Trigger Warning – This story contains information about sexual assault, violence, and/or suicide which may be triggering to survivors.
Hanging by a single nail on a mostly barren plaster wall in Alicia Lanchimba’s living room is a picture of the Holy Mother of Quinche. Written in Spanish at the bottom: “Holy Mother of Quinche pray for us.” She has been called “the people’s Madonna,” who watches over the indigenous Andean tribes in the Ecuadorian highlands, where Alicia and her family of five make their home.
Prayers alone, however, would not deliver her from the hell she endured daily as a child at the hands of her employers.
Like many girls in Ecuador, Alicia started working at a young age, and by the time she was 14 she had left the Andean mountains to work as a cook, nanny and maid for a family in neighboring Colombia.
Alicia tells her story on an …