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| Famatta Massalay In Her Office.. |
Written By GF and posted by LIB HONEY WORLD...
Living in a cramped concrete house in the heart of Liberia’s sweltering capital, 8-year-old Famatta Massalay always dreamed of seeing snow.
One day, her mother told her she was about to get her chance.
But first, “we have to play a game,” Massalay’s mother said.
The mom taught the girl how to write a name that wasn’t hers and to tell authorities she was 10, not 8. Then she took her daughter to the immigration office in Monrovia to get a visa.
Soon after, on a stifling January afternoon in 1978, Massalay set off for JFK Airport for what she was told would be the adventure of a lifetime — the chance to see New York City blanketed in a perfect swirl of white.
The child wore a freshly sewn bell-bottom pantsuit and no coat and carried a small suitcase as she kissed her parents goodbye and waved to them from the stairs leading to the plane.
“I’ll see you tomorrow!” Massalay recalls telling them, confused by the tears pouring down her father’s face.
It was the last time she ever saw them.
Shortly after her arrival in New York City, the girl’s exciting journey became a waking nightmare. Massalay learned she had been sold into the modern-day slave trade as a “house girl.” She would be trapped in domestic servitude for the next six years — cooking, cleaning and caring for strangers while being beaten, forced to sleep in a bathtub and raped, giving birth on the day she celebrated her 14th birthday.
Massalay believes her parents were duped into paying a family to take her to the US, thinking their daughter would be provided safety and an education they could never give her.
It turned out the other family was part of a labor-trafficking network.
“I remember spending hours and days crying, just praying, ‘God, come get me. When are you going to come get me?’ ” Massalay told The Post.
Now, 40 years later, the dark clouds behind her eyes are nearly impossible to discern. Massalay is of one of the city Department of Education’s brightest stars, starting her 23rd year with the agency. She has worked as a substance abuse counselor and high school teacher in Brooklyn, this year teaching history and English at the Academy for College Preparation and Career Exploration in East Flatbush.
She says she wants to share her story to raise awareness about modern-day slavery. There are about 14.2 million people currently trapped in forced labor across the globe, with hundreds in New York, according to the Polaris Project, a nonprofit that runs a national hotline for trafficking victims with assistance from the federal government.
Massalay also has another, equally important message — hope.
“I tell my students all the time, when you learn something, you have to teach someone else what you learn — you have to always pay it forward because that’s what’s going to propel this world to evolve,” said Massalay, 48.
“There is a kid, just like me, in this city right now, and that kid needs to know . . . ‘You don’t have to take this. And we can give you information to leave today.’ ”
Massalay says her saga began when her mother, Selena, a teacher at a Monrovia primary school, was persuaded by the facility’s headmistress to send her daughter to America to live with her relatives to give her a US education.
Massalay said she believes the headmistress and her family were in on the human-trafficking scheme — and they had an easy target in her mother.
Civil war was coming to Liberia, and within a decade, the West African nation would be ravaged by unthinkable atrocities — child soldiers as young as 10 raping and killing relatives and drinking the blood of enemy kids straight from their ripped-out hearts.
“Political unrest was brewing,” Massalay said. “My dad was a police officer, and my mom was a teacher. Those are the people they come for first.
“[My mother’s] hopes were that my life would not be the desperateness that existed for young women in Liberia at that time,” she said. “The philosophy was, I’d come to America, obtain an education, evolve into a good person with a decent life and come back.”
But when Massalay stepped off the plane in Queens, disappointment hit her as fast as the fierce air cut through her flimsy blazer.
There was snow, but instead of fluffy powder, it was dirty mounds of icy muck. Massalay was picked up by a female relative of the headmistress and brought to a row house in Flatbush.
Initially, the woman appeared harmless. But the next day, she discovered Massalay, a little girl alone in a strange land, had wet the bed — and severely beat her for the innocent infraction.
“She told me right then and there that since I’m a ‘pee pot,’ I’m going to sleep in the bathtub,” said Massalay, who by then was going by the new name she was given, Musu Doherty. “I think that was the first time I felt dehumanized, and I didn’t even know what dehumanized meant. I just felt like I wasn’t a person, and I wanted so badly to go home.’’
That bathtub would be Massalay’s bed for the next few years — and only the beginning of the abuse she endured.
The 8-year-old was forced to cook, clean and care for the woman’s three children — 2-year-old twins and a 9-year-old boy. Massalay was not allowed to go to school, and if she did something wrong, she was beaten and sometimes not allowed to eat.
“You never knew where it was coming from. Maybe I took too long to respond to a question, maybe I burned the rice or didn’t wash the clothes well or didn’t clean something,” Massalay recalled.
She said she was passed around to homes in Brooklyn and Queens, where other relatives of the headmistress lived, to work for them, too.
Massalay traveled with her few belongings stuffed in a trash bag, continuing to be tortured, physically and emotionally, nearly daily.
‘I knew the streets had nothing for me … I don’t know anybody. I don’t have any friends … I wasn’t an adult, I was a kid. I knew kids have no power, so let me just stay here.’
Meanwhile, her documents were locked away in a drawer, and phone calls were forbidden.
She had only one interaction with her family in Liberia in this time — a phone call from her father when she was about 11, Massalay said. She later learned the call came only after her dad put a gun to a female trafficker’s head and demanded she call his daughter.
“I said I wanted to go home . . . and I was so scared,” Massalay recalled. “He said, ‘We’re going to get you home’ . . . But then it never happened.
“I remember I used to think, ‘I’m going to . . . run away,’ but then I kept saying, ‘Where am I going to go?’”
At one of the homes in Brooklyn, another trafficked Liberian girl begged Massalay to escape with her. But Massalay thought she would be worse off on the city’s streets, then rife with crime and violence.
“I knew the streets had nothing for me . . . I don’t know anybody. I don’t have any friends. I don’t even know any phone numbers,” Massalay said. “I don’t know how to get to Liberia. I know I need to get on a plane, but I have no money . . . I wasn’t an adult, I was a kid. I knew kids have no power, so let me just stay here.”
Massalay was allowed to attend school after age 10, but it offered little respite. She was relentlessly bullied for her accent, traditional African clothing and high grades. While attending Cunningham Junior High School in predominantly white Sheepshead Bay, she said, she was “chased every day” to and from the train “with bats and chains” and told, “Go home, n—-r.”
At 13, Massalay was raped and impregnated by a teen who lived next door, she said. He rang her bell when she was home alone.
“He kept saying how he needed to talk to me . . . He just pushed his way in and just forced himself on me. It was like he had been given a drug or something,” Massalay said. “I still don’t understand it . . . and I thought if I just pretended it didn’t happen, then it didn’t happen . . . I didn’t say anything to anybody. [But] it never went away. It just never went away.”
When one of her traffickers found out she was pregnant, Massalay said, the woman beat her.
“She said, ‘What did you do to yourself?’ ” Massalay said. “I explained to her what happened. She wouldn’t believe me. She told me I was a slut, a whore, a liar.”
The trafficker took Massalay to get an abortion, but the teen was in her second trimester, and the doctor refused. The trafficker then told Massalay she could stay in the home and continue to serve her as long as she put the baby up for adoption.
That’s when Massalay says she “finally snapped.”
“For the first time, I just made the decision in my head, ‘This is it. I can’t do this anymore . . . I have to become my own defender because I don’t have one,’” she said.
On Massalay’s 14th birthday, she gave birth to her daughter, Christina, and the two entered the city’s foster-care system together.
The move was life-changing.
“[It] put me in a position for my status in this country to become legalized, so the bad really manifested to a blessing,” Massalay said.
“I always tell Christina, ‘You saved my life because, by you being born, that forced me to stand up for you. I didn’t even know how to stand up for myself, but I knew that I wasn’t going to allow the life that I had to be your life.’”
As Massalay told her story, her voice was mostly stoic and measured, as if she were recounting a bad dream a friend told her about — not her own account of horrific abuse and enslavement.
Her emotions showed only when she brought up her mother, particularly the time when Amnesty International arranged a phone call between the two 15 years after Massalay was trafficked. By this time, Massalay’s father, Jacob, had died.
“The first and last conversation I had with my mother was not my best day as a human being. I don’t think I’ve ever been mean to anyone except for that time,” Massalay said.
“I was 23 years old and full of anger . . . My words were very, very harsh. Even when she was crying, I kept [pushing] . . . because I blamed her . . . [She put me] in this strange country, these people were psychologically torturing me, they’re calling me all kinds of names, I’m getting beat, some days I don’t get to eat.”
Massalay said she wanted her mother to answer one question: “All these years, how could you sleep?”
She said her mother could only say she prayed for her constantly. Massalay said she never got to grill her mother on how much she knew about her childhood in the US, but she now believes her parents were good people who got duped.
The two never spoke again.
Massalay’s mother died, and her daughter said it took years for her to fully forgive her and her father. In 2013, Massalay went to Liberia for the first time since she was 8. She went to visit her parents’ graves and find some measure of peace.
“There were a lot of losses. My parents lost me. I lost them. I lost my innocence, my family was ripped apart,” Massalay said.
In her parents’ memory, Massalay has started The Jacob and Selena Project, a nonprofit named after her mother and father that aims to educate Liberian families on trafficking and provide them with basic needs so they won’t be faced with the tough decisions her parents faced.
As a teacher, Massalay has used her story to help students, including a girl she urged to go to her parents for help after getting pregnant.
Massalay has been honored with dozens of awards, including for being an outstanding mentor to other teachers and for helping students.
But she says the accolades aren’t what push her to continue spreading awareness. It’s her own memories of abandonment, the still-festering wounds of a broken family and the realities of a childhood lost.
“As recent as last year, I had a co-worker from Nigeria [in the car],” she said, “and I told her a little synopsis of my story, and she said, ‘Why do you call that trafficking? My family’s been doing that for years . . . My mother brings girls from Nigeria, their family gives my mother money, and they help us, they cook, they clean.’ ”
Massalay pulled the car over.
“She said, ‘That’s not trafficking.’ I said, ‘Yes it is. Look up the definition,’ ” Massalay recalled. “ ‘You’re two master’s in, woman. You’ve been teaching for eight years-plus. If you don’t know this, who will?’”
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