Imagine you are a child with autism, trapped in poverty with a family who abuses you. Your earliest memories are steeped in scarcity, and the unending ache of hunger is more familiar to you than the feeling of being full. However, compared to the other things you experience on a daily basis, the malnourishment is almost manageable. Because when you are treated like an unwanted dog by your own parents, that’s a kind of pain that never stops hurting.

You are shunned and isolated simply for how your brain works, and whenever you show behaviors typical of someone with autism, your father strikes you, pushes you, kicks you, spits on you, breaks your few treasured belongings, and/or threatens to take you to an asylum. Your mother rarely protects you from his wrath, but when she does, she simply becomes his next target for screamed insults and threats. She will take it out on you later. With a drag of her fifth cigarette for the day, she will tell you to shut up and leave her alone. Your only option is to stay small, stay quiet, and try to disappear.

The only “home” you’ve ever known is a dilapidated 500-square-foot apartment you, your parents, and your two younger siblings are packed into like sardines in a dirty tin. From black mold, to pests, to secondhand smoke, to broken plumbing, to faulty electrical wiring… You face it all every day, year after year. And your parents’ disastrous hoarding tendencies quadruple the effects of each of these problems, making your life a living hell.

Despite it all, you somehow find the strength and optimism inside of you over and over again to keep going. You dream of having a room of your own to decorate to your heart’s content. You imagine quiet spaces and clean floors and a comfortable chair to do your work at. Part of you wants to believe that there is a life outside of this poverty and that one day you can break free if you just work hard enough! So you dedicate your every waking hour to school and to furthering your career through your talents.

Despite the starvation, the loneliness, the sleep deprivation, the dental pain, the asthma problems (worsened by secondhand smoke from your mother's cigarettes), and the abuse, you work hard every single day for more than 16 years. But no matter how hard you try, how late you stay up working, how much you sweat and cry and bleed for your future, your career does not take off. You are still stuck in poverty, in an apartment crammed to the brim with trash, surrounded by endless noise, and shackled to an abusive family that hates you.

You’re 24 now. Still autistic and now deeply traumatized and frail from your years of being mistreated. You are exhausted to your very core, and you are no closer to escape.

What would you do?

Even when faced with the worst of the worst, many of us probably feel like we have options. In many countries, we trust that there are safety nets, public services, or people we can reach out to when our financial situation is bleak. We trust that there is somewhere we can go to report abuse or to seek safe refuge. We trust that there is someone to call when we are in danger.

But in Hungary, these options are limited for many people—and they are practically nonexistent for someone as poor and as vulnerable as my best friend Dorka. Corruption, lack of funding, and apathy mar every single system that could save my friend from the horrors I’ve described to you above, and at this point, there is no amount of “pulling herself up by her bootstraps” that will fix this! Hungary has some of the highest suicide rates in Europe for a reason.

Please. Hear this story of a girl who has remained kind and loving despite years of neglect and physical and emotional abuse! See her humanity and the lovely art she has been making for more than a decade! She deserves a proper home. She deserves to have food to eat every day. She deserves to be loved and cared for, unconditionally, for exactly who she is!

Dorka needs ALL OF US in order to finally escape the immoral conditions she has been trapped in her whole life. So please help me free her from her living nightmare NOW before it’s too late!

For more details about Dorka and her situation and to see more photos, please visit this Google Doc I have put together.

Goals:

Thank you so much for reading my friend’s story. Please help me change her life for the better!

Simon ♥

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