She Got Married At 16, Became A Prostitute At 20, Now A Recluse

Like any other child, Blessing Edwin had an ambitious dream when she was five. Her dream was to acquire education and attain an enviable career that could improve her life and lift her immediate family from the dungeon of poverty.

But her beautiful dream died too soon at 16, when, against her wish, she was forcefully married off to a man twice her father’s age by her beloved mother. But in her determination to fulfill destiny,...

Blessing fled home and her bus stop was Kano, where she had earlier lived with an aunt, who trained her in the primary school prior to the forced marriage.

After escaping to Kano, Blessing was full of hopes that she can now enroll in a secondary school with the assistance of her aunt who was still eager and willing to assist her. But unfortunately, her hope was short-circuited as she constantly took ill and got admitted in the hospital over one ailment or the other.

For fear that she might be held liable if anything happened to Blessing, her aunty advised that she returned to her mother in Akwa Ibom to resolve their animosity. By the time she returned, her mother was no longer interested in her case, since had "disappointed" her by running away from her old-man husband.

Blessing recounted her experience when she returned home. She said her home-coming gave her mother an opportunity to hit back at her. She said: “She was furious when she saw me, and mocked me that I rejected a wealthy suitor for what I consider a better life and ended up a big loser.” 

Since then, her life deteriorated as her mother allegedly subjected her to sleep with different kinds of men in order to make money and sustain the family. She was 20 then. The climax came when officials of the Lagos State Government raided where Blessing worked as a sex worker and was taken to Kirikiri Prisons.

She relived her prison experience thus: “I was at the Kirikiri Prisons with other girls for some weeks before we were released. When we got out of prison, I had no place to go, but there was a boy I had known as a friend while working in the hotel. I called him and he asked me to come over to his house where he offered me accommodation. Unfortunately I got pregnant for him and to my surprise, he denied responsibility for the pregnancy, reminding me that I was a prostitute and could have been pregnant before the arrest.”

 
At 24, Blessing had seen it all; the good, the bad and the ugly. Today, she roams Lagos streets with nowhere in particular to lay her head.# 

Hmmm, what a sad story! I hope parents will learn from the experience of this lady. Majority of these early marriages doesn't end well and the scars they left on the victims (young girls) is always too lethal for them to withstand. As it stands, only God's intervention will save Blessing Edwin.

Source: TheNATION.