Different worlds

It is 1860 and Claire looked at her ball gown. With a disappointed sigh she put it aside. She had enjoyed the ball immensely until one of her friends spilled something on her dress. It was her favorite dress and she did not know if her maid would be able to get the stain out. She angrily threw the dress on the floor.
Louise, her maid, stepped into her living room at that moment. Her eye fell on the dress lying on the floor. She picked it up and wanted to put it on a chair.
‘Oh, what a waste of your dress’, she exclaimed. ‘What a nasty stain this is’.
‘Still my favorite dress’, said Claire. ‘Do you think you can get the stain out?’
‘I’ll take it to the “Order of Holy Nuns”, they will surely know what to do with it. ‘It is important,’ she said, ‘that it is brought today, otherwise we will not be able to finish the alterations to the dress by tomorrow.’
Claire and Louise arrived at the convent and walked straight to the washroom.
Claire looked around in shock when she saw the miserable conditions under which the maids were working. There was a large damp room with large tubs where some of the maids were doing the washing with bloody hands. Some were no older than 10 years old.
She looked at the nun in astonishment and asked, ‘Is that what I pay for?’
‘Pay?’, one of the older maids shouted.
‘Shut up,’ hissed the nun.
‘Or what?’ asked Louise.
‘Then it will be an isolation cell with bread and water,’ was the answer she got back.
‘Is that so?’ asked Claire.
The nun tried to get Claire and Louise out of the washroom but Claire walked over to the older girl, took her aside and started a conversation with her.
The girl told her about how badly she was treated in the convent. Claire discovered that the maids were not only forced to work but also locked up, punished and removed from society. held.
They were told that they were worthless and that there was no prospect of a better life, because they couldn’t do anything anyway.
The depression, the fear was palpable among the girls.
Claire and Louise left the convent, defeated and distraught.

Daphne slammed the diary she had been reading shut with a bang. The diary belonged to her great-great-grandmother Claire.
The story about the girls in the convent had affected Daphne. Daphne decided to look up more information about the convent on the internet.
It was 164 years ago, but maybe she could still find something.
She couldn’t find anything about the convent ‘Order of the Holy Nuns’, but she did come across identical stories.
In the queue at the checkout, Daphne got into conversation with a woman. The woman was elderly and asked if Daphne wanted to help her pack the groceries.
The woman lived nearby and Daphne walked with her. The woman told about her childhood and how she had grown up in a convent and had done forced labor with children there.
‘She still suffered from it,’ she said, ‘but not as much as she used to.’
‘That wasn’t so long ago,’ Daphne replied. ‘Child labor was already prohibited then, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, that’s right, we demanded attention for it. From the nuns, the media, and from the minister.
She continued: ‘The nuns apologized to us for their behavior. This was so important to us, because in this way we received recognition. ‘We were finally able to put the trauma in its place and move on with our lives.’
Daphne walked home, thinking.
What a world of difference between her and me, she thought to herself, how I and my friends grew up and how the girls in the convent grew up.
But how does the world look the same? It doesn’t.
Even though the years have passed, when you hear the stories from the old days and now, it seems as if time has stood still.