Stories

Pencil Cases for Change

After completing a training in Rwanda, several teachers and caregivers approached us asking if they could keep some of the school supplies we had brought with us.  We realized that they were working with children, but had no glue, scissors, crayons, colored pencils, pencils, pens, markers or paints.  How could they manage?  How could you work with children without the most basic tools?

We shared this dilemma in a seminar in Oregon and afterwards, a student said her mother, who owned an upholstery business, always wanted to do something in missions, but never knew what.  Suddenly, she saw the answer – her mother could donate bags of extra fabric to be used to sew together pencil cases.   Another group of women decided to get together and sew them all!   Someone else designed a pattern that would be simple, durable and nice looking, and before we knew it we had home-made pencil cases ready to take to our next training.A student, a business woman, a church group, friends and family from all over  the U.S.  worked together to make this happen!  And then, to top it all off, someone else donated supplies to fill these beautiful pencil cases!

This got us thinking further.  What if we could find a group of women or girls who had been rescued from sex trafficking or situations of poverty and vulnerability – and teach them the basic skills and design to sew the bags?  This would provide a job and income for these girls, while providing supplies for children’s workers around the world.

We are now seeing that dream come true.  In 2012, girls in Bangladesh will be paid fair wages to produce the bags that we will give to teachers, caregivers, and ministry leaders working with children in South Africa, India, and Bangladesh and beyond.

Listening – Terry McCurley

Anna and Donna are two Costa Rican women who attended the Celebrating Children Workshop (CCW) we ran in Jaco.  This is a training for grass-roots projects on how to work with children who have come from at risk situations such as living on the street, trafficking victims and children from abusive backgrounds.  Both women listened intently to the teaching on How and Why to Listen to Children. The result was exciting!

Donna came to me after the class and told me about the “annoying” children who lived next door. They were loud and rude and fought all the time.  But today she realized that they needed someone to listen to them, to be a witness to the pain they had experienced already in their short lives. Their family had been ripped apart – mom and dad had gotten divorced and all four girls were placed in different homes. Now two of the girls were back with their mom, but life was still very painful.

Donna felt bad that she had not seen it before. During the activity in class where we draw our past, present and future, she realized that she could use this activity to “listen to” the girls next door. Maybe this would open up a door for her to help their family. She would go right after class to buy paints, markers and paper for them.  When she left, I gave her some paints and markers that had been donated to help children in Costa Rica.

Anna and her husband lead a “Kid’s Club” on Saturdays, so she was excited that she could also use the technique of drawing as a way to listen to the children in their group. She said she wanted to know about their family situations and this was a great way to begin to “listen” to their stories. All the children drew pictures of their families and now Anna and her husband could see if the father was there, if the mother was there, how many children they had in their families, etc. One teenage girl said she could not draw her family. When asked why, she said she just couldn’t. This was painful, but also may lead to a time when she could share more with Anna and her husband.

It was just a great reminder that people in local areas can affect their own communities and even neighbors to support children who may be in at-risk situations.

 

But Why? Ange Miracle

“During the Celebrating Children Workshop, we had several opportunities for application, so that people could understand more of what was being taught and so they would have a way to remember the information.  There was a specific application time that I remember from the rest.  The title of the application was called “But Why?.”  The point of this exercise was to discover the roots of certain circumstances now present in individuals’ lives.  So, we were to break up into groups of four and pick an issue that we knew was occurring and try to understand how this issue started in the first place.

I was in a group with Scott, Leslie and Spencer.  We chose a situation of a girl that sells jewelry on the side of the road several nights out of the week.  We started the process of trying to find the root cause of why she was put on the street at night to make money.  We knew that the mother did not work and the girl’s family was making a living off these earnings.  But why were the parents not working?  We knew that the father had an addiction to drugs and alcohol and therefore could not hold a job.  We also knew that he often would cut himself.  But why did the father do these things to himself?  We came to the conclusion that the father had become addicted to drugs and alcohol to numb himself to the void and hatred he felt for himself.  The father had grown up in a difficult home himself, and didn’t understand what it meant to have a healthy home life.  So this girls’ father was just doing what he knew to survive and provide for his own family.

This was an eye opener for all of us sitting at the table – it was easy to react negatively toward the father for subjecting his young daughter to such dangerous conditions as being out late every night selling beads to make money.  However, through this exercise we realized that the actions of the father were his only way of coping with life and dealing with the abuse from his own life and, unfortunately it was his daughter that was now being subjected to the same lifestyle because of the cycle of unhealthy patterns that were passed from one generation to the next.

But for the four of us sitting at the table doing this exercise we now have a better understanding of how to help this little girl because we see more clearly the issues that were causing the breakdown and forcing this girl to the streets to make money.  And more times than not, to help the child you have to involve the parent.  If you are going to see results in the child, the trauma that the parent endured and suppressed throughout their lives has to be addressed so that change can take place in both lives.  Because any work that is accomplished with the child will not hold if they are continually going back to their home life where things are not changing.  So, from this, I was able to understand very clearly how important it is that the parent and child work through their issues in unison so that total healing can be seen and the cycle broken.”

Beauty to Behold – Theresa

We came to Jaco to strengthen and support the Freeman’s who were pioneering a project to at-risk youth.  We knew community development would be key to the their success, but to be honest, we had no idea if we would be meeting with three or thirty.  I was part of a subcommittee that came to Jaco with the intention of providing education and support to community members who wanted to address the problem of sex tourism–including child prostitution.  We know that vulnerable youth are funneled into prostitution and can literally spend a lifetime in bondage.  This city had been identified as the Bangkok of the West and while prostitution is legal, alive and well in Costa Rica, one barely needs to scratch the surface to see the un-glamorized and illegal aspects of the industry.   An entire chapter was written in the Book “The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men Who Buy it,” about Jaco and the tiny Beatle Bar, the busiest bar/brothel in the small coastal town.  In the book, Jaco is described as a town that receives tens of thousands of tourists a year and over 50 percent are men traveling alone mostly for sex tourism.  Surprisingly, our living accommodations were 1/2 a block from the Beatle Bar, making easy access for observation and investigation.

So here we were, a subgroup of 10 to 15 depending on the day.  A contingent willing to spend afternoon and evening hours seeking a creative and innovative way to examine the issues, impart and exchange information and be mobilized for action.  We were such a random group, strangely connected, with each coming to know about the meetings in a unique and unlikely fashion that it simply could not be coincidence.   The interests and needs of the individuals who gave their time to attend these meetings was broad and deep.    We came to realize that the job was beyond our capacity and yet one of the greatest things we could do was take the first step.  Our time in Jaco and with these individuals was limited and so the clear priority was about participants getting what they needed from us and each other.  By day three participants were spending hours together outside our meeting times, swapping information, devising plans for the future and supporting one another…and that was the beauty of the operation…to behold the synergy of creative and courageous individuals with shared values and difficult dreams take giant steps toward their destiny, a beauty to behold.