It Takes a Village . . . to Rape a Child: One Woman's Struggle to Survive, to Love, and to Forgive - Paperback

by Samina Chamma Rashid (Author)

My name is Samina. My parents always called me by my nickname, Chamma. I am a Pakistani-American woman living in the "me too" era. I came to the USA in 1998 at the age of 38, with two small kids. I live near San Francisco, a city built-like myself-along a fault line that holds the potential for "the big one" with its seismic upheavals and chaotic disruption. I recently experienced a personal "big one" which fundamentally changed and eviscerated the person I had known myself to be. Like a city built on an unseen fault line, all my walls came crumbling down and left me buried in deep debris. It has now taken me three years to learn how to assess the destruction and find my way out of the chaos. I've learned that the most severe earthquakes are not those lying beneath our feet, but within our souls. Powerful forces can build up in the fault lines and crevices of our souls, and must finally and cataclysmically erupt. That is when all we have known is lost and we are forced to meet our true selves. I've survived "the big one," and this is that story.