“This was the first time in my life that this young Avatar had taken a stance against an injustice that was done to me, except for my tantrums – which didn’t count. Both my sister and I knew that these women were committing a wrong against us by keeping these toys from us, and then lying to us about whom they belonged to. Playing with this dollhouse, and its toys, against the expressed order of these two women, could be seen as just an act of defiance by a little girl and her sister, and a natural thing for two little girls in our situation to want to do. But for a child to make the decision to actually do so, especially when her elder sister kept warning her not to, was very unnatural, since these two babies were living with people whom they did not like or trust. It took courage, and a strong sense of being wronged, for a young child to do something like this, in such a difficult situation. This was the first time that I had defied anyone in authority that had done me wrong. But it was just the beginning of my life of challenging and opposing injustices of every kind, against myself, against my family, or against anyone.

The traumas that I had suffered to that point in my three-year-old life had caused me to develop a problem. But it was a problem that children my age often had, even if they were not abused or mistreated. Shortly after we were left with these women, I started wetting my bed, and after a while, I started doing so regularly. I was not trying to wet my bed, and I was already toilet trained by my mother. But I just could not stop wetting my bed no matter how hard I tried. I was too young to realize that bedwetting was a symptom of traumas that someone is going through; and I did not know that it was normal for a child who is under a lot of stress to lose control of their bladder, as I had done. All I knew was that I was a child who felt unhappy, scared, alone, abandoned, betrayed, and rejected by my own father, mother, brothers, uncles, and aunts. All I knew was that they had disappeared from my life, and left my sister and I in the home of two strangers, who did not care about us, and who really did not want to have us around. Looking back at the bed-wetting problem that I had developed, I am surprised that this was the only symptom I developed, from the traumas I was going through, and had been put through already.

These two women did not know how to stop a little child from wetting her bed. Each time that I did so, they would have to drag the mattress outside for the sun to dry up the urine on it, and remove some of the strong urine smell from it. This bed belonged to their daughter, who was now an adult, and it was being stained and ruined every time this child urinated on it. They did not know what to do, to help me to stop wetting their daughter’s bed. They did not know how to protect this mattress, from being badly stained and from smelling like urine. But what they knew was that they had to find a way to stop a three-year-old child from wetting their mattress, to stop me from wetting my bed at nights. They were going to force me to stop bedwetting; they were going to punish me for destroying their good mattress. They were going to put me in a place to sleep, where I did not have a bed that I could wet, and where they did not have to worry about having to clean up any urine that a little child may release, during her long unhappy nights of rest.

They had a third bedroom in their home; and they had turned this room into a home for the hens, and chickens, and roosters, for a small poultry business that they had started years ago. These two elderly women, who were considered good Christians, and a respectful family, by most people in their community, decided one day to punish and discipline a three-year-old child, who was suffering from being in a strange home, and from not having her family around.

One night, they decided to put this unhappy little girl to sleep in the same room that their chickens and hens and roosters also slept in. It was an experience that left a deep scar in my mind, and in my heart, that still remains with me today. I knew that they had fowl sheds in that room, within a few days after I got there. It was hard to ignore the loud clucking sounds of fowls, because they sounded like they were close to the house. This bedroom was at the back part of the house, but sometimes you could here the sound of chickens, hens, and roosters, coming from that room. I had been in that room many times before, and I would just stand there and look at the fowls, observing them, enjoying their presence and their beauty as part of the natural world. I was not afraid of them, and I did not try to make them afraid of me. I was use to being around farm animals, because of the different animals that my family had in the small farm area in the backyard of my grandmother’s house.

I love animals, and as I grew older and saw the cruel and dishonest way that people often behaved towards me, and each other, I came to embrace the honesty, the purity, and the beauty of the children of the Mother of Nature. I came to see them as being more of a family to me, than the two-legged and five fingered animals called humans. I love them because they love unconditionally, unless they have been mistreated and deformed. I trust them because they have never tried to hurt me in any way, unless they have been hurt, and they think I may also try to hurt them as well. I rely on them for information about the natural world around me, and even about the movement of people around me, because they are couriers of nature, and their information is always completely accurate.

But I do not want to sleep with them. And when I was put in that room, and they locked the door behind me, I knew that I was going to endure one of the worse nights of my young life on Earth. I really do not remember how I got through that night; and even today, I really do to not want to remember. Being locked in a fowl shed, lined with cages filled with dozens and dozens of fowls, inside what use to be a bedroom, is not an experience that anyone wants to recall. A fowl shed is a place, that carries a smell that makes you want to hold your breath and cover your nostrils, if you stay inside it for too long. Fowl sheds are usually well ventilated to keep the strong foul odour from staying in the shed, and even causing the fowls to become ill, and they are usually cleaned often for the same reasons. But fowl sheds are never built inside a bedroom. Bedrooms are designed for people to sleep in, and not for fowls to live in. If a bedroom is turned into a fowl shed, then it becomes a dangerous and unhealthy place to be in, for a long period of time, unless you are an animal of the poultry type.

I was not an animal, yet on this night, these two women had de-humanized me, by treating me like one of their animals. There was no bed in this fowl shed, and I had no choice but to find a place on the floor to sleep for the night. I remember being cold as I lie down to sleep on the floor with all those animals. I remember curling up my body to try to keep myself warm. I was cold, tired, hurt, stunned, and sad all at the same time. It was dark in that room, it was stuffy, and it smelled awful. I finally fell asleep that night on the floor in that fowl shed, and I slept through the night, only because I was very tired.

I knew I did not want to stay awake all night, locked in that room staring at the hens, the chickens, and the roosters, as they stood or sat in their small cubicles - looking at me, and probably wondering why they had a human child sleeping in their shed with them. Later on in my life, I heard about another Avatar who also slept in a shed with animals, when he was a newborn baby. I thought about how this Avatar, who later became a carpenter, had spent the first days of his life in a manger with the animals in that inn in the city of Bethlehem, and how I spent a night sleeping alone in a fowl shed filled with chickens, hens, and roosters. Maybe it is the destiny of Avatars to sleep with animals, at some point in their life, as a way of reminding them of their humility, and of their work as Cosmic servants for all beings. Maybe that is a way of showing human beings that Gods have been there as low as the other Races of Beings that humanity has degraded, without wanting to be, without meaning to be, without needing to be.

Forcing anyone to sleep in a fowl shed, even for an hour was wrong, and cruel. What these two old women did to a little girl should not have been done to anyone. It would have been cruel, for them to have even put their dogs in that room to sleep with those fowls, even if those fowls were locked up in cages to keep the dogs from going after them. Even their dogs might have developed some illness, after a while, from sleeping in that closed shed with those fowls. Yet they had placed me in that smelly, filthy, unhealthy room to sleep with their animals, and they locked the door to make sure that I had to stay in there all night by myself - with no light, with no ventilation, and with no concern for my health or for my feelings. Fortunately, I did not have to spend another night sleeping in that fowl shed, because of the manner in which my stay in that unhealthy room had affected my health.

I woke up the next morning in that fowl shed feeling very sick. I felt cold and hot all over my body, and my head did not feel like my own. When one of those women came to let me out of that room, she realized that I was ill. So they rubbed some ointment all over my body, gave me something hot to drink, and then put me to bed. It was the same bed that they did not want me to sleep on anymore, because of my bedwetting problem. It was the same bed that they had punished me for wetting, by locking me in that room with the fowls for the night. I was not put in that room to sleep with the fowls anymore. I had gotten some kind of disease from sleeping there, and it took me a long time before I got better. I don’t remember being taken to see a doctor, but I remember being ill for a long time. The only reason I think that they did not put me back in that room to sleep with those fowls, was because they did not want to take the risk of having me becoming sick again, and possibly even dying; and dying in their own home, by their own hands. But whatever the reason, I was relieved that I was not forced to spend another night in that foul place, sleeping with the fowls.

Illness is one of the most powerful means that someone can use to take control of their lives, and to defy others who would continue to abuse them if they were healthy. When others know that you are sick, they cannot ask you to do anything for them, and they do not expect you to be able to do anything for yourself, especially if you are really ill. It is also the most obvious way that someone can inform others, that there is something wrong with their body; and also that they have some level of dis-eased and un-balance in some aspect of their life at that time. My illness saved my life. It kept those cruel women from punishing me further, for an act that I could not control or prevent at the time. I did not stop wetting my bed until I left the home of those women, but they did not lock me up in that fowl shed of a bedroom to sleep again.

Even though I was no longer being abused, especially in the horrendous way in which I had been that one night, I continued to suffer. I missed my family, I missed my home, I missed the people who had been there for me all my young life – my mother, my father, my brothers, and the great life I had lived with them. Both myself, and my sister were suffering and aching for our family, especially for the mother we had, and even for the daddy that we no longer had. Every night, we would spend hours just calling for our parents. My sister Christine and I would spend hours, almost every night we lived with these women, just lying down on our stomachs and banging our feet on the bed - and we said the same thing over and over again until we finally fell asleep:

“I want mommy, I want daddy,
Where is mommy, where is daddy?
Why don’t mommy come and see us?
Why don’t daddy come and see us?
Don’t they want us anymore?
Don’t they love us anymore?”

That’s what we did for many nights for about two years, until we left that house, and left the custody of those two cold-hearted elder women, who did not like children. Life for two little sisters did not get any better - it only got worse and worse. Two strangers, who were being well paid to look after us, were abusing us. And we had no one to complain to about it. No one had come around to see how we were doing, no one had written to find out if we were all right, and even if they did, these women did not let us know. Most of my memories of living with those two elderly women are unhappy and painful ones, especially my experience of being locked up for an entire night with their fowls in their fowl shed.
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