Eight-year-old Charity never chose to be a home help. Who would? No school, unrelenting work, minimal food and zero pay. Plus, regular beatings from her sadistic boss.
The choice was her father’s. A contact told him that a woman on Ghana’s Lake Volta was looking for an extra pair of hands around the house. Charity doesn’t know if he got paid. She just knows one day that someone came to take her and her younger sister away. Neither have seen their parents since.
“All day we spent washing and cleaning. Sometimes we’d take food to her husband who fished on the lake,” Charity recalls. “Anything we did wrong, she’d cane us. If she was really annoyed, she’d put ground ginger in our bottoms.”
