Prayers For Justice - A Prayer Guideনমুনা

Pray For Girls Who Stand Up For Equality

Our final stop lands us in a village of India where we meet a local hero. While Sampatya would never call herself one, the 16-year-old has spent many of her teen years as a champion for children in poverty. 

When Sampatya walks through her village in India, she is a hero to the little girls she passes. She is educated in a world where girls don’t go to school. She fights for justice in a world where she is supposed to be silent. 

When she was just 14, Sampatya overheard her parents discussing the marriage they had arranged for her. She was devastated because she had seen other girls in her village treated like property, married off to the highest bidder. There was no room for dreams in their new lives as they struggled to care for older husbands and a quick succession of babies. 

This wasn’t the life Sampatya wanted. For years, she had attended a Compassion center in her community, where she learned that girls hold as much value as boys. Her tutors at the center encouraged her in her studies, even while her own parents were reluctant to send her to school.

Sampatya knew she had to stand up for more than herself. She had to advocate for her classmates and peers. For her neighbors and friends. Perhaps most of all, for her younger sisters.

But her defiance had dire consequences. “My parents would not talk to me properly and would not cook for me,” she says. “Although I lived with my parents under one roof, they treated me like a stranger and kept their distance from me, which was heartbreaking.”

Sampatya went to the only place she knew would support her decision—the Compassion center. Both her tutor and the center’s director visited her parents, doing their best to convince them that marrying their daughter off would have terrible long-term consequences.

Sam, the center director at the time, knew how critical it was to support the teen. He had already seen so many young girls, filled with potential and promise, disappear from Compassion’s program, only to find out later that they had been married off by their families.

“We had already lost more than 20 girls who were secretly married off by their parents,” says Sam. “And Sampatya could have been one of those girls. Her ambitions could have ended so easily had she not informed us in time about her [upcoming] marriage. We spent hours talking to her parents about her future.”

Eventually, Sampatya’s parents called off her marriage. Her relationship with them remains strained, but she says standing up for girls in her community was the right choice. Because of her example, the center conducted several awareness programs to educate village elders about the implications of child marriage. Progress was slow, but even one success story, one saved teen, was worth it.

Today, Sampatya is in college, majoring in humanities and studying to be a teacher. She wants to show girls that they hold more value than a dowry - that they have rights and a voice to speak out against injustice. Because once Sampatya learned that God had a plan for her, she refused to stop learning, growing and fighting.

God, we thank You for being our Father and the Father to many children around the world. We pray that each child would know their intrinsic worth in Your eyes, that You love them so much You sent Jesus to die for them. Thank You that we can trust You to complete Your good work in them. We pray that You would continue to surround these children with Your people, and that they would find a safe place to thrive and learn more about You.

Note: When India's government forced Compassion to end its program in the country in 2017, 147,000 children, young adults, babies and their caregivers stopped receiving benefits of our programs.

Read more about Samptya here.