school, to escape the cycle of poverty that plagues them.

Gospel for Asia (GFA World), Wills Point, Texas – One young child’s journey from cowering in the corner.

Day after day, night after night, the scene was all too familiar. Bijay would withdraw to a corner of his home in an attempt to avoid becoming the object of the venting of his father’s drunken rages. It is a scene that is common in many homes where the family lives in abject poverty, and there seems to be no hope for today or all the tomorrows that will follow.

At his tender age, Bijay could understand the poverty. His family was one of many in the village whose fathers worked in the rice paddies to provide an income upon which they could barely subsist. For Bijay, poverty was ‘normal.’

What Bijay could not understand was the indignity that a life of poverty had heaped upon his father. Kuwar had once been a young boy like Bijay with hopes and dreams of a better future, but his dreams had dissolved into a wearisome morass of hopelessness. All Bijay could understand was that his father was usually drunk and angry.

This habit, too, was common among men in the village as many suffered the cycle of shame that entraps so many fathers trying to raise a family in poverty. Shame drove them to escape from reality in alcohol. Aside from the physical abuse, the expenditure of what little income he earned for drinking continued to exacerbate the family’s poverty.

Cowering in the corner, Bijay was already heading toward the path of despair in which his father was entrapped. In fact, the child was so traumatized that he found it impossible to concentrate on his school work.

That’s the way it was the day some Gospel for Asia-supported Bridge of Hope staff came to visit Bijay’s family.


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