This last week has been one of my hardest weeks here. A few days ago a came down with a nasty cold/flu and discovered the same night that I had gotten lice from our trip to Cambodia. I have been boiling water to wash my sheets and pour into my hair since we dont have hot water or a wash machine. I am also having trouble knowing when I have fever because we dont have air con (the weather right now is similar to July in texas)I am constantly hot and sweating. It is very easy to slip into a state of self- pity, but then I realize that so many of the women and children we work with experience the same discomforts on a daily basis.
Monday night the Word Made Flesh field in Kolkata,India suffered a great loss Tuesday after discovering that one of their Sari Bari ladies had been murdered. (Sari Bari, a business initiative for women, began in February 2006 in a red-light area of Kolkata. They began in a small room with three women who wanted to start the road to freedom from the sex trade; they now provide jobs for 28 women and expect to reach 50 women by the end of 2009. Sari Bari trains the new women to sew blankets and bags from recycled saris (the sari is the traditional dress for Indian women). In addition to tailoring lessons, the training program includes literacy, math, budgeting, nutrition and informal group therapy. The community desires to see a transformation of the women’s minds and to encourage the women’s value and self-esteem through on-going training and support. Visit the Sari Bari website to learn more and to buy a handmade blanket or bag.)
From one of the WMF staff:
One of our ladies who has spent three months with us in training was murdered by a customer last night. There will be no justice for her… everyone in the brothels knows who did it but will not speak up. This is a devastating loss for our community. The Sari Bari ladies in particular see themselves in this loss and the realities and violence that some of them still face as they continue to live in the brothels. Please pray for our dear ladies and for Pornima’s family-who would not even come to see her because of the shame of where she was working.
Pornima had a great day at Sari Bari Monday. There was new hope and belief in herself, that she could have freedom and was a mere day away from completing her first blanket. She will be cremated with her blanket sometime today or tomorrow and will surrounded by the family God gave her three months ago in all of us at Sari Bari.
We are brokenhearted that Pornima will not be able to see the dream for her life fulfilled. We can only hope for freedom in the next.
Jesus have mercy on us and on the whole world.
What violence has beset us this day
What violence has beset us this day
Of all days, this day was most unexpected
Most vile, violent and cruel
Because it is the day after hope still lingered in one woman’s heart
Yet it lingers no longer with her end
Today is everyday and the today no one wanted
Today is for weeping over violence
Weeping for freedom lost
Where no freedom can be found
Powerless, fearful silent
Offenders protected
Shame for such injustice is heavy on us all.
Three months of freedom tossed like her body
Aside.
What violence has beset us this day.
We all are her. She was us.
Part of us left with her.
The violence committed, indignity
Against her, against us all.
She flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone
This sister gone.
Her fight for freedom was violently wrenched from her grasp,
We will fight on remembering.
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These last two months I have realized that so many Americans live in an illusion. The people we see one the streets are the reality of the world. This is a dangerous realization. To realize this truth without being crushed by its implications is only possible with the knowledge that Christ will one day bring justice to this suffering.
The point of my trip is not to fix their problems, but to be compassionate to them (Luke 6:36). For so many of us compassion has simply meant to shower them with financial aid, and although there is a place for helping their physical needs, most of the time all I can do is to recognize them as people who have been made in the image of God. The word compassion is derived from the Latin words 'pati'and 'cum', which together means "to suffer with."
Sometimes the most powerful way to love someone is by simply suffering with them.
This is an excerpt from Henri Nouwen's Compassion: A reflection on the Christian life
"To the outsider, much Christian behavior seems to be naive, impractical, and often little less than an exercise in self-flagellation. The outsider understandably believes that anyone who feels attracted to suffering and pain and who desires to humble himself or herself to a position of servanthood cannot be taken very seriously. Striving to be a slave seems such a perverted way of living that it offends human sensibilities. Nobody finds anything wrong or strange with attempting to help people who are visibly lacking the basic necessities of life, and it appears quite reasonable to try to alleviate suffering when this is possible. But to leave a successful position and enter freely, consciously, and intentionally into a position of disrepute and to become dependent and vulnerable seems to be a form of masochism that defies the best of our aspirations... Radical servanthood does not make sense unless we introduce a new level of understanding and see it as the way to encounter God himself. To be humble and persecuted cannot be desired unless we can find God in humility and persecution. When we begin to see God himself, the source of all our comfort and consolation, in the center of servanthood, compassion becomes much more than doing good for unfortunate people. Radical servanthood, as the encounter with the compassionate God, takes us beyond the distinctions between wealth and poverty, success and failure, fortune and bad luck. Radical servanthood is not an enterprise in which we try to surround ourselves with as much misery as possible, but a joyful way of life in which our eyes are opened to the vision of the true God who chose the way of servanthood to make himself known. The poor are called blessed not because poverty is good, but because theirs is the kingdom in heaven; the mourners are called blessed not because mourning is good, but because they shall be comforted.
Here we are touching the profound spiritual truth that service is an expression of the search for God and not just of the desire to being about individual or social change. This is open to all sorts of misunderstanding, but its truth is confirmed in the lives of those for whom service is a constant and uninterrupted concern. As long as the help we offer to others is motivated primarily by the changes we may accomplish, our service cannot last. When results do not appear, when success is absent, when we are no longer liked or praised for what we do, we lose the strength and motivation to continue. When we see nothing but sad, poor, sick, or miserable people who, even after our many attempts to offer help, remain sad, poor, sick, and miserable, then the only reasonable response is to move away in order to prevent ourselves from becoming cynical or depressed. Radical servanthood challenges us, while attempting persistently to overcome poverty, hunger, illness, and any other form of human misery, to reveal the gentle presence of our compassionate God in the midst of our broken world."
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