One Wild and Precious Life

on "be"ing here...

2011-07-09T16:26:00.001-07:00

Sitting here in my sweet neighborhood in Portland, OR, minutes from great food and drink, enjoying the quiet. Yesterday, first time in a month, I felt a little lonely. Still looking for a church community and still letting my introverted socially ackward nature get the best of me most days. (except Monday’s when I go to a Drink and Draw …it’s a bar where you can draw costumed models) I think I knew this would happen…the tired restlessness of facing the next step of letting going is overwhelming me. Pursing beauty and rest easier and harder than I thought.

Harder…even rest takes discipline. So does creating and seeking/seeing beauty. Creation takes commitment, discipline, willingness to fail or maybe willingness to allow what is created to not be appreciated (learning to let this false sense of internal disapproval go is hard).

Easy…this Oregon, beauty is everywhere. I live in a comfortable beautiful home.

Sabbatical so far has mostly been good days. Discovered that though I longed and hoped for a trip to Italy at the end of my sabbatical to discover beauty there…it is not worth working 10-20 hours a week. So no real part time job for me.

My first week of just “be”ing…opened my eyes. I began to write and sew and the flood gates began to open. It was then that I saw a job would destroy the possibilities. So I may help cater a few weddings—there is no commitment—I can say no. And I got accepted as an extra this summer/ fall for Portlandia (just google and watch theYou Tube clips to see what it is). If they call it will be fun and surely something to tell stories about and maybe an opportunity to use my socially ackward return to American culture in my favor. And Italy will happen another season but not this one.

I’ve got sweet memories created and stored away after getting to spend birthday’s with two of my nieces. Holding new niece number 4 is not any less special that holding niece number 1, 2 or 3. They are all simply gorgeous and amazing.

On overdoing it: it’s me Sarah Lance and yes, sometimes I can go a little crazy and over do it. I admit it. And admit to you now that I have not one but two stress fractures in my left foot…due to increasing my mileage too fast when training for the Portland marathon. So I am wearing a boot for the next 3 weeks—one week already completed. So even my marathon will require slow…looks like I will be walking most of it. So so slow and simple is how I am keeping it. Joined a gym and I am swimming my way to fitness or at least trying to…

I am getting into snail email and loving being less connected on email. If you want to write me a letter you can do so at the following address, and I will write you back!

Sarah Lance

2803 SE 48^th Ave

Portland, OR97206

I am not blogging much here but you can find me at www.reclaimrestore.com during sabbatical and see what creative endeavors I am up to…cooking, sewing, thifting and gardening etc.

Last Prayer letter for awhile: June 2011

2011-05-14T09:09:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends and Family-

A few days ago, I was in the midst of saying goodbye to my dear beloved friends and sisters at Sari Bari, my community and my life in Kolkata. I was flooded with emotions, broken heartedness, fear of the unknown future, doubt if taking Sabbatical was the right choice. Now sitting at my dear friend Daphne’s home, having spent a couple of days getting loved on by Jared and Julie Landreth, the feelings have lessened but still linger and I wonder what I am supposed to do with all these feelings.

I have spent a good part of the last 10 years in Kolkata where if I am honest, everyday has been a battle. A fight for justice, a fight to love, a fight to give mercy when I have been hurt, a fight for a seat on a crowded metro or even a fight simply not be cheated or taken for a ride by a local taxi driver. As a fighter or at least one who has had to fight to survive life in Kolkata, I have been very well equipped with weapons of war. I have a clenched jaw and a hard face that appears without my permission and a struggle to trust, a healthy fear of men who stand too close and some sweet evasive moves to ward off potential harm both physical and emotional.

As I was getting ready to depart, I reflected to Beth that I think this may have been the hardest year of my life. It began more than a year ago when I transitioned out of the field director position and the strain of the transition was hard on relationships. And then almost exactly a year ago our friend Pornima was murdered and her loss was followed by many other losses. Our community has engaged one trauma after another in the last year. I think we are all ready for something new. Ready for a little more life, a little more hope and a little more space to be renewed by the presence of Jesus.

So my hope is to be an intercessor for my community even as I Hope to receive the gift of sabbatical.

When I departed Kolkata, I told the ladies, when I departed the USA ten years ago, there were many hard goodbyes and since then my mind and heart remember with joy all the people, family and friends, whose presence I miss in my day to life. And now, so many years later, it is the women of Sari Bari, my community in Kolkata, my dear friends Upendra and Radha, the names of the women at Sari Bari and Kate and Emma whose names will be coming to mind and whose lack of presence will be felt deeply over the next 8 months. I find this turn around in perspective to be a gift. I am thankful to built such beautiful relationships in India. And just as I have been drawn to return to the states to soak up the love of family, in the same way I will be drawn to return to India because that is where my heart has planted itself and grown new roots.

A week before my departure, I was able to covenant with the Upendra and Beth and with the community for the next two years. And I am thankful to have been sent out with promise and to be able to return renewed and re-visioned and maybe even made new myself.

I have new email for sabbatical and I would love to hear from you about your life and what God is speaking. My email is sarahspundita@gmail.com and my cell is 541-530-3116.

Thanks for giving me the gift of this time and many thanks to all of you who sent cards and gifts to help me get off to a good start!

With love, Sarah

Overturning idols

2011-05-02T09:54:00.000-07:00

I sat down with a couple of people recently and as I looked around the table, I thought wow, we are all broken people. Of course, we all understand this in theory, but the practice of understanding and welcoming the brokenness of others, especially people who we look to as leaders is an almost impossible task.

I grew up as the daughter of a preacher man and probably have seen more than my fair share of the underbelly of the church. And the "Church" is the one place where in truth we do hope that broken people will gather. And where real broken people come together, real brokenness in relationship follows and so on the other side we hope do real healing and reconciliation.

I am guilty. Guilty of forgetting that people who have led me, people who have walked with me are broken, imperfect and perfectly fallible. Being surrounded by brokenness, even creation groans and writhes in destructiveness, I am looking for something better, something less broken, more perfect. So guilty, I confess that I have put people who are leaders in the position of being that something better, that something less broken. In fact, they are not less broken, maybe they just have more responsibility and maybe sometimes they handle that badly.

I lead people, have led people and sometimes, I do a crappy job and have done it pretty badly with my brokenness spilling out in all my sloppy need and sin. I need grace, I desperately want to make right my offenses, I want to be forgiven. I want to lead people well but sometimes, I fail.

Yet, I struggle to forgive the debts of those who basically broken like me but hold positions of power, I simply can not get over that they are not more perfect than I am. I have made them demi-gods. Given them power in my life and expected that they would use it well and i fiercely hoped that they would not fail me. They did fail me. They have failed me. Many leaders from childhood till now have in fact hurt me, wounded me. Should i expect less or more? People who lead are broken, they are me, human, frail, fallible and destructive at times. Hopefully, they are also vulnerable and transparent, if in fact we will let them be...

The failings of leaders, parents, bosses, pastors and priests bring us to questions about God. Questions that come mainly because we presume these people of position to be better than us, to be more like God than us. Some leaders fail us because they present the possibility with their behavior and words that they are not fallible...they deceive us. But we know its not true and we eat their deceit because we want good leaders, we want people who have our best at heart, who love well. We in part do not want imperfect leaders, we want lower case g...gods who give us something to believe in outside ourselves. So when a leader fails, it is not only their brokenness that is revealed but ours. And because our lowercase gods are reflecting badly on capital G..God and our general opinion of the creator of the universe drops when people who call themselves godly fail, maybe we should let those who lead, be people too, maybe we should ask for and demand their vulnerability, maybe they should be given the freedom to ask for and demand our vulnerability. Maybe we could all be a bunch of parts connected in a body that all have different jobs, sometimes body parts will fail and the rest of us should maybe compensate till that part heals. Maybe capital G, God is enough god to go around.

The Violence of Love, Oscar Romero pg. 43

We must overturn so many idols,

the idol of self first of all,

so that we can be humble,

and only from our humility,

can learn to be redeemers

can learn to work together,

in the way the world really needs.

Liberation that raises a cry against others

is no true liberation

Liberation that means revolutions of hate and violence

and takes the lives of others

or abases the dignity of others

cannot be true liberty

True liberty does violence to self

and like, Christ

who disregarded that he was sovereign,

becomes a slave to serve others.

Kolkata Community Prayer Requests

2011-04-22T08:09:00.000-07:00

Continue to pray for our Sari Bari ladies, many continue to wrestle with health issues, family problems, and depression which often carries over into the work environment. Please pray for peace to rest on them and for holistic healing to engulf their lives. Pray also for our staff as we seek new and creative ways to love, mediate, and advocate on their behalf.

Please pray for one of our ladies’ daughter. She is currently looking for a safe place to board her so that her daughter doesn’t have to live with her in the red light area.

Pray for Sarah as we send her out to begin her 9 month Sabbatical. Pray for renewal and refreshment as she enters a new season. Pray that all her needs will be provided for extravagantly. Pray also that she will be surrounded by a loving and embracing community as she moves to Portland for these next nine months.

Pray for Radha, that she will walk in strength and wisdom, that her body and health would stay strong, and that she could continue to lead the KG Unit with love and a heart of service.

Pray for all of our WMF staff’s children. Pray for protection and health and clear minds as they study at school.

Pray for Shela’s husband as he walks through some difficult times in his job. Pray for their marriage and strength for Shela as she loves and supports him.

Pray for one of our KG women who has struggled to come to work for some time. Pray that she will know how much she is loved by our staff and that she will have the courage to return full time to work.

Pray for two of our SB ladies’ eyes. One woman recently had cataract surgery on her left eye and is now recovering, pray that she will have no complications and can return to normal life rhythms quickly. The other woman is taking medicine for similar cataract problems, pray that the medicine would work and she would have a clear check up in a few months when she returns to the hospital.

Pray for our ladies and staff as they say goodbye to Sarah for nine months. Pray for peace to cover them as they process how much they will miss her during these nine months.

Pray for a miracle in the cotton industry! There has been a cotton strike for some time now, and we have had a difficult time getting the supplies we need. Pray that the strike would end quickly!!!!

Pray for Upendra as he leads and serves the WMF community and Sari Bari. Pray for wisdom and rest and he takes a break next month. Pray that God would renew and guide him both at work, in his marriage, and within his family.

Pray for our field as we offer hospitality to many visitors and teams throughout the summer. Pray that even with so many folks coming through, that we would be renewed and rested. Pray that we could experience the gift of stability even with so much transition!

Pray for each of the WMF staff members as they take their quarterly breaks in the next two months. Pray for rest and peace to cover each of us!

Pray for all the women in the Canning Prevention Unit. Pray for their families and the many problems and worries each of them face each day. Pray for Gita as she counsels and serves these girls.

Pray for Gita and Rafique as they prepare for their baby to arrive in the fall. Pray for health for the baby and for Gita.

Pray for one of our newest Sari Bari ladies, pray that as she begins the journey to freedom that she would grow in confidence and determination. Pray that she would have the strength to work through these six months of training and discover the powerful family that Sari Bari is.

Pray for the auction Sari Bari is hosting to raise money for office computers and new sewing machines. Pray that there would be an amazing response and that Sari Bari would be provided for in abundance!

Pray for Kyle as he manages the finances and production in the next months.

Pray for Beth as she leads and serves the field, pray for peace and joy to cover her, and that she would lead from a posture of humility, love, and wisdom.

Pray for Brooke as she returns from Bangladesh at the end of the month. Pray for her transition into our Kolkata community and for her formation year to be a time of discovery and purpose.

The Pain of Healing

2011-03-22T08:05:00.001-07:00

Today is Tuesday. Two weeks ago, I had an accident. The biggest part of the accident was that I lost myself in my thoughts, ruminating, worrying. The result was shocking and very, very painful in the moment and hours following.

In my life in India, if I want to take hot shower, I have to heat the water with coil that I plug into the wall. You leave it for 20 minutes and walaa…hot water. So that morning, it was about an hour before I got around to showering and I did the usual and mixed the super hot water with the cold water for a nice warm bucket bath. The bucket full of hot water sitting there unmixed side by side with the mixed bucket water…Caught up in my thoughts, about half way through my shower, I without realizing my mistake, I pulled a large mug full from the hot, hot water and poured it over my left arm and chest. The realization of mistake was to say the least devastating…BURNING! I could not make it stop. In the moment, a scream escaped my lips and then the sobbing started and I could not stop. I do have a shower head in my bathroom and immediately turned on the water, naturally cold, to stand underneath. Probably, several minutes later, I realized I needed help and ran from the bathroom to get my phone and promptly ran back to stand under the water. Stilling sobbing, I called around till I got friend and coworker, Sheila on the phone. Though apparently she could not understand me, she dropped what she was doing and ran to my house. I grabbed the cold packs in my freezer and waited under the stream of water till she arrived. Being that I mostly red at the moment we could not gage the damage and Sheila ran home to get some burn salve. Not sure how long I stood under that cold water but I never wanted to leave it, I hurt so bad. Sheila arrived again and made me get out the shower so she could put on some good old straight from the USA Amish burn salve. It helped a little and my sobbing eased as I lay down and Sheila began calling doctors to find the best place to take me for help.

That day was pretty traumatic and remains mostly emotionally unprocessed. My initial response was simple one of being thankful that it was not worse…could have been my face, my eyes, my head. It was that posture that I engaged as I smiled through visitors and sweet and encouraging phone calls. I was in denial. I ultimately ended up in the hospital, in an operating room getting a very fancy dressing and very thorough cleaning of my burns. Sheila estimated that I received 1^st and 2^nd degree burns over 15 percent of my body which would constitute serve burns because of the sheer surface area. My few days of denial was okay, helped me get though some very awkward and painful moments. The blistering, the grossness of the daily evolving dying of my skin was something to be in denial about for as long as possib le. The next few days when the reality set in, I missed a vision trip I planned to Mushirabad to explore the opportunities of a second Sari Bari Prevention Unit and I was alone a lot as I attempt to rest, recover and heal. Four days alone without more than 15 minutes of people time was enough to make my head spin and being locked down with the internet as my guide, I realized that my burns would take weeks, not a few days to heal. Those were not great days…they were the dark ones before the dawn so to speak. Late last week hope emerged in glimmers as the dead skin began to peel away and new skin, fresh and very sensitive emerged. Today, two week later, I am almost new. I still have some open wounds that have to be dressed every day, twice day. I still have unrealistic expectations about healing even though I know the realities—one to three weeks at least. And at the two week mark I am 80 percent all better, right on track with being whole again in three weeks.

My body may be finished healing in the next week, I do hope so. But I am not sure when my heart and mind will be finished. I have been drinking my coffee cold, if I have been drinking it all, cooking has been an act of will and I do not foresee hot showers in the near future. I have not written about this before now because basically I have been ashamed. I did this to myself, it was an accident, but an accident caused by my own carelessness, by my stress and worry. Writing about it is supposed to be healing, I hope it will be. The pain of the burns was horrible, maybe the worst pain of my life even worse than shattering my wrist but I think the pain of healing has been worse. The initial pain faded in 4 or 5 hours but every day since there has been pain, struggle and discomfort…reminders of that first hurt. The progress has been hard to mark because it only points me to the reality of how I was hurt, how that hurt happened and what I could have done to prevent it.

For the last week, with my extra time in recovery, I keep thinking about the healing process. How in almost every situation, we expect it to come fast. But the reality is that healing takes time. I think not only of my own pain but of the times when I have caused pain and how that also takes time to heal and it basically sucks for everyone. There is no good side to being a jerk and then asking for forgiveness, you just have to wait it out. Hoping for the best and praying for forgiveness while changing the behaviors that cause the hurt. So many hurts are long in the healing. A very long time, sometimes eternity might be just enough time. In some areas, we have to choose our healedness every day. In the case of my burns, I have to keep believing in the progress and that one day I will be without these wounds and new scars that mark me. The wounds and the scars will disappear and I will be new again, in body, heart and mind.

Still healing and thankful to be healed.

God Sets the Lonley in Families

2011-02-20T04:36:00.000-08:00

I am not a mother, I have no children of my own. I am not even married. I am a graying single woman who is surrounded by more family, more sisters, and more children then I could have ever dreamed.

I have been given the gift of coming from a beautiful family that raised me well, cherished me, called me smart, a princess, a woman of compassion, my parents told me I could do anything, be anything. I believed them. And this family that I was born into loved me enough to let me go. They sent me here to India, they are sharing me and prayerfully upholding me. They are my Aaron and Hur. And here I am bewildered and amazed by the gift of more family.

It's true that God sets the lonely in families. I see it happening everyday. I see women come through the doors of Sari Bari and find something they have been longing for, a safe place, a community, a family. We are a unique family, heavy on the x chromosome but thankfully cherish the few who carry the y chromosome ( they redeem the whole lot with their presence and because of who they are among us). We are a family that mourns the losses in our midst, a family of hope addicted crazy dreamers who believe that impossible is possible, a family that spends most of its time just being together, working alongside each other, supporting, listening and moving forward one step at a time.

today, we celebrate the 5 year anniversary of Sari Bari and they many beautiful, amazing women who are the core of our family. I may being graying but I am so not alone and so very thankful to celebrate our life together this week as we travel to a hill station (a short 8 hour train ride and 5 hour jeep ride away) to mark this moment in time, to remember all that God has done and to look foward with Hope to future whose seeds have been planted but have yet to bloom.

It's a good story

2011-02-15T08:42:00.000-08:00

A good storyteller doesn't just tell a better story. She invites other people into the story with her, giving them a better story too.
–Donald Miller, A Million Miles, in a Thousand Years

Dear Friends and Family-
In the last ten years, I have been invited into many stories. I have been invited into the lives of the people of Kolkata and some of the journeys have been short and some of them long. Each of these stories has deeply impacted me, changed me, formed me into who I have become and who I am becoming as friend, a woman, a seeker of justice and freedom and a follower of Jesus.
When I began ten years ago, I was welcomed into the story of Mother Teresa and the women of the Missionaries of Charity, who have given their lives in whole hearted service to the poorest of the poor. I spent years discovering the heart of God in the broken bodies and minds of the destitute whom I been given the opportunity to serve, love and care for at the Home for Dying. These beloved women(MC Sisters) taught me a new way to pray, a new way to serve and new way to mourn for those who found themselves with no one to stand beside them in their times of most desperate need. I remember being invited to sit with Sister Georgina to pray beside a man who dying and we prayed until he slipped into the arms of God. I remember caring for a woman with AIDS with touch and songs and I remember her reciprocity and God’s affirmation of how He saw us both, as His beloved daughters, not separated by language or culture or class. We were His and held together by His embrace.

As I continued, I made many friends whose stories led me and challenged. There was Martin, a gentle Irish man, whose compassion and commitment taught me about humility and grace. Martin truly is one of the few people I have ever met that reflected Jesus almost perfectly.
My friend Maya welcomed me into her home and heart in the early days in Tollygunge. She fed me, stretched me as I struggled through my Bengali and my culture shock. Maya is my oldest friend in Kolkata and as I joined her story, I also joined the stories of her children who are now becoming adults and overwhelming me with just how old I am now!

The WMF community in Kolkata has grown and changed and evolved over the last 10 years and I would not be who I am without the Brotherly love and friendship of Josh, Kyle and Trever. They protected me, challenged me, inspired me and hugged me every night when they left my house. My beloved sister Kristin, cofounder of Sari Bari, was my back up in so many ways. She taught me that No can sometimes be the most loving answer. She showed a way of passion and compelling love that still drives and impacts me. She held me and knew me in my deepest brokenness and loved me anyway. And there is Bethie, so much more than a little sister, a partner whose heart holds the key to opening so many doors in the lives of people whom she serves Sheppard’s and upholds in prayer. Kyle Scott has been an anchoring presence of peace and service and example of just how redemptive a good man can be in a place where all the brokenness of males surrounds us. And now, Melissa, Sheila and Brookie offering something new…I am excited to share in the coming years with these beautiful women.

Pinkie’s story brought me back to Kolkata with a desire to give my life here. I met her in 2004 and her tragic story brought me to my knees in lament before God and spurred the passionate desire to never have to walk away from a young girl trapped in the sex trade by poverty with no choices, ever again. The end of her story is unknown to me but I hope and pray that she found a way.

The words that came from the story of a man who spent thirty years in Bangladesh still move me to tears. “Dream for things you will never see.” And I do, I do.

Some my favorite stories are the ones connected with the Birth of Sari Bari. We were invited into the story of Freeset, Connextions and At the Well who gave us encouragement, place, and vision for the first stumbling steps forward. Out of these first stumbling steps, I was given relationship with Upendra. He is brother and friend. I am pretty sure he might be a super hero; God has given him the gift of being able to accomplish the impossible in India and his joy in doing it is testimony to his character. I have also been given beautiful friendships with Radha, Shela and Gita. Sharing in Gita’s story has been something like the joy of being a mom and watching your children blossom and grow and do impossible things with grace. Last year when I walked her down the aisle on her wedding day was one of the most important and beautiful days of my life.
And of course the story that I love to tell and the story that I love to be a part of is the stories of freedom that come out of the life journey’s of the women at Sari Bari. They have invited me into their stories with such trust and love. I know them as sisters, saints, teachers and heroes. We have shared the highest highs and the lowest lows together as family. I have watched as Jamuna, a friend for three years prior to Sari Bari, trapped in one of the worst brothels I have ever entered, become an advocate for the freedom of other women as she makes her own freedom journey. The gift of watching so many of the women at Sari Bari blossom, grow and find new life has been something that I struggle to give words. I never could have imagined that so many would become managers, trainers and heroes for other woman. They now led us forward as they invite new women into both their stories of loss and into their stories of hope and restoration. I have sat by Ranjana’s beside begging and pleading with God for her life and have seen God save and restore her. I have mourned alongside Ranjana as she lost her husband to HIV, shared my home with her, even as she taught me quiet lessons on faith, waiting and receiving. I have mourned the loss of Pornima alongside the women at Sari Bari and I jumped into the dirtiest river I have ever seen, to share in the washing away of the tears after the funeral. In the last 5 years, I have seen more than 80 women celebrate their first freedom birthday on the day they entered Sari Bari for training and just a few weeks ago 2 women who have been with us since the beginning , marked their 5th freedom birthday and 8 more celebrated 4 years! We have celebrated birthdays, retreats, graduations, births and freedom together. These women are now deeply apart of my story and I am so very honored to have been invited to be a part of theirs!

I celebrate the journey and I celebrate being invited into the stories of so many amazing people. I celebrate you, my friends and family, who have journeyed with me, visited me, upheld me and my community in prayer, and also been so generous and faithful in creating the opportunity for me to be here with your support. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

I am looking forward to the stories of the next ten years of stories in Kolkata and looking forward to my upcoming Sabbatical which I am sure will be full of opportunities to join in new stories and invite others into mine!

With a spirit of thankful celebration for all that God has done in and through these many stories,
Sarah

Flowers in the Jungle

2011-02-11T00:05:00.000-08:00

“No one sees flowers in the jungle. It’s the jungle, flowers are fragile and stunning, and no one would plant a flower in the jungle, who would see it?” This is the way my friend began her story recently as we sat together on my bed both of us sick and trying to recover. Jamuna has been my friend for 5 years. She is without a doubt one of my hero’s and one of the women whose life and story is a miracle. She is a prophet and preacher of freedom in the Red Light areas, she has brought many women through the doors of Sari Bari and continues to be an active advocate for freedom and offer hope to others. She has found her feet and is beginning to root in beautiful and healthy way, a flower herself planted in the jungle as she continues to live in the red light, being a presence and witness to the power of love within her.

Jamuna told me that it is was a woman who is interested in coming to work at sari Bari who offered this reflection on flowers in the Jungle. The woman asked, who plants a beautiful flower in the jungle, no one would see it. The jungle is dangerous and unpredictable no one would plant a thing of beauty in a place like that! She said that Sari Bari coming to Sonagacchi last year was like a flower being planted in the jungle…no one who matters is ever going to see it or understand its beauty. She was profoundly amazed at seeing someone plant a flower in the jungle of Sonagacchi, right in the midst of the darkness of a dangerous jungle, a flower to bring hope. She thought maybe the folks at Sari Bari must be a little crazy but she was thankful that she might have the opportunity to be a part of it.

I was pretty overwhelmed and amazed to hear this story…a reflection from a woman who does not even work for us yet a woman who gets it better than most. I keep thinking flowers in the jungle are sign posts of the kingdom. A beautiful flower amidst other beautiful flower is still beautiful but it does not stand unique. I think the sign posts of the kingdom are everywhere but I see them standing out in a profound way when I walk through Sonagacchi. In the middle of the red light area, at an intersection of lanes that I walk by everyday on my way to work, I imagine a lamppost, it’s so dirty that nobody even notices it when they walk by, but I see it. I know its power to light up the lane, for now it waits, fully powered but not fully ready to be revealed. This is sign post of the kingdom, the thing that allows me to walk through the lanes alone instead of around—the knowledge that the lamppost is fully powered and is only waiting to be revealed. This is the kingdom, fully powered only waiting to be revealed.

The woman who sees’s Sari Bari as a flower in the jungle is really seeing a signpost of the kingdom and it is truly a unique thing of beauty. But she does not yet see the reverse, that in my eyes, in the eyes of our community and certainly in the eyes of God, the flower in the jungle is her, a beautiful treasure who has the possibility of blooming in the most unlikely of places, the tragic circumstances that have made this dangerous jungle home only makes the beauty of this flower more striking. We are surrounded by flowers in Sonagacchi, waiting to be revealed and discovered. What will Songacchi, the place called Golden Tree, be in ten years, or twenty or fifty? We believe with hope that it will be garden of overwhelming beauty—a testimony that a small frail flower can in time with the right nurturing take over even the darkest densest jungle.

We will be marking 5 years of Sari this month on February 20^th. We will be celebrating with our women by taking them to Darjeeling for our annual retreat. I am looking forward to sharing in this celebration and embracing the bouquet of beautiful women that it has been my privilege to share life with over the last 5 years. Many years ago before I came back to Kolkata in 2005, I talked about creating a garden space in my heart and in my home to make Kolkata more sustainable—a life giving place and I am overwhelmed to see that once again God has done more than we could ask or imagine by surrounding us with a garden of the most beautiful flowers (relationship with the women) in the midst of the jungle where I absolutely did not expect to find them.

If I had a glass, I would raise it and toast the ladies, “Here’s to you, the signposts of the kingdom in our midst, to life, to beauty, to freedom, to flowers in the jungle. Thanks be to God.”

Pretty interesting stuff...

2011-01-20T19:11:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends:

This is a very important article. As a movement we have to be much more fastidious about the statistics/facts we use. Not doing so only undermines our credibility and gives ammunition to those who claim that sex trafficking is just hyperbole.

However, I'm not saying I agree with everything stated in this article. For instance I certainly take issue with statements like this: "Fuzzy data and definitions -- lumping under the 'trafficked' label not only girls forced into the trade and moved place to place but runaways who sell sex on their own -- fueled the frenzy." Minors cannot consent to participation in commercial sex. Their consent or lack thereof is a moot issue under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. By federal statute minors in the sex trade are viewed as victims, and rightly so. It is the adults who purchase sex from minors who are culpable, not the children -- runaway, throwaway, homeless, prostituted, trafficked or whatever label you want to put on them.

Whatever the numbers in Portland may be, using reliable data -- even when that means no data -- should become one of our top priorities. Let's all (myself included) go reexamine our fact sheets.

Abolition!

Lisa

P.S. It certainly not surprising that a city the size of Seattle would have a larger problem than a city the size of Portland.

Analysis: Despite reputation, no proof Portland is a hub for child sex trafficking

Published: Thursday, January 13, 2011, 7:05 PM Updated: Friday, January 14, 2011, 9:59 AM

Portland Mayor Sam Adams stood before reporters and officials in November to decry how Portland has become "stained" as a national hub for juvenile sex trafficking.

As he spoke, aides passed out a news release with a startling statistic. Portland police, it read, see an average of two cases of child sex trafficking each week.

The problem: It wasn't true.

To be lived

2011-01-08T00:13:00.001-08:00

I grew believing that worship was something to sung but I think worship is something to be lived.

I realize that I have a problem with singing Not a problem with God being good or deserving praise but the unreconcilable reality that sometimes my worship is not honest. My most honest worship in the last year has been full of lament…so it feels like I am not doing it right. I do not feel good or happy or joyful but I do desire God and do desire to be honest in my worship. I actually do not really want to sing much. I have veered toward the liturgical prayers of some saints and believers who expressed their worship in a different way. My confession is worship. My broken heart can weep for a day and it can be worship. My love for the ladies at Sari Bari can be an expression of honoring God if I choose it. God can be glorified in my life, words, actions, tears and maybe even my anger. My most honest worship might be giving to person who begs or taking someone to the hospital when I want to do is sleep. I grew up believing that worship was something to sung but I now better understand that worship is something to be lived. I hope this year, i will live it fully!

The scheming Swindlers

2010-12-18T06:56:00.000-08:00

"The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church's prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament."

Soren Kierkegaard

New Mailing address

2010-12-15T03:54:00.000-08:00

Some friends of ours are now willing to receive mail on our behalf so if you wanted to mail anything to me, my mailing address has changed to the following for personal letters and packages :)

Sarah Lance
c/o Peter Burrell
Swapandeep Apartment
520 Dum Dum Cossipore Rd.
Flat No. A3 Surer Math
Kolkata, India 700-074

January 2011: Sabbatical Letter

2010-12-14T06:54:00.000-08:00

Dear Beloved Friends,

The New Year always opens doors for the possibility of new things, the possibility for renewal and second chances. I celebrate the gift it is and that it has been to be among these women , in this community and in the place of Kolkata for these many years and look forward with longing to coming years and the possibilities of God creative imagination for us. I just spent the last hour looking at the Sari Bari five year plan I wrote in 2006 and I was amazed to see that at almost every point (which mostly at the time felt impossible) we have seen the dreams become tangible realities.

This year (April 2011) marks 10 years with Word Made Flesh. During these years I have been stretched beyond my limits, and embraced with love beyond my imagination as I have sought Christ among the most vulnerable of the world’s poor in service and partnership. My heart has expanded as my vocation has narrowed from those who have been marginalized by poverty to the girls and women who find themselves in unspeakable situations of injustice while bonded in the sex trade. My desire is to continue moving forward with deepening commitment to relationship with God, with community, with the women of Sari Bari and their sisters who remain in the sex trade and with the extended work of the Kingdom in the world.

I am humbled and encouraged to share with you the news of my upcoming sabbatical as the next step in the journey toward long term vocation. Word Made Flesh provides time for Sabbatical up to 9 months after six years of service. This offering of Sabbatical is a reflection of God’s desire for not only the land but the people to rest from their toil every seventh year. (Exodus 21:2-6, Exodus 23:10-11, Leviticus 25:1-7, 18-22, and Deuteronomy 15:1-11, 12-18)

Almost 5 years ago when we started Sari Bari, I knew that it would require at least a 5 year commitment to see staff developed, vision shared and a sustainable foundation laid . This coming February, we will celebrate our 5 year birthday, marking what God has done in and through so many lives that now have freedom. Though I have been eligible for sabbatical for several years, I wanted to wait and to honor my commitment to Sari Bari and to the women and have the permission and support of my community, including all the ladies at Sari Bari. I have been so encouraged by their support , understanding and the opportunity to not only be sent out but also welcomed back at the end of my Sabbatical.

Sabbatical will be an extension of my vocation while I not only pursue times of spiritual formation, reflection and rest but also pursue some creative endeavors that will not only inspire my heart but will be an offering to the Sari Bari community as I hope to return full of creative ideas and design skills for new and amazing products that will bring freedom for more women. Under the direction of our community care department, I have invited 2 community members, Upendra and Beth, to be apart of my sabbatical planning team. Together we are setting goals and dreaming the possibilities of what God will do not only in my heart but in the hearts and minds of the staff as they take on more ownership and find a deeper calling to their vocations. I would so appreciate your prayers for all of us as the Sari Bari Community and the WMF regional community prepare for this creative absence.

You have been a sustaining force as you have journeyed and prayed with me and for me over the last 10 years. I am humbled and blessed to have such amazing partnership and to be connected to such a beautiful body of believers. I will be sharing more in the coming months and would love to hear from you if you have any questions or concerns. You can email me at sarah.lance@wordmadeflesh.org

Much love,
Sarah

SABBATICAL DETAILS:
Next summer I am coming to Portland, OR for my Sabbatical and I am looking for some help finding a few things. The dates of my sabbatical time in Portland will be from Mid May 2011 to December 2011.

1. A place to stay: I am not sure what my financial situation will be on support/part time job but I am sure I can offer something for rent. If you know of anyone with a room and bathroom (acess to a kitchen would also be awesome) that they will be willing to offer for 5-6 months for low or no rent please let me know. I would be willing to work for room rent if that is an option.
2. A fun job: In order to pay the costs of being on Sabbatical, I may need a part time job. I am hoping for something fun like working as a gardner, farm hand, set painter, Home Depot, or anything different from what I currently do in Kolkata. If you have any ideas or connections in this area please let me know.
3. Access to a car: I already have the wonderful offer of a bike to use while I am in Portland but I also may need a car from time to time. If you have or know of a car that could be shared or offered for periods of time while I am on sabbatical please let me know.
4. Camping stuff: I hope to have time to camp and hike and just “be” in the beauty that is Oregon, if you have or know someone who has camping stuff that I could borrow periodically while I am staying in Portland please let me know.
5. Church Recommendations: I am hoping to connect with a good church community, if you know one or two let me know!
6. Community: Last but certainly not least, I looking for community, a space to celebrate and mourn, a place be myself and celebrate and encourage others.

Now you ask, what exactly will Sarah be doing on Sabbatical? I am planning on taking courses at the Oregon School of Craft and Design and also at a local artist guild to learn weaving. These things will not only be life giving for me but also will serve the future purpose of Sari Bari as I continue in the role of Creative Director. The theme of my Sabbatical is beauty and I hope to spend my energy to create beautiful things as well as take advantage of the beauty of my surroundings.
Looking forward to this adventure!

Forever

2010-12-07T19:30:00.000-08:00

Being at Sari Bari means practicing the art of hospitable interruption. Ten, twenty or thirty times a day, a woman will come to door of the Sari Bari office and call "didi, oh didi, ekta katha ache." (which means Sister, can i have a word). Most the time, the answer is of course. Sometimes I want to say no, because mostly these entrances come with conflict, family problem or heart breaking story, but love stretches far in listening ears.

so on monday, one of the Sari Bari women, a daughter, came in and immediately began crying, she was broken and hearing her story, i was broken. She has struggled and work very hard to keep herself out of the trade. Her mother worked in the trade and does even still but this woman, a mere 23, is a mother of 2 children and her husband left yet again for another woman. The most painful and tragic part is that he, her husband, said he would come back to her if she started working in the trade. She was and is devastated. I am devastated for her. She cried (i waited till later for my tears) and I held her.

I have a few responses: first, if i see her husband on the street, my urge would be to do physical violence (i won't) but that's my first human response to a man who has deeply, hurt my friend.

second, i am in awe of this woman and her strength, her desire and ability to maintain her resolve in the face of a future where the sole responsibility for raising her children will be hers. I celebrate her strength and a God who has given her the ability to stand in the midst of such a painful adversity. Pray that she would continue to be able to stand.

Finally, something she said struck me deeply (I have heard it before many, many times) , more deeply that ever before. I woke up this morning thinking about it. She said, "I am never going to leave Sari Bari, i am going to stay here forever and raise my children and make a good life. Where my family is broken i will find family here...this will be the place i build my life."

hearing this and continuing to reflect, i am overwhelmed. Because when i think of India and Sari Bari i would probably not use the word forever. I am committed, yes. i have no leave date in mind. I am here to embrace and be embraced by these women in this time and place. But forever? Sari Bari for many of the women is their future--it is their vocation--the creation of beauty (beautiful things and the blossoming beauty of who they are), to walk in freedom, to embrace hope and be fed by the hope they experience in the lives of others. For many of them it is forever.

so where is my forever? to be in Kolkata forever feels limiting, scary and impossible but maybe it is this place and among these people that i too might find the same possibility, hope and freedom that so many women at Sari Bari have found. I pray that i will have the courage to continue to let them lead me.

Advent Reflection from Melissa

2010-12-02T19:25:00.000-08:00

Chaos. Advent Day 5.

2 December 2010

Melissa

Except for a few hours of Christmas music and sitting near Sarah’s Christmas tree on Thanksgiving Day- I haven’t thought of Christmas at all. In between hectic schedules, visits to the hospital to stay with my sick friend, Bangla lessons, and trying to clean up my bedroom (at least a little) - I haven’t taken a moment to sit with the mystery of God entering into our world, into my world.

Christmas feels far away. There wasn’t an Autum season to signal the coming of winter. There isn’t any snow (and there won’t be). We haven’t been able to decorate our flat yet. No evergreen tree with colorful lights. No advent candles have been lit. No space to breathe it in. And I wonder, how do I connect with the coming of Emmanuel this year? What does it look like to wait., to breathe deep, to long for his coming?

God with us. It melts my brain just a little. God entering into my world. Understanding the entire scope of my emotions. He comes as hope, even when I can’t see it. He comes as peace, even when my world is anything but peaceful. He comes as rest, even when rest seems impossible. This is what we celebrate. God becomes man. And it changes everything. I don’t understand it all - but I know it’s true.

Into my chaos, He comes.

Come Lord Jesus, Come.

Finding Restoration, Hope and Purpose

2010-11-16T10:27:00.000-08:00

This morning for devos at sari bari, I asked a couple of questions. What has happened in your life since you came to sari bari? What are the dreams you have for the future? What do you hope will happen through Sari Bari in the future? The responses were hesitant at first. But they came with power and meaning. They spoke of finding freedom for the first time. Being able to see a future for themselves, wanting safe places for home and family. Jiya said that she hopes that there will be a Sari Bari in every red light area in Kolkata and 300 Sari Bari’s in India. Laxmi remarked that so many women are wandering in darkness still, they do not even know that they can have freedom. Her desire is for them to know what she knows for herself. Dreams we have dreamed for the women are now becoming the dreams of the women for the other women. At the end I asked a few more questions…how many of you have learned to sign your own name since you came here? More than half the women raised their hands. Clapping, clapping and losts of smiles. How many of you have learned to sew since you came here? More clapping. Again more than half the women—the rest knew something of how to sew when they came. And finally, how many of you have received freedom since working at Sari Bari? Almost every single woman raised their hands. Rousing applause.

Can we get an amen!

December 2010 Letter

2010-11-14T23:23:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends and Family-

I am sitting down with a cup of coffee and a little Christmas music (way too early to be playing it but I am anyway) and reflecting on the gifts and sorrows of the last year. I am remembering, as the season of advent approaches, that Jesus came as a gift and took the burden of our broken humanity on Himself. I feel like I have been a little absent this year from you my friends and partners who have made my journey in Kolkata alongside the women at Sari Bari possible and for that I am sorry. I think I am coming back around to myself as I have begun to let the floodgates open and let out my sorrows, laments, questions and even my great joys. If you are interested you can find my laments and ponderings on my blog (www.princessslightbringer.blogspot.com) but right now I want to share some of the The Good and Surprising gifts of 2010:

· Remembering and rediscovering that I am not forsaken, that we are not forsaken, that the good God who loves us remains present even when we do not feel it.

· The opening of Sari Bari in Canning—our first prevention unit. The opening of this third unit was almost a surprise, it happened so fast and with such amazing support that I remain in awe of what God does through His people. Also loving that our dear Shaleha is now the Production Manager and rocking it.

· Our little Gita (now a woman of 22) got married in October. Gita started with us when she was 17 and in many ways is really like a daughter to me. I have the wonderful honor to give her away on her wedding day.

· Speaking: I mostly feel a little like Moses, like I am not sure what to say, how to say it and if it will make any sense at all. But this fall I was able to speak at the Eighth Letter conference in Toronto, Ontario and at the Trafficking, Prostituion and Sex Work Conference in Toledo, Ohio and felt like both went really well. Thanks to all of you who prayed, encouraged and cheered me on!

· Community: in the darkest of nights, the most painful of losses, the most profound of joys, I have the gift of being able to share life with Beth, Upendra, Radha, Shela, Kyle, Melissa, Sheila, WMF peeps in Asia, the amazing teachers and friends I have in the women at Sari Bari, the Servants community in Kolkata and all the WMF (Fleshies) around the world.

· Relishing and rediscovering the joy of dreaming for things I may never see!

A gift you can give: We celebrate Christmas every year at Sari Bari and every year we give the women new clothes (usually a bright new sparkly sari—they love it) and also provide small gifts for the women’s children and husbands. The Christmas parties at Sari Bari are a family event! We have some many women this year we are not sure how we will be able to afford Christmas so our community decided to invite you, our friends and family to participate. We can provide nice gifts for the women and their families for the cost of $25.00 per woman, if you are interested in celebrating Christmas with us by sponsoring a gift for one our women, we would love it, they will love it! You can donate on the WMF website (https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?aid=26156) or by mail at. WMF, PO BOX 70 Omaha, NE 68101, designate the gift to Sari Bari Christmas.

I wish you and all those you love a very Merry Christmas! Celebrating with you once again the coming of Emmanuel, God with us!

Much love,
Sarah

Nothing is impossible

2010-11-14T22:58:00.001-08:00

Recently, I posted this quote on my facebook--still can't get it out of my brain:

'Now I'll give you something to believe. I'm just one hundred and one, five months and a day.'

"'I can't believe that!' said Alice.

"'Can't you?' the Queen said in a pitying tone. 'Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.'

"Alice laughed: 'There's no use trying,' she said; 'one can't believe impossible things.'

"'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'"

–Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Now in wonderland here are the 6 impossible things that the queen was talking about:

1. Theres a Potion that can make you shrink.
2. Cake that can make you grow.
3. Animals can talk.
4. Cats can dissapear.
5. Theres a place called Wonderland.
6. I can slay the Jaberwockey.

So now I am thinking what are the six impossible things that have become possible in the last 5 years:

1. Staff in Kolkata lasting more than 5 years on the ground
2. Sari Bari itself--started with no money, no skills, no idea what we were doing
3. Freedom from the sex trade--businesses here here employ about 1-2 percent of the 10,000 women in this area--previous to 2003--zero.
4. Former Madam being one of our best seamstresses and one of our best advocates for freedom
5. Kolkata no longer is only about death and destruction--Kolkata is also a place for new life in the making
6. Poor/at risk girls who may have ended up locked in room for 7 years with out pay or escape are making a life and future for themselves in the Prevention Unit.

I am sure there is more but that is a pretty good start on the impossible becoming possible in Kolkata.

6 more impossible dreams for the next year:

1. We would be able to buy the entire property of Sari Bari in Sonagacchi.
2. We would be able to employ 150 women by the end of 2011.
3. That we could make inroads into musharrabad for our next prevention unit.
4. Professional counselors for after care
5. The people of God in india to take a legimate and active interest in being apart of giving freedom to women in the red light areas
6. still imagining...want to dream with me?

A few words on Cambodia

2010-11-14T07:56:00.000-08:00

Feelings:
heavy, sad, broken, thankful, devastated, sick, hopeful, scared, ashamed

Observations:
Too many children working on the street to support themselves, their families
There were almost no gray hairs: the average age in cambodia is 15
Lots of pretty solid amazing NGO's doing work for women and children
There are child protection trained taxi(tuck tuck) drivers
Justice takes too long
Restoration takes time, money and commitment
vulnerability of the children, and people in impoverished circumstances to those who will exploit
late middle aged american guy who seemed to have bad intentions (took his photo on my phone in case i actually observed anything-- i did not)

Scribbled words while visiting S-21, prision where only 7 of 20,000 prisoners survived:

To blame God for suffering is easy. To take ownership of our humanity and own our part in the creation of suffering for others is almost unbearable. It is men and women who create suffering for other men and women. We serve suffering on platters to one another. We hope those those who have suffered greatly in wars, genocides and personal traumas will receive our leftover sympathy, receive our neglect of the imago dei in their personhood.

Can we really fathom wars fought by children? Can we forget them? Can we reframe them so we remain without accountability in restoration? Generations lost over and over. Everyone plays a role--torturer or tortured, victim or oppressor. How easily we forget our humanity our vulnerability...Monsters fear us. I am not innocent of these abominations, these tragedies happening in my lifetime--this blood stains my clothes.

A Framer from Gita's Wedding

2010-11-08T07:17:00.000-08:00

I wait

2010-10-17T08:01:00.000-07:00

For you alone, O God, my soul waits in the silence, for my hope is in you. Psalm 62.5
Those who wait for God, shall renew their strength. Isaiah 40:31
Happy are those whose hearts do not condemn them, who have not given up hope. Ecclesiates 14.2

"All that you give can sometimes rob my innocence"
-Delirious

there is not this easy path to hope
hardwork, hard hard labor of waiting
not for lightening bolts but flickering light under the door
my broken heart condemns me sometimes
rather than hope i blame God
for taking my oblivion
sins of omission that steal my joy
i let them
i wait, i wait
i sleep it off
I wait
i cry
I rage
I hate
I wrestle
I am defeated
I wait
I see light flicker
I wait
I hope
Compassion grows
before becoming fatigued
i wait
for God.

November 2010 Reflection

2010-10-15T18:02:00.000-07:00

"Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." Lewis Carroll

Sometimes, I get confused. I have my head down, avoiding eye contact, wanting to avoid the pain I might see as I wend my way through Songacchi on my way to work. I am overwhelmed by the suffering—I can only focus on the filthy pathways contrasted again the painted toe nails and impossibly high heeled shoes that that line the lanes in front of me. My mind is full of the suffering of people I love, the women and men that we have lost and the heroes at Sari Bari who continue to face problems at home. I begin to believe that this suffering, this broken reality is all there is, and hopelessness takes hold my heart.

I have recently been reflecting on Jesus on the cross and the scripture that stands out most clearly is Jesus words directed at the Father, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” I have never reflected deeply on this verse but recently at a conference as I listened to author and activist Peter Rollins reflect on the cross I was struck with the similarity of what I feel, to what Jesus himself, felt on the cross. Jesus felt the absence of God’s presence as he took on the sins of the world and he cried out—God where are you? Why have you left me alone?

I feel this way when I walk into the suffering of the women at Sari Bari and their counterparts who remain trapped in the sex trade. My God, my god, why have your forsaken us? This is the part of me that is looking down, grasping only the worldly realities, the broken people and experiences that have framed the reality of life in Kolkata, India. My question is God, where are you?

God did not create suffering. God created perfection, a garden of beauty in which we could have dwelt. Humanity chose destruction. We choose to live in a forsaken reality. I choose to let my own sin separate me from God. The most profound experience of God is to understand it pains God deeply that we choose destruction and that we choose to separate but He allowed us to do so anyway. And then God pursues us, the beloved, into the depths of darkness. Jesus was God, allowing himself to understand humanity, to enter into a reality of separation. It must be nonsenscial for God to understand why we continue to choose destruction over perfection. Jesus, as God, tasted destruction and then embraced it on the cross. When Jesus cried out “my God, my God, why have your forsaken me?”, he was at that moment enveloped in the darkness of the sins of humanity, and though I am sure God the father was present, Jesus could not see or feel the presence of the Father. Our sin isolated Jesus from the experience of God, a part of himself. In a sense, God rejected himself for us and took on the one thing that He could not stand to embrace, our sin—the thing that brings us destruction. God bridged a path into things that He did not create or intend for humanity.

Why do I feel the absence of God in the presence of those who suffer? Maybe it is because God did not create suffering. It is creative endeavor of destruction that I as a human being embrace in both large and small ways. If we question whether God is good, maybe we are asking the wrong question. The question is are we good, do we do good? Where is God in suffering? God is present though we may not feel it, but we cannot know what God must experience when He enters into destruction with us, and how that impacts our ability to understand who God is, in the reality of suffering and the wrenching He must feel as a parent and creator, when humanity chooses against God. Humans create suffering for other humans. People buy and sell other people. Men and women lie, cheat, steal and objectify. God created a garden. We have created hell, a reality of separation between what God intended and what we experience.

So when I stop being confused once in a great while and I cry out in less a powerful way, where are you God? Why did you leave?

God answers, I am here among you making the impossible possible. More than 7 years ago, before Freeset (www.freesetglobal.com), before Word Made Flesh and Sari Bari, there was a reality of impossibility. Women were not leaving the trade; there was no place for them to go. God was waiting for the beloved, those who call on Him, to be hands and feet, voices of hope and encouragement, to respond.

I think God sent Pornima to be with us Sari Bari, so that she would know His face, when she entered into His presence. God did not prevent her death but created an opportunity for her to receive love, hope and the gift of eternity.

Sari Bari started with 3 women in 2006 and as we enter 2011, have seen more than 70 women have freedom…this is the impossible becoming possible.

Sari Bari itself was not a creation of person but the collaborative effort of many from the beginning, no one person can take credit for anything that has happened. Kristin Keen, had the idea. I was able to contribute tactical, administrative, creative energy. Upendra Prasad Saha and Gita Mondal have been such foundation leaders and visionaries that we know we would not have seen what we have seen without their presence and unique gifts. Others along the way, Beth Waterman, the entirety of WMF staffers who came before, Kyle Scott and most profoundly the women of Sari Bari themselves are the intricate parts of an impossible reality, a reality in which we can only give thanks to a God who has not forsaken us.

I hope enter into the next year with a full heart ready to look up and see what God is doing, where God will enter into suffering, and where God will make the impossible, possible. And when I feel forsaken or wonder why God has not intervened in yet another broken reality, I hope to remember the miracle of the past that has created a fertile ground for my weak faith to grow.

With HOPE,

Sarah

Work Equals Freedom

2010-10-05T09:00:00.000-07:00

Wrote an article earlier this year for Geez Magazine which you can now read online:

http://www.geezmagazine.org/magazine/article/work-equals-freedom/

This is not a movie...

2010-09-12T07:07:00.000-07:00

if i ever get accustomed to what i see in sonagacchi and do not find that it breaks my heart and destroys me, that is the day i should leave here. Spent some time tonight with my friends in the gach over tea and sodas and snacks. Walking from one friends room, where i just encountered 3 new girls under the age of 18, i was so discouraged. But the brokenness of what we encounter the lanes of the red light area did not end...walking down the lane their were more little girls standing the line, new faces, i have not seen, men crowding the lanes, looking the women and girls up and down, making their choice from among the many who do not have choices.

I do not want to get used to what i see here. plain and simple, injustice upon injustice, exploitation upon exploitation. I still find it all very shocking and dumb founding. I once had a team member tell me that it was not a big deal visiting one of the harshest, saddest rooms we visit. She said she has seen it before on tv and in movies. I was dumbfounded, this is not the movies, these are real girls with real stories being exploited before our eyes. God forgive us if think having seen it before it should not move us to our knees, break our hardened hearts and cause us to take action. I have been living a long time and though i have seen it over and over, I still find it appalling and so devastating...because it is real and a true reality for so so many women and girls around the world.

The friends i was visiting were from Sari Bari. Beautiful markers of HOPE in the midst of devastating injustice, they give me hope and reason to continue, to not let my heart hardened and say i have seen it all before. I live in the tension of two realities, the freedom and hope that sari bari acts as the medium to achieve in the lives of the women and the horrifying injustice and the reality of the blatant bondage in which so so many remain. This is the tension that all of us in kolkata work, marking the hope of Jesus our redeemer, risen, alive, transforming people and culture and remembering the suffering of the Christ, the who is with us, with each and every one of the devastated destroyed little girls who stand the line on sonagacchi tonight.

may the prayers of the saints be heard tonight on behalf of these children newly traded and these many forgotten women who lost their childhoods many years ago . Jesus have mercy on us and on the whole world.

Video Introductions to Sari Bari Prevention Unit

2010-06-07T09:34:00.000-07:00

Translation of the last conversation: What is the purpose of work at Sari Bari? The answer freedom. Why do we work for freedom? Because the lives of the women have so much value!

Hopeful to end trafficking...that's what i said!

Waiting for Justice

2010-06-05T04:24:00.000-07:00

I don’t know what to do sometimes…my reality as an observer to the reality of the red light district is painful. I see things I do not want to see and know things I do not what to know. The responsibility is tremendous and far too much for even a community to carry. My spiritual director asked me this week what I thought God was trying to tell me. Because I had told her that I am having a hard time listening. The circumstances of the last weeks and month, tell me that I am not in control, they I never was in control, that I cannot prevent pain and its affects, that I am not alone but sometimes I feel that way, they tell me that I must endure injustice because cannot stop it, they tell me that I am helpless in the face of most things. If this is what the circumstances tell me, then maybe God is at work in those circumstances…telling me that I am helpless in the face of most things.

Yesterday, only one of the many days in this week that affirmed this truth, was particularly devastating. I currently have little or no emotional margin. Sickness, death, injustice and HEAT have made recovery through intentionality difficult. I am basically trudging, with love on good days and impatience on bad days through this season in Kolkata. As I was saying, yesterday was confounding, wrenching and horrific and I still don’t know what to feel about it because it affirms and destroys me.

As I was leaving Sari Bari on very late lunch break I encountered something I have never encountered in progress in the Gach: A girl being sold on the street. There was a big crowd, mostly men surrounding the girl so I could not see her. I saw the man selling her, well dressed (slimy, wretched man—my thoughts), and I thought why? I knew what was happening because a woman walking the opposite direction told me. The men were fighting…I did not stick around to find out the details. I keep asking myself if I should go in there and grab her or if I needed to protect the 50 plus women who work at Sari Bari by doing nothing. I did nothing. You can and should judge me for this…I am judging myself. It all happened so fast and I was so stunned that I could not think clearing what to do really. I think I was not really thinking about myself but in the aftermath, I wonder if I was…confronting this huge injustice would have meant the end of my time India (because the powers that control the red light area would have made it impossible for me to stay), maybe the end of Sari Bari because in the aftermath the red light community would have ceased to trust our community. The reality is that I walk this lane through the red light area every day, from my home to Sari Bari and back. The lane is infamous…big scary madams sit outside buildings, that we are not welcome to enter as they protect their financial investment and prostitute little girls. I smile at these ladies but I am afraid of what would happen if crossed them. I actually love these ladies and want to see their freedom and the freedom of those little girls but I am not foolish enough to believe their own woundedness and anger is not powerful enough to destroy me. It is darkness powerful enough to destroy me and Sari Bari and the freedom it provides, as it is certainly destroying life after life within the walls of those brothels.

I came home last night and I tell my friend Ranjana what I saw and how powerless I felt and she says, I have seen it many times and also did nothing…your hands are tied, there was nothing you could do...those men would have killed you. So I asked Rajana to tell me her story again. (Rajana began staying with me this week until we find her a room near us). Her story breaks my heart, sold as a little girl when her hair was still short, by little girls who worked alongside her washing floors in a rich man’s house. She was sold by her friends for a mere 100 USD. She was held against her will for weeks before being raped by a fat old man (her description) drenching the bed with her blood and innocence. She says that from that moment forward she became a bad woman. As she told her story, I wanted to hold her and tell her she was anything but bad, that she was beautiful and beloved. But she kept sharing more and more horrible and sad details about being held against her will, never receiving any money for the work she was forced to do on an ongoing bases for customer after customer, being sold many times over as virgin because her own small childish frame betrayed her. After she told me her story, I was numb with sadness and I hugged her and told her I was sorry and I went to bed and then woke up thinking about it.

I woke up thinking about the girl who was sold and all the ways I could have helped her. I woke up thinking that her reality was about become Ranjana’s…a story, that if I told you everything would make you gasp with unbelief as you thought of your daughter or sister or friend. Questioning, I ask myself why I did not risk my life and everything I have and love, for her life. And then I came to my mind this morning, why didn’t I go back to the office and get enough rupees to buy her freedom myself—I could have bought her freedom, saved her from Ranjana’s fate and the fate of pretty much everyone women and girl we know. I am deeply ashamed of my helplessness, deeply ashamed that I was paralyzed. I am appalled at the grotesque ability of men and women to commit evil against one another and at the same ability to not respond when we witness injustice—literally women being sold into slavery before our very eyes….my very eyes. I am crying and have been crying much harder and telling God to forgive me.

There are things that I see and know, that I know I would not understand if I had not seen them myself. Talking to Beth, I know this is true…you cannot know unless you have seen it and experienced it. Just like I cannot know what it is like to sold as a sex slave and live a life beyond that trauma…I will never know. The tears I cry and that I can’t cry for these women will never compare to the tears that they have cried and the flood of tears that they still hold inside. There are stories and situations that compel me to choose other than what I have been raised to believe…to say yes to people and relationships, rather than reason and law. Sometimes, my law abiding nature, causes me to feel ashamed but I will do the wrong thing for the right reason because I love someone. I feel like I did the wrong thing yesterday. Because I love the Sari Bari ladies deeply with my whole being and I would give my life a thousand times over in order to see what has happened to them never have happened, I chose them. I chose them yesterday but I also walked by a little girl being sold into the sex trade…oh dear Jesus please forgive me. This day destroyed me and probably will destroy me in the months and years to come.

Yesterday, my only hope came from a conversation with Gita. She is our Director of New Programs and will be the founding Manager of our prevention unit in Canning, West Bengal. She shared a conversation that she had yesterday with young girl who will come to work for us next week when we open the prevention unit. The girl asked why it has taken so long to start; Gita has been visiting for almost 3 months. The girl said “while they have been waiting for us many girls have left for Kolkata looking for work and many girls have been sold into the sex trade…why didn’t you start sooner.” Gita said, “I am sorry we did not start sooner. But we are starting now and we are going end the trafficking of girls from Canning.” Gita said WE ARE GOING TO END THE TRAFFICKING OF GIRLS FROM CANNING. Gita, beautiful, passionate, strong, 22 year girl, woman, hero, is going to bring LIGHT into the darkness and HOPE to what has truly been a hopeless circumstance of the young poor girls of canning. And she is bringing with her another HERO; a woman has gained freedom from the sex trade and will do anything to see that it does not happen to other girls. Gita, my friend, sister, and tiny Bengali hero will be doing what I could not do yesterday, she will be actively preventing girls from being sold into the sex trade by giving her love and providing employment that will literally save girls from this horrible fate. This gives affirmation of all that we hope for by starting a prevention unit.

These things all happened on the same day, Friday, June 4, 2010. A dark horrible day, a little girl was sold into the sex trade and her future is uncertain. A day of continued promise because of Gita and Shaleha, many, many girls will never face this reality. And a day where I again question, God what are you saying, are you saying from these circumstances I am helpless, that the world is dark and evil and i am not in control,because I sure feel that way…and as I acknowledge my broken state, I ask God so what are you going to do about this? Will you please make this injustice right? Will save that girl? Please… And I wait.

31 Days till Summer

2010-06-01T09:28:00.001-07:00

I am a little late to this endeavor but I am still going to do the 31 Days till Summer Challenge

1. Eat when I am hungry and understand why I want to eat when I am not hungry
2. Eat fruit everyday
3. Drink more water less coffee and soda
4. Listen to my body when it tells to me to rest
5. Take my medicine like a good girl
6. Be patient with India
7. Be Patient with myself
8. Take care of my feet
9. Do one creative activity every week
10. Exercise every morning...my body, my mind or my heart in some way
11. Make my own yogurt at least once
12. Trade my old books in for new ones
13. Plant my much delayed herb garden
14. Paint my other room a pretty color
15. Breath deeply and slowly for one minute everyday
16. Practice gratitude
17. Practice hospitality
18. Dance when I feel like it no matter who is watching
19. Run with my community twice a week
20. Be open to new friendships
21. Seek to understand my emotions before I act on them.
22. Go get a head massage
23. Roll my yarn into balls so I can make something beautiful
24. Read Break Free from Emotional Eating by Geenen Roth
25. Read For the Beauty of the Church: Casting a Vision for the Arts Taylor, W. David
26. Call my Baba
27. Cook something new and special for my community
28. Be my best self at Sari Bari, when I am not, take a deep breath and take the time I need to become my best self for the day!
29. Listen to at least one sermon every week
30. Sew myself a new dress
31. Choose to let my heart stay open and shed the shackles of self protection!

Plan to do this through the end of June since I am starting a little late. A list like this deserves the time and space to allow everything on it to become a reality.

Pilgrimage of a soul

2010-05-28T08:47:00.001-07:00

Phileena Heuertz new book was released today! You can buy it here. Here is one the images I did for the book...a little teaser and one i especially like...

More details on the prevention unit

2010-05-24T07:19:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends of Sari Bari-

We recently invited you to participate in helping us raise the funds we need for our new prevention unit opening up in June. We know $10,000.00 is big number so we wanted to break down into parts that make sense and smaller numbers that are workable for every budget. If you want to donate $1.50 you can buy a brick or two or three—bricks are important because we use them to keep tension on the blankets as we are sewing. For $20.00 you can pay for the literacy and materials for one woman. For $90.00 you can support one woman with a stipend we offer during training. For $250.00 you can sponsor clean drinking water with the purchase of the water filter. We welcome your participation, large and small. All of it will be a part of creating a space where young women at risk will be able to find safety and opportunity that will give them freedom from the future that could await them.
We love the support you offer us already and are so thankful to have your purchasing power on the side of freedom for all the women at Sari Bari.

For Freedom,
Sarah

Sari Bari Prevention Unit Start up

Facilities
Rent for one year $1,800.00
Security Deposit $ 700.00
Kitchen Set up $ 250.00
Onsite Manager Housing Set up $ 150.00
Secure Closet $ 150.00
Washer (used) $ 125.00
Dryer (new) $ 400.00
Water Pump with Labor $ 100.00
Paint with Labor $ 400.00
Fans and Electrical with labor $ 340.00
Furniture $ 100.00
Fire extinguishers $ 700.00
Clean Drinking water Electronic Filter $ 250.00

Training for 20 women Total Cost Per Woman
Training Salary for Three months $ 750.00 $ 90.00
Heath check $ 800.00 $ 40.00
Salary Assistance for Management staff $1,275.00 $ 63.75
3 meals per week for trainees for three months $ 818.00 $ 41.00
3 months of Sewing Materials $ 465.00 $ 24.00
Literacy, Math and general training materials $ 400.00 $ 20.00
Bricks for tension on blankets $ 30.00 $ 1.50

Art

2010-05-18T09:20:00.000-07:00

Well, I guess the next couple weeks will make it official. i am a published artist. I did the above T-shirt design for Freeset UK and have another really edgy one in the works for Sari Bari.

And I did the interior art for PILGRIMAGE OF A SOUL by my friend and coworker Phileena Heuertz. I would encourage you to journey with Phileena and order an advance copy so you can get it as soon as it releases! I will share the interior images but not till after the release date!

The Other side of rejection

2010-05-16T00:49:00.001-07:00

I have experience with rejection. We probably all do...at some point someone told us we were not good enough or smart enough or too sinful to be around. This caused pain and fear about the next time it might happen. if this has not happened to you, I'm glad, if it has happened, i truly sorry.

In my early twenties, i had a very good friend, who decided in the midst of very difficult season in my life that I was too much. My tongue piercing, a relapse of my eating disorder, and the choice of the wrong man to spend time with, made me too much. I still have dreams about the loss of this friendship. It has colored my ability to trust and believe that in seasons of darkness in my own life that someone will tell me again that i am too much and that they do not want to be around me.

The other side of rejection is being the one who rejects. It is easy to forget that you have been rejected when someone, an especially broken person, comes across your path and you want to reject them because ultimately they will reveal your brokenness and sin.

this week, one of our ladies husband's died of HIV. We have known him and been his friend for years, but honestly we have not been good friends to this man. He is one who I know I have rejected at different times for reasons that i could legitimize but will not. About a year ago, I finally recognized his humanity...I FINALLY SAW HIM, his heart, his personhood, I saw Jesus in him waiting for our community to respond with love. In recognizing his humanity, i found that i could no longer reject but only be broken over the sin in my life and see that it was his brokeness that brought him to the place that he was and the reasons for why he was where he was and acted the way that he acted. His humanness and my recognition of his humanity lead me to repentance and a place where i could no longer reject him but felt the need instead to embrace him. the embrace was not easy and has remained mostly tentative, trying to forgive him and forgive myself for not loving him as Jesus. He counted himself part of our community because of the connection through his wife and i am thankful that he called on us and asked for help even when should have been the ones to offer before he had to ask. In the wake of his death, all of the women at Sari Bari came to his funeral and mourned his loss. the ripples of love in community extend when we let them to those we would rather cast aside. I am thankful for those ripples that touched Nareem and that he knew he cared for him before he died. But I remain sorry that i did not extend love more fully and more completely to this man that God created and called his child.

I keep thinking of Jesus words: they that have been forgiven much, love much and they that have been forgiven little, love little. i think that it is not so much a matter of the difference in how much we sin but how much we are willing to acknowledge before God and others of our brokenness and how much we are willing to receive the forgiveness that has been offered to us.

I struggle to be broken before others and sometimes that means that brokenness in others in hard to handle. in my own struggle, i do not confess my sin before God and others and struggle to allow it to be taken from me in order to receive forgiveness for myself so i can love better, more freely. I would rather be angry then tell some one that i am sad and that they have disappointed me or that they have hurt someone i love and that it breaks my heart, i would rather self protect and reject than fall apart and lay my soul bare for all to see. I have much to learn and my friend Nareem has given me a harsh lesson in humility and i hope that God in his great mercy has received Nareem into the ARMS of love and that Nareem and Jesus will forgive me for not loving Nareem as if he was Jesus himself. His brokenness revealed my own and it shames me, as it should. i am broken and asking for forgiveness that i may be one who has been forgiven much so that i can let God love much through me.

May God have mercy on us and on the whole world.

Sari Bari Prevention Unit--Opportunity to help

2010-05-15T08:30:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends, family and supporters of Sari Bari-

Sari Bari has been working the red light areas of Kolkata for more than 4 years offering freedom and hope to women trapped the sex trade. Even after opening our second unit last year to create more spaces and opportunities for freedom, we are now busting at the seams and ready for more space with more than 50 women working at Kalighat and Songacchi Sari Bari units. Hope is being restored and is bringing new life in our midst. And we are very, very hope full!

Sadly, the majority of women who work for us were trafficked at a young age and found themselves trapped in the sex trade. They were vulnerable because of poverty and lack of choices for young women in the villages where they lived. Kyle Scott, WMF staff member, wrote a song called “35 once 13” that speaks profoundly of the losses that these women, our friends, have lost in the “in between”. Knowing these losses intimately because of our friendship and the life we share in community among these women we want to take a new step and prevent this cycle from repeating.

One of the important steps we took when we opened the second Sari Bari unit in Songacchi was to invite young women at risk, primarily daughters of sex workers, within the red light areas to work with us. We reserved 20 percent of our space in Sonagacchi for these young women and we are so encouraged to see this making a difference in their lives and have seen how their current employment has literally saved them from being forced to work in the sex trade. We see new girls working in Sonagacchi every day and this exploitation can be stopped before it has started. Helping to prevent new girls from being trafficked into the sex trade is the most effective way to combat sexual slavery. We hope to offer more high-risk girls an opportunity to life-giving education and work that will protect them from ever entering the sex trade.

Sari Bari is ready to open one of its first sites dedicated to prevention in the next month, in a village that is a high trafficking area on the border of Bangladesh and India. We hope to employ young women ages 17-25 and living in poverty as a means of preventing them from being trafficked into the city of Kolkata as sex workers. As we have prepared for this new step our outreach, we have been visiting and connecting with the young women from the village. Gita (WMF Staff member) and Shaleha (New Production Manager--some of you probably have one of her blankets!) for the Prevention unit have been engaging the women and their mothers in conversations. And we have sadly found as we feared, that we are not the first visitors but one among many visitors to these impoverished areas. The girls have described many, many visitors who have sought to bring them to Kolkata for a job and ultimately to be sold into the sex trade in Songacchi or trafficked even further to Mumbai or the Middle East. Our encounters have confirmed the need for a response in this village to create a space for opportunity through employment so that these young women will not have to take the risk of trusting a stranger and ending up in sexual slavery.

We would like to offer you the opportunity to partner with us in the start up expenses for the building, the initial setup and the training costs for employing 20 young women. We are seeking to raise $10,000.00 by the end of June to cover these expenses and we hope that you will join with us. You can donate though WMF (www.wordmadeflesh.org) and click on the donate link or you can go to https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?aid=26156 to make a donation online.

For Freedom,
Sarah, Beth, Kyle, Gita, Upendra, Radha, Shela, Shaleha and all the Sari Bari Ladies

Dude...I'm angry

2010-04-22T10:18:00.000-07:00

So this week i think denial has moved to anger as i process Pornima's loss and probably the fact that it touches on all the other injustices that I encounter daily. I have walked past the place where she used to stand multiple times this week looking for her, hoping that I would see her and all that has happened would have only been a nightmare. This anger has compelled me forward so hard that I am accomplishing alot (negative energy producing hopefully positive things) and thankfully not hurting anyone in the process...because basically i am not angry at anyone but at systems of injustice, at fatalism in the culture that surrounds me and at my own powerless to stop it. I am angry that Pornima's son will not be going to school--if you pray, please pray that this changes, i am angry to be away from my sister when she is hurting, i am angry that i helpless to change anything much.

This afternoon i crashed and just felt weary and tired and almost all the anger left. I think and hope this is God's grace. I feel pretty confident that I want these feelings to leave and love to replace it....to shed that hard protect wall that has been keeping me sane and let God love me so that love can flow better to others. Because as they say...love can cover a multitude of sins. Goodness knows i need my sins covered and forgiven. I guess when i feel this spent the only place I can turn with my emptiness is Jesus. He seems to have been taking the heat with some of my sadness and anger and hurt over so much injustice and suffering. I hopeful for His continued embrace in the coming days until all this anger is gone and love and mercy find their way back.

Jesus have mercy on me and on the world!

Sabbatical Planning

2010-04-15T04:28:00.001-07:00

So i am taking a few days break to plan my Sabbatical in 2011...this means I will be taking a 6 month time of reflection and rest after 10 years with WMF. I have been looking forward to this opportunity and priviledge for a couple years but have never really made the time to think about it let alone plan for it. So today when I really sat down and wrote everything out, i started to cry. I started to cry because the thought of leaving my friends and sisters at Sari Bari for 6 months seems like too long, maybe even too selfish a thing to consider. My spiritual director has been encouragin me over the last year to remember that I need to take care of myself in order to offer my best to these friends and sisters. This is what i am trying to keep in mind because i know this to be the truth. In 2009, I took a 3 month leave of absence becausei was so burnt out--i had to leave because i was not taking care of myself and i do not want to see that happen again in the next ten years. So i am trying to look at this as an opportunity--something that can be both a gift for myself and my community. I would love to have your prayers as I plan and dream and prepare the SB community for this temporary departure. Pray that God would be preparign my heart and an acutal way for it to happen (there are alot of details to be worked out!) So i am back to dreaming and planning and maybe that pain in my heart with subside--but maybe it is not supposed to...

May 2010 Prayer letter

2010-04-15T04:23:00.000-07:00

Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted. Matthew 5:4

We lost a friend recently. She was killed in her room by a customer. The why’s and how’s are still uncertain but what is certain is that she is gone from us. Her name is Pornima and she was our sister, our friend and a part of the Sari Bari Family.

She began her journey to freedom with us at Sari Bari three months ago was still in the middle of her period of training. (During training the women are given 6 months to transition out of the trade. This is an important part of allowing them to make the choice for freedom. They can bring closure to the past and break ties with old customers while gaining confidence and an understanding of their value which ultimately gives them the strength and courage to leave completely. We have seen about 90 percent of our ladies leave the trade permanently.) She had only begun to the take first steps toward the ownership of her own freedom. And her ability to have it fully through her own hard work in the midst of a safe and loving community. The day before she died was particularly important as she poured herself into completing her first blanket and completed more than she had in day than she had the weeks prior. She even surprised herself and was talking about how amazed she was at what she had accomplished. Pornima was cremated with her almost completed blanket as sign of the freedom that she experienced in this lifetime and the hope of freedom in the next.

Her loss is deeply impactful for our community and each person within it. We mourned for her together the day of her death, each coming to pay their respects at the uncomfortably open crime scene. Afterward, we all returned to Sari Bari to pray and share and listen to stories of Pornima and the personal stories of loss, hurt and hope from many of the other women. Sari Bari remained closed for the rest of the day as we pursued the details of laying our friend to rest as quickly as possible ( a process complicated by the circumstances and the police, red light area and family politics that played themselves out in the aftermath of the loss our beloved sister.) We continue to mourn in the days following and I am sure we feel the loss and mourn our friend in the months and years to come.

There is nothing good about Pornima’s death or how she died or even how her life was spent up to that point. Her life was a long legacy of suffering and strife that led her to the brothels of Songacchi. But as I reflect, I find comfort and hope for Pornima because now her suffering is finished. Three months at Sari Bari brought her a taste of the goodness of a loving God. She celebrated Easter with us in the days before her death and came to know that the Redeemer of the world was on her side. No more sacrifice or offering needed to be made for her sins because the God of the Universe has offered up His Son as the final sacrifice. Though she was not able to experience the fullness of freedom in this lifetime we trust that she is experiencing true freedom in the presence of Jesus at this very moment.

Pornima is gone and we are left to mourn her loss and figure out what to do in world without her presence and her cocked smile when she greeted us on the street before joining us at Sari Bari. I will miss her shy approach as she called out “Didi (big sister), is it okay if ….?” As we have mourned, we have been comforted, by one another, by the new enthusiasm and drive that we see in the women who lost their dear friend, to make sure freedom does not slip from their grasp. We have been comforted by simple cultural acts of purification as we all went for a swim in the Ganges right after the funeral (you can read more about this on my blog www.princesslightbringer.blogspot.com) and we have been comforted by many of you in our extended community who have poured our your prayers and encouragements. We have been comforted by Psalm 34:18 The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit and Psalm 142. Ultimately, we have been comforted in these days since the marking of the death and resurrection of our Redeemer by the spirit that prays with us and for us, encourages us and upholds us.

For Pornima True freedom has been granted earlier than we expected. And the rest of us will continue the fight for freedom with fervor and compassion for those who remain in bondage and alongside us we find more than 50 women who believe in the cause of freedom not only for themselves but for their sisters still trapped in bondage.

From one who has been comforted,

Sarah

Let there beauty for these ashes...

2010-04-08T08:59:00.000-07:00

Pornima's body was cremated today and we know in our hearts that she has been given her True freedom and entry into the promised land earlier than we expected. Her Body was accompanied by her Sari Bari and Freeset families as well as her mother and son. One of the girls commented, that Pornima would have been so encouraged to know how very well loved she was by so many people. Pornima was wrapped in her Sari Bari blanket, it was a marker of hope and the freedom that Pornima has received in the welcome embrace of Jesus. We ended the time with prayers and the rememberance that one day we will see pornima again, whole and restored. We hope, believe and pray for beauty out these ashes in our loss of Pornima...for each woman at Sari Bari, their children and their families.

We all wept and cried together and then we followed the bengali tradition of taking a bath in the Ganga (Ganges). I have never taken a bath in the ganga before but i have to say there is something pretty healing about jumping in the water with other mourners, sisters and friends, washing away the tears and starting anew. It is like after experiencing the death of a loved one, you have the opportunity once again to be reborn, to be refreshed in the water (even very dirty water that makes you wonder whether you should take a z-pac as a preventative measure.). There is alot of religious rituals connected to this practice but i have to say, i celebrated the bath with the Sari Bari women as something that heals, remembering that Jesus makes us new, washes us clean and restores life.

What violence has beset us this day

2010-04-07T03:23:00.000-07:00

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 heart
Yet is 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 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.

For Pornima. Completed three months of training at Sari bari.
Died: Today

Sari Bari Bags are on Sale

2010-04-04T02:41:00.000-07:00

visit Sari Bari to buy a bag before the email goes out and they disappear!

Remembering

2010-04-04T02:38:00.000-07:00

I was going some of my stuff yesterday and I found this reflection that I wrote just two weeks after the start of Sari Bari in 2006. Pretty cool after celebrating Easter on friday with more than 50 ladies who now have freedom!

The new life of three women has begun with the advent of Sari Bari. Three women now have freedom to begin a new life that was never before possible. Now it is more than possible…it is a reality. We celebrated the beginning of the new lives of these three women with birthday cake on Saturday. This is something that started with celebrating the life of one girl in Sonagacchi who left the trade and now will become the beautifully regular celebration of every new women employed by Sari Bari.

It was exciting and beautiful to be with them as we sang happy birthday for them and with them as they celebrated not only their own freedom but the start of freedom of the other 2 women working alongside them. It was a sweet celebration of new life on the floor of what is now Sari Bari in Kalighat.

These first two weeks have been full of new and good experiences. The ladies are amazing and they are working so hard…it was hard to get them to stop for the informal education we hope to have built into all our training sessions. We want to make sure that they have basic literary, nutrition education, budgeting and team building games to round out their training but they just want to keep working on their blankets. Most of the time it just feels normal and maybe like I might be in a little over my head but so good.

I also started learning how to make a Sari Blanket and if you know me at all you will know I wanted my Sari Blanket, even though it is my first one, to be perfect and beautiful. I thought I had picked beautiful and fun sari’s to make the perfect blanket. But as my work progressed I realized that my Sari had all these holes and that I would need to patch them. Hey no problem, the patches add to the coolness I thought, but then there was not left over fabric to match my sari so I had to patch with another color that did not quite match…I was tempted to think that now my Sari blanket was ruined. And then I started to think about it…this sari blanket that I was working on is very much like me and in fact very much like all the ladies I am working alongside. It has the appearance of something good and the potential for great beauty but there are holes and the holes while they make it imperfect they do not make it any less beautiful. The holes which require patching, even patching with a color that does not quite match, make the Sari Blanket even more unique and beautiful. I just realized that I want my life to be perfect but it is not…I imagine the ladies we work with feel the same way…they want beauty and wholeness for themselves and their families but this has not been something available or even attainable. But the fact of the matter is just because there are holes, brokenness and imperfection in our lives does not mean that these things can not be patched, healed and redeemed to make something even more beautiful. That is the kind God we serve, one who patches our holes and calls us beautiful…a God who will heal my brokenness and the brokenness of these ladies and make something new.

This is our vision for Sari Bari that God would take the lives of these women just as they take these old thrown away Sari’s and make something new. We started making Sari Blankets in a business that we call Sari Bari but this week God started making things new in the lives of three women. He started the redemption process and I believe we can trust the end result will be beautiful.

I was able to pay them yesterday for the first two weeks of training and it was so beautiful to see their faces and see their responses as it was again affirmed for them that a new life is started and that there really will be freedom for them. They had their first budgeting class yesterday taught by Kiran and it was a really rough go…it is really the first time that they have been asked to intentionally figure out their money and consider how they can pay their debts and even save some money. It was not easy for them to consider how they could actually make something like a budget work but I believe and hope that they can be successful at managing their money and living on the money they make without taking additional loans. They do not yet know that we will be paying off their loans (they can pay us back at no interest—some of them are paying the equivalent of 120 percent a year) and I am so looking forward to the day when I can tell them their debt will be paid and they will be free from it’s burden in the not too far off future.

Please keep these women in your prayers. They have a long, hard and most certainly amazing road ahead them. Freedom will require a fight that they will not have to fight alone but still it will not be easy. They need you to fight on their behalf in prayer.

So thanks for praying for us and for them. We feel it and we most certainly need it!

STONE SOUP

2010-03-20T20:57:00.000-07:00

Do you know the story of stone soup? The one where the guy starts with stone and invites everyone to contribute thus making something that was nothing into a delightful meal, a community event and celebration over the miracle of soup made from a stone.

Yesterday, at Sari Bari Kalighat we had Jhal Muri (puffed rice, lots of veggies, chilies etc. mixed in) for a snack…it was stone soup Indian style. The women started with nothing but the idea of a good snack and an invitation to participate. Everyone brought something, a few rupees each, a little cost to create an abundant meal, shared, enjoyed and very tasty!

Sari Bari has been a stone soup of sorts. We started with nothing…only an idea and a little hope. Everyone involved from the beginning until now has brought something to the pot. Kristin Keen gave her dream for freedom and a lot of laughter, I offered my system building skills, creative energy and passion for the dream and the women who could find freedom within the dream, Upendra and Gita offered their sewing talents and their labor of love, each and every woman has offered her hopes, dreams and a good deal of hard work, Melinda Snader got us started in the states by advocating, marketing and dreaming with us, Kat McRitchie keeps us going by doing the same, Beth Waterman offered her support and partnership from our beginnings, Kyle Schroeder offered his sweet design skills, tons of interns and team members offered encouragement and partnership, thousands of people in the US and UK bought our beautiful handmade products, the folks at Freeset who cheered us on and offered wisdom, The One Million Can Campaign gave us the funds to offer freedom to so many more women, Chris Heuertz advocated for our success, Word Made Flesh gave us a foundation, Kyle Scott offered his sweet admin skills and heart for freedom and four years later, 2 production units and working on a third prevention unit, we have the benefit of sharing in a very unique and special soup. This soup from began with just a stone and an invitation to join us for a meal at the table. Now more 60 friends, staff, partners and freedom fighters are sharing in the nourishing and abundant meal in Kolkata, India.

This is the miracle of stone soup! Starting with nothing but a stone and an invitation, in the end we are all beneficiaries of the meal. The women who began with us in the first years are becoming our leaders and partners in the work of freedom, they are our trainers, our assistant managers, our missionaries and the founders of the new projects that have started and will start in the years to come. We who began by offering that the stone could in fact create a delicious meal are in awe of the goodness of the blessing we have received by those who have accepted the invitation. We overwhelmed at the friends, family and freedom that come out of a simple offering, a starting point.
The invitation to join us is still open. We want to receive from the new women who will come through our doors and find a new life, from the interns, staff and friends who keep freedom possible through their purchasing power! The soup is already pretty darn good but hope remains for more, for a more extravagant meal to be shared by all!

Thankful today to be at this table with these beautiful women, partners and friends! Wish you all could have had some Jhal Muri yesterday it was amazing!

Taste and see that God is GOOD!

a few of my favorite things...

2010-02-05T08:58:00.000-08:00

~receiving answers to prayers the same day

~seeing freedom happen for a dear friend after walking with her through hell for three years

~beth's heart for the women in Sona...gacchi.

~Kyle's tender heart, humility and quiet strength

~Anna Snader's Art

~clean hair

~dancing alone when my heart is sad

~being able to cry, being able to hold back my tears when strength is needed.

~reconcillation

~chances to make wrongs right

~self revelations that make me better and less of a jerk

~my neices...Emma, Grace and Addison

~The Freeset Signature T-shirt (www.freesetglobal.com)

~seeing people blossom like flowers

~being forgiven

~my hot water kettle

~coffee, dark and bold

~peacemakers

~matching Sari Blankets

~being a walking Sari Bari advertisement

~incense from that place in nepal that Chris showed me

~water

~cooking fresh food, how couscous and thyme makes everything seem a little better.

~running

~letting my imagination run wild!

My garden

2010-02-05T02:03:00.000-08:00

If I describe my community to you, I will describe a garden wild, treacherous and beautiful. My community if full of life but in it you will also find that there are seasons, times to plant and times to reap, times die. Because of the loneliness, because of the struggles, I have been examining what is it that makes my life here in Kolkata sustainable and what I have determined is the very thing I felt so deeply when I first returned to Kolkata more than four years ago, that I was called to be in the garden, to create a garden in Kolkata. Over the years I have considered the garden to the place of rest, restoration, where God created for our renewal and refreshment, I created it in my home, and on some days I may tell you it’s in my heart as well.

As I reflect on community, I mean many things when I say it. My community is made up of many people and places but mostly, it is the women of Sona.....gacchi and Kali....ghat, the women at Sari Bari, who remain at the center. These women are the garden that I have longed to find, longed to create for myself but could not have in my wildest dreams fathomed this garden. God has created this garden for me, for the women, for our North American and Indian partners. The women themselves are most beautiful flowers that you will find in the garden. I have found that these women are my garden, in all its stages of growth, the place where I can be sure to find rest, be sure to find beauty, be sure to find welcome and restoration. They are the place where Jesus dwells, where inspiration comes, where things die to be reborn. North Americans will come and go, I myself may go one day, but they are constant, and have the master hand of the master gardener at work in their lives. I want Sunday through Saturday to be at their beckon call, to call them my friends and sisters, as I so often do. I want my Sunday afternoons to celebrate in their homes over rice and prayer and fart jokes. And I want others to join us, to celebrate life with us, to make this their home.

Today was time spent in that treasured garden. Celebrating a special day, a celebration of six months of hard work for 15 women who are now working full time at sari bari after their season of training. grace is poured out all over us and we feel its refreshment in the presence of these beautiful women, wild gorgeous flowers, who made it through, still daily fighting battles for their freedom and a new life for themselves and their families. It was a simple meal and some encouraging words from upendra, a few photo ops for our wall of beauty (this is like our selection of family photos that we put up on the walls of the sari bari unit), and a few simple gifts to mark the occasion. Looking around the room, i saw hope and beauty. I also felt the pain for the tragedy of the few who did not choose to remain with us but went back into the trade. Also encouraging to look around the room and see our new trainees and the hope and expectation for when this day will come for them. In the middle of Sona....gacchi, overlooking the lanes where darkness has made its home, we had a few moments in the garden together, the space God created for us, to be whole and refreshed, intimate with the one who made us, even if just for a few hours.

One liners for this week and last...

2010-02-03T08:01:00.000-08:00

The amount of stories i have stored up for all the blogs I never wrote is ridiculous! So today, I am going to tell you today's highlights...

There is Minu ma reminding me today again that when i go to America I better bring back a brother in law...she means a husband as i am her sister.

Our sweet Nazir, the master taylor, open heartedly and open mindedly, asking what responsibilities God has given us because he wants to live them out.

And the business student who interviewed me and asked great questions with sincerity and intergrity.

Watching a bengali film in with my new tutor in an attempt to practice my listening and thereby improve my speaking so i speak like a bengali...the problem with this film is that the sound quality made it impossible in parts for me to understand either way.

On monday, we celebrated the 2 and 3 year anniversaries of many of our ladies at Sari Bari! Love it!

last weeks stories include...

One of our ladies volunteering to go help our staff in thailand start a business like sari bari so other women can have freedom.

Lunch on sunday with one of ladies and her kids...so sweet.

I got to name a little girl...i named her Mukta which means pearl in bengali...this was accompanied by the obligation to eat 8 bengali sweets and lots of rice!

Still more SB Retreat fun

2010-01-17T22:07:00.000-08:00

We just returned from Digha and celebrating the last year of life at Sari bari with the Kali....ghat ladies and their families! A few highlights were Kate and Kausik Das speaking at the retreat on the parable of the talents and the parable of the 10 virgins! Beth Waterman, led us in a hilarious time of games doing the balloon stomp! And we spent out last night together thanking God for all He has done in our lives over the last year....almost all the women shared about how God has worked within them, bringing healing physically and emotionally. It was great to celebrate life together and 4 years of Sari Bari!

SB Retreat Continued...

2010-01-17T22:02:00.001-08:00

SB Retreat continued...

2010-01-17T22:02:00.000-08:00

Sari Bari Annual Retreat 2010

2010-01-17T22:00:00.000-08:00

A year of facebook status...

2010-01-02T06:55:00.000-08:00

making christmas bright...

2009-12-24T21:18:00.000-08:00

bright lights on christmas day so far...presents with the watermans, new prayer books from mom and dad, phone call from one of the newest sari bari women (made me cry), cinnamon rolls that turned out flat but still taste like christmas morning, and bing crosby wafting down my alley in kolkata mixing with Chris Tomlin's Christmas album. off to celebrate with the SB ladies in some more christmas cheer!

the one that was lost

2009-12-21T06:13:00.000-08:00

As I have looked toward Christmas this year, i have been anticipating the ways that Jesus could come in new ways in my own life and new ways in which he can come in the lives of so many of my friends in the red light areas. I have looked toward rest and creating spaces of peace and spaces of celebration for our community. And i have enjoyed the process and buying about 50 sari's to give as gifts to the Sari Bari women at our christmas celebrations on the 23rd and the 25th. ( We will have about 60 people at each event including the husbands and children of our women).

I was thinking mostly of the joy of christmas. celebrating the people I love and reflecting on the HOPE of emmanuel. Last night, as i walked down the road a few women stepped in my path and told me about our long time friend who has HIV. Her condition is serious and she has refused to get help or let herself be helped. she pulled her kids out of a great school situation and they have become her caregivers. We have not seen or heard from this woman in many, many months. And after hearing the sad state of her current situation, i agreed to visit her on christmas eve and hopeful be able to connect her with the help both she and children need

Suffering entered my picture of Christmas for this year, not suffering i am afraid but suffering that was unexpected. The broken body of my friend, the isolation and lack of support for her children, the loneliness of all it.

i was not able to sleep last night, wrestling with my sadness at the whole thing. And all i could think of today was the story of the lost sheep. 99 doing well and the one that was lost. Sitting with the Sari Bari women in the sona....gacchi, i was overwhelmed as i looked at their faces, they too were lost at one point and are being found. I saw in their eyes hope and renewal that was not there three months ago. they have been found. The are secure in the embrace of the master....loved and growing in security in that love. and yet, are many of their sisters just outside on the lanes are still very lost. and all i could think of was the one who is still lost...my friend,the friend of our community, a woman whose picture i keep in my bible. I welcomed her into my heart long ago, and now it deeply hurts to know of her suffering, it deeply hurts to know that our many pursuits have not brought her yet into safety, it hurts to know that she is still lost, and that her children suffer with her.

It will be my honor to pursue her once again with other members of our community on Christmas eve and hopefully be able to bring her home to safety. Please pray for the miraculous return of this dear lost friend that she may know the healing and restorative embrace of our Emmanuel.

This christmas I will certainly be celebrating the joy of salvation in the form of a child savior and i will be marking the suffering of the those who are still lost who do not know that they can be found. We in kolkata will continue seek those who lost so they can know that they are sought after and deeply loved.

The Broken Body

2009-12-17T19:27:00.001-08:00

These pages are to tell you,
my dear brother, my sister,
not to run away from people who are in pain
or who are broken,
but to walk towards them,
to touch them,
Then you will find rising up within you the well of love,
springing from ressurection.
In waling along this way
I have had to meet my own darkness and brokeness
in the deeper knowledge that i am loved,
and so , though i have had to let go
of many dreams for our world
and many illusions about myself,
still i am growing in hope and trust
in the light that shines in each person:
believer or nonbeliever.
Yes, in that broken child,
a light is shining;
in that man in prision,
a heart is beating;
in that women, victim of prositution,
there is yearning for life;
in the rich and greedy person, seeking power,
there is a child of purity;
in that young man dying of AIDS,
there is the light of God;
in every person, no matter how broken, sinful,
hardened dominating and cruel,
there is a spring of water waiting to flow forth.

If you walk with Jesus along this path,
he will lead you
to the poor, the weak, the lonley and oppressed,
not with fear and despair,
not with feelings of guilt and helplessness,
not with anger or revolt,
not with theories or preconceived solutions,
but with a new and deeper
peace and love and hope.

Jean Vanier, The Broken Body

December Prayer Letter 2009

2009-12-16T17:08:00.000-08:00

The sunlight is streaming in washing us with light. The Paki Tara (bird star in Bengali aka. WMF Logo) flys above us and all of Sona—gacchi. Kyle is playing the guitar as we worship with the women in our Gach unit, our mostly female voices lifting high the name of Jesus, and I imagine the streams of light and hope that are carried out into the lanes of the red light district with our voices. It is a moment of beauty and perfection as I reflect on all that has lead us to this point. We are almost 4 months in at the new unit in Kolkata’s largest red light area, the women are full time now, finding their place and we are finding which product suits them best depending on speed and skill. We are discovering their hearts, learning their burdens and sorrows and enjoying these new friendships and cherishing even more those that began many years ago when the seeds where first planted.

I know not many people get to see their dreams come true and their hopes finding feet but it is a profound gift to live in the reality of a place where dreams really do come true. And it is not a Disneyland reality, of fireworks, color and candy but a fleshed out reality of life being made new and heroes being formed out of real people, real women whose only super power is love and their story!

This week as I was reflecting with the women on stories of Faith, I caught my breath a little bit. There is always something about relating new scriptures to the women that reveals new things as I think about what it means for them, in their context and the realities that they face every day. Both are stories of deep faith. One of the faith of a man for his daughter’s healing and one of a woman, caught in deep suffering and frustration over a long term illness. The woman’s faith revealed her strength of will and committed desire for healing. She believed so hard that only a touch of Jesus robe was enough for complete healing. Her faith is the way faith works sometimes, straightforward, committed, and certainly profound. It is however, Jarius faith that made me catch my breath a little. He was not seeking healing for himself but healing for his daughter. His daughter, her body too weak and broken, to come before Jesus herself; she may not have even had consciousness, awareness, such that we could see or name the presence of personal faith for healing. But Jarius had faith, faith for one he loved. He had faith even when others called upon him to give up hope. Jarius made me think of several of our ladies who are becoming our heroes. They in fact are very much like Jarius, having faith for the freedom and healing of those who remain in bondage in the red light areas, coming to Jesus on behalf of ones they love. Sitting in front of the women, it was beautiful to be reminded together of the one thing we all need to hear sometimes. We are not alone. And in Sona----gacchi when you cannot have faith for yourself, here beside you at Sari Bari are all these other women who will have faith for you. Here at your side, are the Heroes who have gone before, who have faith for your freedom, because the God of Hope, has begun His healing and redeeming work in them. They can tell their stories of faith and restoration. Our Heroes can tell the stories of those who loved them deeply and believed for them when they could not believe for themselves. And I must tell you my friends; you too are a part of this story of Faith. Your prayers for the women still trapped in bondage and those coming into the arms of love, have and are making a profound impact. You have believed for the Sari Bari women when they could not believe for themselves and Jesus has turned them into markers of Hope, reflections of Himself, and those who will point the way as the Kingdom continues to come in Kolkata.

Celebrating this season of Hope with Joy, Merry Christmas to you! Love, Sarah

A few of my favorite things

2009-12-16T07:40:00.000-08:00

1. The enneagram personality test: scarily accurate and really "rips my face off" as Kristin Keen would say. The WMF kolkata community had a great retreat last week in Gangtok and as we "looked into our cup" so to speak, we were able to celebrate and encourage each other in all the ways that we are different.

2. Closing time at Sari Bari: We pray together, sometimes holding hands, sometimes noi. At SB Sona...gacchi, about 7 or 8 ladies wait around and we all walk out together, talking, laughing and I like to think offering a little bit of Jesus presence to the girls we pass who have not yet been able to take those steps toward freedom.

3. Beth Waterman becoming the Kolkata Field Director: Beth and I just spent 2 intense days doing the symbolic hand over of responsibilities. And I am really so excited to see Beth lead us and shepard the community in the coming years.

4. Talking to my mom and dad: I get all filled up to the top when i get skype time.

5. Making beauty: I am on a crochet kick right now, it must be the freezing 60 degree weather! also designing a few new products for sari bari...and working on some sketches for a friend.

6. Upendra Prasad Saha: Never met a man with a bigger smile, a bigger heart and a more profound gifting for what he does at Sari Bari as the Operations Manager.

7. Christmas in kolkata: I have decorated my little tree and i am looking forward to celebrations with our women at Sari Bari. I feel I really get the "when you leave houses or family for my sake...you will receive a hundred fold", i receive a hundred fold everyday.

8. My new sari bari king size bedspread: I almost never buy any Sari Bari Products because i want to get them out there for the world to see but I finally bought myself a sweet, gorgeous blanket of many colors. I am sitting on it right now...love it!

9. Spiritual direction: Someone who constantly points you back to Jesus. Who asks the right questions but does not give the answers, who listens with you and for you.

Coming Soon...

2009-11-10T07:57:00.000-08:00

I have been under it, so to speak! After travels in the states and then my parents coming to visit, and trying to play catch up at Sari Bari, there has been time for little else. But I will be back, hopefully with a real blog post this week some time!

A few more Sari Bari Pics

2009-09-16T10:46:00.000-07:00

Sari Bari After Photos

2009-09-16T10:39:00.000-07:00

Sari Bari After Photos

Update and Visit in Oct.

2009-09-07T21:14:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends- I hope you are all well and have enjoyed your summer! We have had a super busy summer here in Kolkata and Sari Bari has grown as we opened the doors to a second Sari Bari Unit in a second red light area. We are super grateful for your support and for the support of the One Million Can Campaign which made it possible for us to open this second unit and remodel a run down building in the red light district.

I believe in miracles in everyday life and it is unlikely that anyone could convince me women having freedom from the sex trade is not a miracle and does not require the direction hand of God in action, breaking chains and setting women free. Even as I write today, 22 women got their first paycheck at our new Sari Bari Unit in Sonagacchi. One of them called, practically shouting with joy to tell me how happy she was and how all the girls were laughing in celebration their first paycheck. They celebrate the gift of promises kept, hard work paying off, freedom tasted and they will come back for more.

The Kolkata community continues to live in the space of dreams for our friends here being realized not in just small ways but in large, “can’t believe this is real”, ways. Thanks to the gifts of the One Million Can Campaign, Sari Bari has seen our dream of opening the unit in Sonagacchi become a reality. We opened the unit on one of the darkest lanes in the district and while it did take us 9 months to get the contract, during the construction process we received so much favor. We have been welcomed into the area and girls continue to come every day asking for jobs (We currently have a waiting list.). Most of our new women in training came through the doors out of relationship with each other not because of previous connection to our community. However, two women who have joined us have impossible stories and we see the miraculous in their presence among us. We know Sushmita because she was the owner of one of our friends and when she came through outdoors we were surprised, and yet a month later she is still here and learning what freedom means to both have and give to others. She is not allowed to keep girls as a condition of her work and it will be exciting to see how God uses this woman of influence in the area to bring about His purposes. Our friend, Jamie, stopped me on the street more than three years ago for tea, and brought me into a room filled with very young girls, among who she was one. Over the years, we have become friends with many of the girls in that room, we have taught literacy, and been invited to eat with them. We talked about other work with Jamie many times and there was one instance, when she was at my house in the last 6 months, where a taste of what was possible became real for both of us. Freedom was possible. So it was especially exciting when Jamie joined us at Sari Bari and brought along several of her friends. She is finding freedom not only for herself but making freedom possible for the women around her. These two women now among the 22 that work in the new unit are a marker for our community of what God has done and what He can do through our presence in Sonagacchi.
God has done great things, making lives new, and bringing light into the darkest places. As a community we were profoundly moved as we prayed scripture over the SB Sonagacchi unit. Each person brought a word or scripture full of promise, full of hope, full of the truth of who God was, who God is and who God will be for us as a community among our friends here in Kolkata. We all often have the feeling of, “is this real”, “can this be happening” and I hope that feeling does not go away. Because that feeling, leads us to Jesus, and our own powerlessness to make any of it happen without God’s divine direction and leading. We are all thankful to be here now, awaiting God’s continued direction as we walk forward, alongside our friends on the Exodus road to freedom and the Promised Land.

Personally, my first year as Regional Coordinator has been super full, comprising of itself of the loss of a Field Director and multiple staff members in Nepal, bi- weekly calls with Field Directors, 2 visits to Thailand, 2 visits to Nepal and one visit to Chennai and lots and lots of time reflecting on policy conversations as the larger WMF community grows and reforms itself in new and I believe healthy ways. I feel like I have finally found my footing and am regaining balance as I try to manage Sari Bari, being the Field Director and also a Regional Coordinator. I think all that was needed was time and growing and deepening personal connections with the staff throughout Asia.

I am more at home in my life here in Kolkata than I thought could be possible. There are certainly ebbs and flows of weariness, energy, joy and sorrow but mostly there is deep sense of purpose and calm in my life here in the last 6 months. I am so grateful for my time away from Kolkata because it has allowed me to refocus and at the very least pick out some important practices and rhythms that make life fuller and most sustainable.

I began meeting with a spiritual director 6 months ago and it has really been a gift to have someone listening with me to what God is speaking. I also began attending an Anglican church just before Easter this year and it has been a super centering and important part of my weekly practices. As we sit in the cathedral, the beauty of the place, the sometimes volumous silence marked against the Eucharist prayers sung by the congregation, the presence of the Holy Spirit, a still small voice so to speak, though the word and song my soul feels restored.

I feel like my listening and actually doing what I hear, has been a gift in relationship as I struggle to lead an evolving community and a struggling region. There has been many times when my intent has been to bring the hammer down and all I hear is wait, listen, and pray for them. My nature being one that both hates conflict and yet needs resolution often leads me into some hard situations but I think I can safely say that when I have been obedient to the ‘still small voice’ things seem to go better than planned and I guess I am seeing the fruits of the gentleness and patience that I have prayed for many times in recent years.

I will be back in the states briefly this fall to attend two conferences, one in Ohio and one in California. While I am in California, I am hoping that I can borrow a car from Oct 3rd to Oct 12th from someone living the LA, Pasadena area. I am also looking to borrow some camping stuff, a tent, a stove, a couple of sleep bags for a little camping in between conferences. If you are willing to help me out with either of these things please let me know.

My itinerary is as follows:

30th Sept: Depart Kolkata
Oct 1: Arrive Toledo, Ohio for Prostitution and Trafficking Conference
Oct 3: Depart Toledo, Arrive in Los Angeles
Oct 5: Travel to Carlsbad California
Oct 7,8,9: Not For Sale Conference in Carlsbad, CA
Oct 10-12: Time in Los Angeles with friends and family
Depart for Kolkata

I hope to see a some of you during my brief visit to Los Angeles.

Much love,
Sarah

A Future Not Our Own

2009-08-26T08:12:00.000-07:00

Written by Arch Bishop Oscar Romero

It helps, now and then, to step back
and take the long view.
The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of
the magnificent enterprise that is God's work.
Nothing we do is complete,
which is another way of saying
that the kingdom always lies beyond us.

No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No programme accomplishes the church's mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about:
We plant seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything
and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something,
and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way,
an opportunity for God's grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results,
but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders,
ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.

A little update on Ranjana

2009-08-26T06:53:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to let everyone know that at least for today Ranajana seems to be a little better. She is eating, off the IV and she herself says "I am better." Thankful that now,after a couple weeks back on the right meds, it seems she is inching toward getting better and to place where maybe we can transfer her back to the one decent place in the city to receive hospice care. That's todays good news, pray that it becomes good news everyday when it comes to Ranjana's care and recovery!! I believe that the prayers of many for relief from suffering for Ranjana are getting answers!

What money can not buy in Kolkata....

2009-08-21T20:49:00.000-07:00

In most places in the world, it seems that if you have a little money, you can enter most doors and find the help you need. I find this to be especially true in kolkata, the support we have received from our many friends and the profits from Sari Bari have allowed us to serve with generosity and regularity the needs of our friends here in the red light areas and at Sari Bari.

There is however, one stopping point. One barrier that money does not reconcile and that is in the area of the treatment of HIV. There is only one hospital in all of kolkata that will admit patients with HIV/AIDS and that is the government hospital. Where doctors are overun with patients and students seems to do most of the work. Our friend Ranjana is there in the end stages of her life not being offered the best comfort and care but barely receiving the minimum and there is nothing we can do about it. She is in pain, crying out and her IV is dripping most of its contents on the floor and the woman we hired to care for her likes to disappear and be rude (yes we tried to fire her and get a new woman but the hospital controls who we can hire and fire) I can barely contain my frustration and anger and hurt at the conditions that we are forced to offer our friend who needs so much more, who we want to give so much more.

Ranjana called me yesterday, sobbing, in writhing pain telling me she wanted me to take her away from that place. But I am powerless, there is no other place to take her. When we hung up, I sobbed at her suffering, in frustration at the my powerless to help my friend.

I tried. We tried to get her admitted to a private hositpal where the care would be more consitant and compassionate but there is not one private hospital that will accept someone with HIV. When i called Apollo Hospital, a reputable and good health care insitution, the call went something like this: Hi, I need to admit a patient with HIV. Transfer, transfer. Hello can i help you (operator again). Transfer. transfer. Hang up. I call again. Yes, sir i just called a minute ago and i would like to talk to someone about admitting a patient in the end stages of life who has AIDS. Yes, let me transfer you. Transfer. transfer. (emergency room) Hello, I need to admit someone with HIV, can you tell me the process, indiscernable babble--do you speak english or bengali? indiscernable babble. transfer. transfer. hangup. Upendra used his contacts through a doctor friend who used his contacts to contact every major hospital and private care facililty...no one with take someone with HIV/AIDS.

I am to the point of lament, to the point to crying out for mercy, for someone, anyone to use basic medical precautions and offer humane and compassionate care to those with HIV AIDS. I told Beth yesterday that I can not watch another one of our friends be put in a situation like this again. And it will happen again, another friend and sister will need medical care for HIV and the government hospital will be the only place to go. Cockroaches and poor response to patient needs will be all we can offer. I feel powerless. I am powerless.

I am in pleading posture, saying to anyone who listen, Bill and Melinda Gates give your money to hospitals who will offer good care and good facilities to those with HIV. Stop giving money to the sex workers unions who keep sex workers uninformed of their HIV status while allowing them to continue to work in the trade. Mission of Mercy hospital be merciful and care for the poor whom you profess to serve.

"Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will." Martin Luther King Jr.

God's eyes are better than mine...i am thankful that he is letting me see again with His.

2009-08-17T09:27:00.000-07:00

These last weeks have been full of joy and amazement as we have opened the doors of our second Sari Bari unit. What is happening now is the realization of a dream...it is the dream we thought we would never see realized. Light burns the darkness and Hope rises from the the murky depths to triumph over devastation.

I can now walk to work in 2 minutes straight thought the heart of the Gach. And each morning the Gach leaves is mark on me. There is a face the turns and smiles, a woman who wants a job, and a muddy lane that leaves is marks on my pant legs every day. It is a walk of boldness and humility, if those can exist at the same time. As I walk I make the choice to be exposed to the darkness, letting it grab me before I walk through the gates of Sari Bari. Truly, even after all this time it takes a little guts for me to do this alone. What is humbling is knowledge of where I am, where we have been and the road that we have taken to arrive at this point, all to make a space of safety and Resurrection in the midst of a place of danger and death. I am humbled that this is the place that God has given, humbled we as a community together acknowledge all that God has done to bring us from a few ladies in a tiny room to the darkest lane in the Gach throwing open the doorways of freedom. Humble because I know that this miracle is both God's grace and mercy on His beloved daughters and son's in the red light and His grace and mercy for our community in the gift of being able to see dreams come true. And the fight has been and is real but it is and always has been His fight and it humbling to see what happens when we have let Him lead and provide and use us.

In the last months, I have been surprised by how God shows up in my own life and how He keeps showing himself in very real and tangible ways for friends here. I do not know why I am surprised...i think I keep expecting more setbacks and end points. But what is constantly being affirmed for me personally and communally is that God sits at the table waiting, always present for us to show up. He is not the one that needs to show up in the equation, I am the one that needs to show up. When I show up He is always waiting, and sometimes when I do not show up He gets up from the table and stands in my way to do what i should have been letting Him do in the first place.

God is showing up not only in the joys of recent weeks but also in the losses and places of suffering. Our friend Ranjana is dying of AIDS. She has worked for us for a couple of years and there has been a profound struggle for her life in the last 6 months. She is losing the struggle and we are all beside ourselves whether we admit it and allow the tears to come or not. She has known a life full of deep suffering and suffers still. She often talks of dying and this may be the end. We have moved from encouraging her struggle to live to assuring her that the dreams that she dreams of Jesus are real and His presence is with her now in the seen will be very soon tangible when she gets to live in Jesus house. We see Jesus holding her, she sees Him holding in her dreams cradling her head. We know that this suffering will end and it is gift to be able to offer that there will be an end to the tears and the sickness. We want our ranjana to live, to raise her kids and to keep finding life and freedom among us but know that our dreams for Ranjana are probably too small and God will do what he does and keep meeting her, holding her and loving her whether it is in this lifetime or not.

We have struggled to love Ranjana's husband knowing the personal burden's and struggles of Ranjana's family. But as we lose Ranjana we have been given eyes to a broken man who looks for love as we all do and needs it so desperately. I once said that i did not know if i had ever met a more broken and destroyed individual but yesterday I realized, he just wears his shame on the outside...humiliation draped around his shoulder marking him unfairly in world where most of us are master's of illusion. God loves this man deeply, just as he loves Ranjana. God's eyes are better than mine...i am thankful that he is letting me see again with His.

The suffering of Rajana and her husband exists beside the joy and celebration of God making things new in the Gach and in KG. This is how it is in our broken world...where the kingdom comes and yet all of creation writhes with devastation, both exist, in both places we find "Emmanuel", in death and in Resurrection.

Pray for Ranjana and her family. Pray for continued grace and favor for Sari Bari and pray for the 25 ladies who are working toward freedom. And for the 30 ladies who have been long on the exodus road and are still engaged in battle for their lives and
hearts.

Definitly worth reading...

2009-08-17T09:26:00.000-07:00

Why Christians Can’t Be Post-Racial: Christian Existence in the Murky Waters of Race and Place
by Brian Bantum

Brian Bantum is an assistant professor of theology at Seattle Pacific University. He is currently completing his first book, which is tentatively titled Mulatto Theology: Christ, Identity and the Birth of a New People (Baylor University Press). Mulatto Theology examines interracial existence and draws on theological doctrine and critical theory to reimagine Christian identity and difference.

When we are baptized, we are made new; whether as children or adults, somehow our lives are different, and the life of discipleship is the discernment of that life. Struggling to conform or resist, we attempt to understand which aspects of ourselves must die and which aspects can be conformed into the image of Christ.

But in the Western world, this is not the only baptism we undergo. Through refusal or acceptance, we are incorporated into racial waters and into a racial people. We are reminded that we are not like others or we are assured that we have a place. Just as many of us came to see ourselves as beloved, as God’s children, we also undergo a racial conversion of sorts. W. E. B. DuBois described his own baptism into racial life this way:

In a wee schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card, - refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.1

DuBois’s experience, from over a century ago, continues to reverberate today as we are confirmed or refused in subtle and not so subtle ways. The question of race in America is about systemic patterns of inequity. But it is also about how these inequities are born through the formation of hopes and in the practices of everyday life.

Our lives together are indelibly marked by race. The complicated interconnections of belonging and exclusion, foods and music, practices and hopes, and simple ways of being in the world are not easily untangled from our claims of who Christ is for us and for the world. Because of this, the question of race is not merely about practices or acts that should be eliminated. The question of race for Christians is about the shape of our lives together and what might prevent us from binding ourselves to one another in ways that produce a real disruption to the racial imagination and its oppressive systems in the modern world.

I suggest that if Christians are to account for race in their lives, it must be seen as a matter of discipleship. Race (and ethnicity) constitute a wide set of practices, visual markers, and ways of being in the world that cannot be bypassed or become “post-racialized.” Far from imagining a “post-racial” world, the question of race reminds us of the difficulty of discerning how to live faithful lives. As disciples of Christ, we are continually discovering what aspects of our lives must be conformed more faithfully to the image of Christ, while also consecrating the particularities of our life to glorify the God that created us. The question of race confronts us with the realities of our own formation and of how our lives are shaped by something both illusory and real.

Our lives together are built upon the lies, pain, and blood of racialized life in the West. This necessitates that we recognize the power and effects of racial formation in all American identities, particularly the challenges and possibilities that racial formation poses to our Christian claim that God has called us and that somehow God’s Word has entered into our predicament. Through this entrance, God draws us into life with one another and into God’s own life. To become a disciple is to account for the ways race has formed us and shaped our vision of a Christian life that is disconnected from one another.

Who We Are

Today, at the end of the summer of 2009, it is clear that we still struggle to negotiate the realities of race in both personal and systemic ways, that these are intricately tied, and that these struggles are significant. For the sixty children of the Creative Kids Camp in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who overheard women talking about “all the black kids” at the Valley Club pool in Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania, race mattered. It mattered for the men and women of Valley Club who would refund the camp’s admission and revoke its privileges at the pool.2 And it mattered for those many white people who protested or were appalled at the behavior of the club. It matters in the criminal justice system. It matters in identifying gifted and talented children in schools. It matters in who likes whom in middle school, who loves whom in high school, and who marries whom after college.

Race mattered in the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his Harvard University home. How race intersected with power in the exchange between Professor Gates and Officer James M. Crowley (as well as President Barack Obama), we may never know. But what is clear is that a significant portion of this country felt Gates’s pain and humiliation while another portion of the country identified with the officer who they felt was “just doing his job.”

In this process of identification we are reminded how intimately race binds us or separates our perceptions of one another as well as what even constitutes a problem. Race matters in our assertions of its existence, and it matters in our refusals. But perhaps we must now ask the question, “How does it matter?” and perhaps more importantly for those who confess the name of Christ, how does Christ complicate the process of identification, assertion, and refusal that constitutes our identities? What does it mean to live as disciples in a world so indelibly marked by race in its institutions and its relationships?

Those people who became uncomfortable with sixty darker children in the swimming pool were not the same kinds of racists who, forty years ago, would have considered the pool water dirty. But despite their relative innocence, they represent the pernicious effects of racial formation in our modern world. These effects accumulate in the mundane hardening of institutional arteries. America’s racial problem is perhaps no longer due to insufficient laws but to our failure to imagine ourselves differently and consequently our failure to imagine one another differently. The challenge of race stands before us no longer as a beast armed with bold ignorance and legal codification. Instead, it lurks in the everyday, and in this way, it entangles all of us in illusions concerning our lives together.

President Barack Obama’s election ushered in a new era of hopefulness regarding the possibility that America might have crossed an important threshold in the race problem. Wide swaths of the American public embraced this man and hoped that his election would be representative of a change in America. Obama’s election shows that America has changed to some degree, but more than anything, it reveals the complications of American identity—his election marks the visibility of our condition. He is both hopeful and disruptive.

Like those parents at the pool in Huntingdon Valley, white society in America is only now beginning to calibrate itself to the presence of difference within its boundaries. Many white people are only recently recognizing the presence of those who presume their equality and whom white society thought it presumed to be equal—until they got in the pool. That is, we often speak of our desire to be fair and without prejudice, but we do not reflect on what might prevent us from doing so. Here we have unwittingly tied the task of discipleship to commitments of citizenship or family or race in ways that shape our perceptions of problems and possibilities. This is not to say that we are racist, but that we must attend to how our desires are shaped by a deeply racialized world.

Of course, the Apostle Paul admonishes us to not be of this world, but we cannot take this as a matter of simple obedience. It is a task of de-formation. The church cannot merely ask, “What is to be done?” We must begin by asking, “What in the world are we?” We must discern together how the patterns of this world have become a part of us, how they have made us reflect something very different from Christ. Although we so often want to act to show our lack of guilt or a true desire to serve, our actions are always bound to our perceptions of the problems and the possibilities. Our vision of what must be done and who it must be done for is always bound to who we perceive as others and who we see as our people.

We see difference where we should see similarity, and we see sameness where we should see difference. This lack of discernment could be identified as a mark of our fall, the corruption of the imago dei. When Adam and Eve looked at the tree of good and evil, they saw similarity, a thing to be attained. Transgressing that line of difference, they gave birth to a series of fissures that would continue to fragment individuals, peoples, and societies. These differences sparked a flame in the very first children of the fall, as Cain hated Abel’s difference and sought to master it, and on and on.

In the midst of these refusals and misconceived claims, Christ, as the early church father Ireneaus of Lyon reminds us, came to undo the knot that Adam and Eve ensnared about humanity.3 The child of Israel, Christ refused the impossibility of difference; he came as a God-man, as the God-man, thus opening up a new way to conceive difference in the world. But even within Christian reflection, the question of difference, the question of Jew and Gentile continues to mark the church and the world.4

Racial identity is bound to the contestations and assertions of identity in encounters with “new” peoples. We exist in a vast wake of claims and forces that we cannot quite locate, but that nonetheless pervade our sight, our assumptions, the nuances that so often become constitutive of our deepest value, and our individuality. The modern world we are wading through is indelibly marked by the racial question, what W. E. B. DuBois would call the problem of the color-line.5

In the modern world, the question of difference is predominately a racial question. Or to put it another way, the question of difference was the birth of the modern world. Discovery of peoples was always bound to encounters, and encounters always became explanations of “Why?” and “For what purpose?”

The question of race is important for the church—in fact, this question should pervade our very identities as Christians—because we are children of the modern world, a world forged in the foundries of racial speculation and dominance. We cannot forget this. To ignore this would be to look away from the mirror and forget who we were and what we have become.

Race matters in the world, and most importantly, it should matter for those who claim the name of Christ. But it matters in a particular way. It matters not as something to move past as we seek an “unqualified Christianity.”6 Rather, Christ qualifies us and as such, he dissects, interrogates, and illumines our particularities, our struggles, and our possibilities. To be without qualification is to be people of our own making. We must ask, “What is our qualifier?” and “What does the answer to that question mean for our lives together?” Some of us have found the injustices of racial oppression lamentable yet abstract, whereas some of us live with the consequences of this silence and obfuscation. Before we speak too quickly, we would do well to properly consider the power of race upon us.

Race Is Discipleship

More than a biological fact, an essential aspect of our createdness or our nature, race is a process.7 It is a way of imagining difference and the significance of those differences. For centuries, racial indicators have served as signals that point to a deeper set of realities (intellect, spirituality, or capacity for citizenship, for instance) and denote how peoples ought to be ordered or participate in the common life of a nation or culture. These racialized presuppositions were not merely prejudices about peoples who were different; they were a complicated process of forming self-understanding that all peoples participated in.8

Simply because we have attained some separation from the brutally explicit practices of differentiation does not mean we have escaped the subtle modes of identification or differentiation that mark all identities. In this way, race is much more a process of formation than a given fact. This is not to say it is not real or that it is everything about us, but racial identities are a product of our living into ideas about who we ought to be or who we do not want to be.

This process of formation is what makes race in America such a difficult and pressing challenge for the Christian church. It is a theological challenge not only because of the inequities still present or the vestiges of oppression that haunt us, but because it highlights the failure of churches to account for the very real ways we are formed and the aspects of ourselves we do not question or examine more carefully. In failing to do so, we unwittingly fall into a trap of idolatry, of worshipping (through our patterns of life, our fears, and our hopes) a god who seemingly looks like us and wants for us what we want for us.

It is not merely a question of people being afraid to air their true racist feelings. They truly believe it does not matter, that they are not racist. But this is where the church has failed. We have failed because we have placed the emphasis upon actions rather than personhood. We have chosen to fight against injustice rather than fighting for people.

The emphasis here is not the exclusion of action; it is a question of how our actions are bound to our self-understanding. For example, the evangelical fascination (or obsession) with Supreme Court justices and state abortion legislation is, in many ways, the inverse of the civil rights movement and its contemporary legacy. In each instance, the movements sought the codification of their aims.9 Likewise, although legal action can press the Valley Club to offer its space to the Creative Camp or an abortion clinic to turn a young girl away, it cannot abide with them. It does not imagine a life together, but only the other as opposition. On one level, such action is necessary, but as Christians, might we ask the question differently? Is this God for us? Is this how Christ has qualified our lives? Do these actions of opposition only reify an illusion of purity?

We cannot recognize our own sin because we equate sinfulness with the perpetration of certain mores, laws, and codes of conduct that legitimize or delegitimize our membership within these communities. To be blunt, we are Pharisees. We are the ones who pray in the temple, thanking God that we are not like “those over there” (Luke 18:10) determined to establish our purity and therefore our place before God (or the hospitality lay committee or the worship band or the you-fill-in-the-blank).

We cannot recognize how race matters because we have refused to accept our own culpability, our own sinfulness, our own participation in these processes of formation. For all of us, these processes and their products are different, but none of us are without the need for reflection.

In the theological academy and some Christian traditions, we hold up baptism and the Eucharist as the central elements of the Christian life, and in other traditions we preach Christ, obedience, love, tithe, serving—none of these help us to see that race still matters, that those who are different from us matter, because we have refused to acknowledge our own failures. We do not confess that we have sought to be God in these moments in our lives.

If we took confession seriously, we would be confronted with the very real possibility that God may not matter for us, not really. Does our view of God really determine who we look at on the street, who seems to “click” with us at a local party, who we look for first when our wallet is gone, or who we are convinced is the smartest in our class? Does our faith participate in the vision of the one we want to marry, the one we want to sleep with, and the children we hope to have?

When we consider the realities that shape and form us, we want to think that our lives have been formed by our desire for Jesus, our hope and love for a God who saved us, but when we really look at the patterns of our lives, where we live, who we befriend, who we avoid, and who we hope to be like, we begin to see the perniciousness of that quiet beast lurking. Race is alive in America.

Because we do not think about how race matters, those assumptions and habits not only go unnoticed, but become sacralized, embedded within the patterns and hopes concerning ourselves that are above reflection, above confession. They are simply an aspect of who we think God created us to be. So I like this music, and they like that music. I like this neighborhood, and they like that one. My judgment of his or her criminality is completely objective.

We exonerate ourselves on the question of race because we are not like “those” women in Huntingdon Valley. But those women have done us a great service because they have been the sacrificial lambs. They are the ones who would die to appease the guilt of the many. They are the ones who allow the rest of us to say, “We are clean.”

However, this is not an occasion to appease our guilt, but to confess our similarities. It is not an occasion to lament the stupidity or narrowness of a few privileged white people but to lament our own participation, however small, on any given day. Christ frees us to confess. He has freed us to bare it because it no longer marks us, and it only fails to mark if we give it up, if we identify with the one who knows us better than we know ourselves. But knowing us as he did, he also knew he would have to die.

This is the difficulty of the race question in America. We are so convinced that race is bound to truth that we refuse our own complicity. Certain of our vicitimization or our innocence, we enter the conversation not to bear witness, but to accuse or deny. But what is so deceptive about these approaches—and telling about our churches—is that it presumes a certainty of who we are and simply asks the question of what we should do given this fact. And perhaps this is the clearest indication that race matters in America.

We enter churches certain of our placedness. We enter classes certain of who we are. We are certain through a complex process of signs and patterns of interaction. We come to believe certain things about who is beautiful and who is not, who has a right to speak and who must prove themselves worthy to speak, who is to be trusted and who is suspected. These certainties are no longer racially coded in an explicit sense, but they are deeply bound to race in the modern world (a fact that dark people of the world have been trying to convince white people of for some time). The certainty of who we are becomes bound to the things we think we need not confess. If I am certain this is who God made me to be, I must reflect upon, search out, and confess the aspects of myself that are inconsistent with that personhood.

All of this is to say that our conversations regarding race can no longer be centered upon what to do alone. This, for lack of a better phrase, was a question of the 60s. It was a question that needed to be raised against a vicious beast who had been fed so well it could walk easily in the daylight and whose presence emboldened others to feed it and be fed by it.

But this beast is not dead. The beast now lingers quietly in the sinews of cultural and personal formation. It binds itself quietly to our yearnings and our fears so that it becomes so close to us we could mistake it for ourselves. This beast will rear up publicly on occasion, but we are not like “those” narrow-minded suburbanites—we would welcome those darker children—it’s a shame they live so far away! No, in reality, the marks of the beast are quite plain and our participation is too often clear if we take the time to honestly look at ourselves or let another name us.

So we go to church, and we sing, and we listen, and we share. We repent for the bad word we spoke or our frustration with the neighbors. In our most vulnerable moments, we might even confess our sexual addiction or our violent anger, but we will not confess or think about how it could possibly be wrong that we failed to see that Susan was more than “Asian.” We cannot take the time to consider why we presumed that the white guy was more qualified than the Hispanic guy—“I just seemed to ‘click’ with the other guy,” “We came from the same city,” “I could really see myself working with him.”

Jesus’s life challenged an Israel that had forgotten what it ought to repent for. He was a presence that refused the claim of the state that it was god. Both the Judaic elite and the Roman state sought to discipline and shape its followers not through strict codification but in formation through the mundane. The codes represented a system of identification that resisted transformation for its own survival. Christ’s person and work ushered in not only the possibility of social and individual transformation, but even more radically, a citizenship not bound to the world yet still present in the world. The earliest baptismal rites incorporated a physical turning away as part of their liturgy, which suggested that the life of the Christian must require a certain death of the old person. When we consider race in America, we can only say that our baptisms do not call us into death, but deify our own self-deceptions. In these ways, we are still slaves to the state and servants of the law.

It is this necessity of confession, this ritual of self-discovery that the church has failed to do and that our conversations regarding race have refused to acknowledge. It is not about what must be done. Our lives as disciples are a claim about who we are bound to, what we do or do not do. In the face of Christ, we cannot begin with what we understand about ourselves; we must begin with the confession that we do not understand ourselves, that we do not know the depths to which we have sunk in this system of death and imprisonment. We must all acknowledge that we do not know where to go or where to begin. We must confess this, we must make our lack of knowledge central to who we are because we cannot change without this. And we cannot begin to imagine what we ought to do unless we can imagine becoming people who are different because of these conversations and these relationships.

The longer we refuse to acknowledge how we are intertwined with race and its optics, the more race will matter. Our conversations, our prayers, and our liturgies must come to take seriously our malformation. Perhaps through this process of confession we can begin to imagine what to do, how our lives can resist the mark of this beast, and how we might become conformed with one another in Christ. Our baptisms have ushered us into a world in-between where difference can no longer be accounted for in the same way. For the simple reason that we are baptized, we cannot hope to look beyond; we cannot hope to be “post” anything. We are baptized into a living body that did not bypass us, did not look beyond us, but became us and entered into our condition. Our baptisms enter us into this life of transformation, this life of holy union that produces children who may not look like us and our lives. As followers of Christ, we must seek not only the possibilities but also acknowledge and struggle with our own refusals.

Notes
1. W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York, NY: Dover Publications), 2.

2. The club would eventually extend an offer to the children to return to the pool, claiming that safety and not race led to their decision to break the contract. See Zoe Tillman and Max Stendahl, “Montco Swim Club Accused of Racial Discrimination,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 9, 2009, Local News section, http://www.philly.com/philly/news/local/20090709_Montco_swim_club_accused_of_racial_discrimination.html, accessed July 30, 2009.

3. Ireneaus of Lyon, Against Heresies, trans. Robert. M. Grant (New York, NY: Routledge, 1997), III.22.4.

4. For two interpretations of how theology failed to account for difference and Jesus’s Jewishness in the development of modern theology see Jay Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008).

5. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, 9.

6. Rodney S. Sadler Jr., “Unqualified Christians,” Christian Century 124 (2007): 16. Dr. Sadler is a good friend of mine, and here I am not seeking to contradict him but rather to suggest a way of imagining how to account for the particularity of our lives in a world where race has mattered and perhaps should matter.

7. Recent scholarship has described race as a process or more formally as a social construction, thus repudiating the claims of race as natural. The notion of race as natural was tied to ideas concerning essential characteristics related to this natural phenomenon. These claims regarding race as essential aspects of our identity were deeply bound to the hierarchical and oppressive systems of slavery, Jim Crow, interracial marriage, and inadequate education for those deemed not white.

8. For an excellent account of how whiteness was “formed” in the United States, see Matthew Jacobsen, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

9. Of course, an important difference here is in the way the legislation is envisioned. For the civil rights movement, legislation was sought that included citizens within the larger possibilities of the country while anti-abortion legislation (while seeking to protect unborn children) must do so through exclusion or refusals. Although this is an important difference, it is also vital to note how the civil rights movement began to splinter as Martin Luther King Jr. and others envisioned a wider (and deeper) level of participation through the language of integration.

Hello from BKK

2009-07-13T03:10:00.000-07:00

August 2009: Out of the Box

2009-07-13T02:46:00.000-07:00

August 2009

…if the gospel of Jesus is just some formula I obey in order to get taken of the naughty list and put in the nice list, then it doesn’t meet the deep need of the human condition, it does not interact with the great desire of my soul, and it has nothing to do with the hidden (or rather obvious) language we are all speaking. But, if it is more, if it is a story about humanity falling away from the community that named it, and an attempt to bring humanity back to that community, if it is more than a series of ideas, but rather speaks directly into this basic human need we are feeling, then the gospel of Jesus is the most relevant message in the history of mankind.

What if the gospel was an invitation to know God? . . . If the gospel of Jesus is relational; that is, if our brokenness will be fixed, not by our understanding of theology, but by God telling us who we are, then this would require a kind of intimacy of which only heaven knows. (Donald Miller, Searching for God knows What, pg. 45,46)

If you know me well, then you know that I like boxes. You know, the things that hold other things, and make things look nice and make things easy to find. I have boxes and baskets in my tiny little flat, which hold items categorically: my art supplies, office supplies, jewelry, magazines, clothes, blankets. I have a bookcase to hold my books by category and also doubles as a dust protector against the Kolkata dirt. I like the box or at least the idea behind the box.

But as I reflect on the box, I see that it not only serves the purposes for which I appreciate it but it also keeps me out. I forget that my art supplies are waiting for me to be creative and that things I have been saving to use for just right purpose are buried in a box, pretty on the outside but elusive and prohibitive to seeing right away the thing that will meet my need of moment.

Boxes do serve a purpose; seriously, my house would chaos without them. But boxes are best for things not for God. I’ve found, more than I would like to admit, that I have made God very small and fit Him into my little box. I fear what might happen to me if I let God out of the box. For certain I would be out of control and then I might be overwhelmed with His love and His grace. I might love others without reserve. I might open the door of my heart all the way and been seen by God and others for who I am really.

In boxing in God, I have not found Him when I have sought Him. I have limited God and I think sometimes He lets me, just to prove that my limits work for a time but truly He is limitless. My neat clean box prevents me from dreaming and hoping and praying for more than I can ask or imagine. When I relegate God to the box He is limited because He seems to only go as far as I let him and in limiting my Father, Savior and Friend, I am missing out on the fullness of whom He is and wants to be for me and for the people I love and serve.

I have always wanted my faith walk to come in 3 to 5 easy steps. A list of precepts and programs, easy as one, two, three. But honestly when it does happen that way, I rebel. I am known to have occasional authority issues and every time I am told a rule, a policy or a procedure or a way of doing something I question it. I do not really want a list, that is just my excuse for not pursuing and allowing myself to be pursued by the great and mighty, gentle and loving Abba. I want a relationship, in the deepest core of my being, I want to be loved, love and find intimacy with a pursuant lover. And in the truest way, I find when I let go trying, doing and numbering lists; I find the freedom of a relationship with Jesus. It’s not perfect yet, I still am dismantling the boxes but I am relishing the embrace and newness of discovering God in new ways after more than 20 years being a believer.

God outside of the box is not only what I need but also what our friends here in Kolkata need. My friends “Julie and Monita” need a God out of the box for them to take the first steps of freedom in August as we open the doors of our second Sari Bari location. (Pray that these ladies and about 18 more make those steps to freedom and new life. Also pray for our staff as we start at the new location in a new area). They need a big, big God who can makes all things new, who can call them beautiful, beloved, forgiven and treasured. They need “the intimacy of which only heaven knows” as Donald Miller puts. They need that intimacy because not only is it the most basic of human needs but because they need a transformation of intimacy. They need an intimacy that restores broken human relationship with agape, boundless love.

My prayer is that you too would continue discovering Jesus out of the box.

Much love,
Sarah

July 2009 Prayer Letter: Names

2009-06-15T09:47:00.001-07:00

On the day of our birth we a given a name. It is our “good name”, as our friends in India call it. The name is given by our parents who probably spent 9 months thoughtfully, even prayerfully, considering what name would ours for the duration our lifetime. Our names have weight and meaning in defining us, our spoken and written identity to friends, family and even our governments. Our names have deeper meanings. My name, Sarah, which means Princess or daughter of the King. My middle name is a family name, Lucinda, and it means, bringer of light. If you read my blog, you know that the web address is www.princesslightbringer.blospot.com, a name that I have identified with in part and hope to live into every day.

We live in a world that loves to name and not all those names are good. Working with women in the sex trade I see the burden and weight of many who bear false names given to them by culture and society. They are whores, hookers, prostitutes, and husband stealers. Many, when you meet them, will not give you their “good name” but instead give another name that they have chosen to hide their true identity and protect them from the false names chosen for them by society. When they leave the red light area to visit family, they leave their false name behind and again take on their “good name”, leaving behind the other names that plague them and dehumanize them.

Naming has profound importance at Sari Bari. Each woman chooses her name and that name is the name that you will find marking each blanket. When the time comes to choose their name, they will most often choose their “good name”, the name given by their parents to identify them. They want to be identified with their good name, as good women, leaving the false names, the red light name behind.

There is a re-naming that happens at Sari Bari as the women take steps down the road of Exodus into freedom. The renaming happens as the women begin to understand that the false names and the awful names that society has given them do not need to hold power in their lives or in their identity as human beings. We process with them the false names and give them new names. We use names that bring dignity. Instead of prostitute, they are Sari Bari business women, seamstress’, and artists. Instead of a whore, they are friends. Instead of hooker, they are sisters. Their new names come in relationship, in a safe place of welcome and respite from society, and in the warm cleansing embrace of Jesus. The re-naming is a process. First comes the giving a new names and them comes the part where each woman must choose to live into her new names. Living into the new names is the hardest part. Living into being one who is now called accepted, loved, cherished, daughter, friend, sister, mother, beloved, cleansed, healed and beautiful is no easy path. Especially when the burden of false names like rejected, despised, dirty, worthless and powerless has been ascribed and those are the names that you have been living into for more years that you can count.

The “good names” must be embraced. We embrace the women, each one, and call them by name. Just as Jesus has embraced us and called us by name. We are compelled by our friends and their lives to continue the pursuit of women who do not yet know their names. It is the names that move us, compel us toward reconciliation, restoration and healing for the red light areas where these beautiful women live. Bringing freedom to the red light areas is not about a cause. It is about a human being with a name. Ending human trafficking, sexual slavery and the exploitation of persons are truly noble and important causes. But it is the one woman living into her “good name”, into the new names given, which compels our action, our advocacy, and our hearts. The causes must have the names of persons and be framed by the human persons who compel the causes. I do not know any prostitutes or whores or hookers. I only know women, friends, sisters and daughters of the King. And they have beautiful names: Minu, Shopna, Putul, Shakina, Arotun, Josna, Bharoti, Chaya, Rohima and Champa.

Coming in the mail in the next month, you will receive a personal letter from me and you will find some the names of Sari Bari women. These are the name tags we use to label each and every blanket. I have enclosed three names. I hope you take these lengths of labels and put them in your bibles, or on your fridge, and even share one with a friend and then when you see their name, pray for these women by name. Let their name speak to your heart. Speak the name out loud making it real. Look up their name on the website blog and find out a little bit more. Come and meet them in Kolkata and you too may find a new name.

Blessed be the name of Jesus!

With love,

Sarah

not my people

2009-06-04T21:52:00.000-07:00

I am frustrated and concerned when I hear things like "not my people." makes me sad. yeah, we disagree. so what? we have different beliefs, politics, ideas about how life should be live, how faith should be experienced and practiced. So what? isn't everyone welcome at the table in the relationship. if we are believers in jesus, doesn't that make us apart of the same body. certainly, we do not reflect christ perfectly as the body. it is a broken body.

i have many concerns about the church body here in k-town. honestly, when i hear things like you are not a believer if you do not attend such and such a church, i cringe. I want to see welcome and inclusion of all members of the body regardless of church attendance. but my stance is to be welcoming when others are not, to include people who may judge me as well as those who agree with me. does one group and one group only have the corner on truth. We have central beliefs that we agree on, some periferals that we do not, and some kind of important stuff that we just not have the answers for, even if we say that we do. Where is the grace for each other in all of this...

i am just as weary of liberal bigots as i am of conservative ones. Bigotry no matter where you derive it from, is ugly. love covers a multitude of sins, so why can't it cover a multitude of varying ideas, belief systems and politics. we are still human, imperfect, broken, frail and created. we can take no credit for our presence on earth nor can we assume that it ours to take for granted, full of entitlement.

i admit to having been a bigot, especially in my idealist 20's, to not welcoming others because for their beliefs or politics, but age, the knowledge of my own failed humanity has brought some humility. learning to offer grace before i expect it to be offered to me. the God of the universe is the only one who loved first, gave grace first. should we not follow the leader on this one? Jesus did not like the religous leaders but certainly he loved them. He spoke truth to them but did not reject them. they rejected him. as humans we need to offer grace if we expect to receive it. it seems more appropriate the we welcome the rejection that is sent our way than that we reject and condemn those who disagree with becoming like them in the process. God forgive me for not embracing your body and all it parts, for rejecting when i have been rejected, for not offering grace to my fellow journeyman and women as we travel this road together.

You are all welcome at my table. I may not agree with you and sometimes i may not even like what you choose to do but you are welcome to share life with me. just so know, you are all my people!

insider...outsider: HUMAN

2009-05-24T05:54:00.000-07:00

There is loneliness sometimes in being different but also a beauty in the places that different takes me.

In Kolkata, i stand out, a shining beacon of foriegness, tall, a bit heavy, jeans and big earring wearing different. People stare, sometimes they cheat. it feels heavy, wearisome to not be welcomed because I look different and maybe act different.

the beauty of different is the places i can go with no shame, no fear of cultural reprisal. I am an outsider, not fully in-culturated, though i do try to submit to many cultural standards, still able to do what many here cannot without reprisals. No one judges me for entering a red light area--if they do, i have the freedom of not caring because there is no cultural reprisal for me. and i have several hundred, maybe even several thousand people in the states who support what i do and cheer me on.

Our indian partners do not have the difficulties of different but they do not the luxuries of it either. They face cultural reprisal for entering the red light areas. They face rejection from the church itself in many cases. They give something up to do what they do...inspite of what they might lose, they lay down their lives for the freedom of our friends. they lay down their reputations so the women can regain theirs, they lay down their own preconceptions about red light areas so they can have the eyes of God and the heart of the Father and love our friends into freedom and something better.

There is reconciliation of insider and outside in relationship. We each have something to offer that the other does not...we are a partnership reflecting the body. our reconciliation to each other in all the ways we are different happens when we partner together for something beyond what either an insider or an outside could reach without the others help. that's it really, loving partnership, working together in community to accomplish the kingdom for the glory of God.

And for me being an outsider does not matter when i sit and share chai with a friend in their brothel room. I only feel like a friend, a sister, a fellow human being. It is gift when different falls away and there is no insider or outsider. There is only us in the moment. And it does not matter in staff meeting where we, insiders and outsiders, together dream for the future and imagine what God might do for our friends in the red light areas. We are only believers, believing for more than we can ask or imagine.

I had an afternoon without being on the outside yesterday. I was invited in to just be with the Sari Bari women in their homes. not really even their boss for those few hours, just their friend and their guest. only strange in my unmarried state but really not that strange for many are alone there. it was a gift. it is always a gift when we can see that regardless of color or class or cultural indentity, there is welcome and beauty in our shared humanity. We are welcome to the kingdom, for the glory of God as we pursue each other, becoming one in jesus.

no answers

2009-05-21T20:36:00.000-07:00

I walked down the street yesterday morning on the way to sari bari, after filling my belly with the best Puri (fried bread with potato curry) in Kolkata, I saw two little boys had a very large piece of cardboard and had made themselves a little fort right on the sidewalk in the midst of rush hour chaos. they made me smile and turn my head to see them better. And i thought to myself, there is not enough cardboard in the world for the forts that must be in the imaginations of these boys.

I visited one of my friends at the AIDS hospice yesterday. Seeing her breaks my heart and i could barely restrain my tears last night as i thought of her. I fear to lose her even though death might be a release. Selfishly, i do not want to endure the pain of what will be a deep and profound loss to our community and a deep and profound loss for me personally.

And thinking of my friend struggling to survive with HIV and the little boys building forts, i began to think about what needs to be righted about the wrongs I see everyday. And i thought if AIDS can not be cured, which is obviously the best solution, then when are't AIDS hospices palaces of comfort. Why isn't there fair distribution of resources so that those imaginiative little boys could have 4 walls to their fort instead of just one. There are enough toys in the world for all its children i am pretty sure, yet some have more than they will ever play with and some have one piece of cardboard and their imaginations. These are my questions.

I have no answers. Only faces in memory to mark moments of joy and despair, open ended, unresolved feeling with no answers.

This is the story of so many of our friends....

2009-05-21T09:36:00.000-07:00

From The Sunday Times
May 17, 2009

A Life in the Day: Mariam Laskar, s*x worker
Mariam Laskar, 42, a s*x worker in Kalighat, the poorest r*d-light district in Calcutta

I wake up around 5am so I can use the latrine early, while it’s still quiet.

I share it with nine other households. Each has one room about 8ft square. Although Kalighat is a red-light district, families live here too, street vendors and stall workers, but most prostitutes live alone like me.

My room doesn’t smell so good because it’s next to rotting rubbish and the latrine, but it is away from the street.

I go back to sleep until 8. My bed is a thin mattress on a board lifted off the ground by red bricks at each corner. Under the bed are the pots I use for cooking and washing.

My saris and underclothes are strung on a wire across the small window. I have electricity, a light bulb, a fan, a black-and-white television and a suitcase.

If I’m on my own, as I mostly am, I make tea, heating the water on a kerosene stove in my doorway. If my babu — he’s like a special client, a temporary husband, you could say — is with me, I give him naan bread and sweets. Calcutta is famous for its sweets: all colours and varieties you can buy here.

Then I go to the vegetable stalls outside and buy ladies’ fingers, brinjal, potatoes, tomatoes and garlic to cook later.

I put on eyeliner, a bindi on my forehead, my jewelled earrings and gold bangles, and I am working the street by 10am. There are three of us who mostly go together — Arati, my best friend, and I watch for each other. I work a little strip just outside the slum beside the Mohambagam football club.

There is a disused pitch and that’s where I go with my clients. Mostly they are strangers, rickshaw drivers or hawkers.

Kalighat is the cheapest red-light district, but I have to work here because I’m old now. I need to make 250 rupees a day [about £3.50]; my rent is 45 rupees a day and I am paying off a loan to my landlord for hospital treatment. My clients don’t have much money — maybe I get 50 rupees a time. I try to make them wear a condom but mostly they don’t. I have been very lucky: I don’t think I have any sexual diseases. There is a clinic in Kalighat run by the Hope Foundation for us. I go a few times each year.

When I was young I worked on a jetty on the Ganges — they call it Babughat. I would go with men on boats they rent. Then I would have 10 or 12 clients a day easily, shopkeepers or truck drivers, and each would pay me 250 rupees.

My own family in Bangladesh has no idea if I am alive or dead. I grew up in a small village with three older brothers and a baby sister.

I was trafficked here when I was 14 by a man who married me. His real wife and children were here in Calcutta, and he brought me here. He sold me to a brothel. I was terrified, but he was my husband and I thought I had to do what he said. I did not have the guts to tell my family what had happened to me, so I never contacted them again.

If I‘m lucky I finish around 9.30. There is a lot of waiting around now, so we drink Bangla liquor, a strong illegal drink they sell on the streets. I drink it quite a lot — it helps. If I have made enough money I go home with Arati, and maybe we go to my room or her room and share some food. But if business is slow I stay out all night.

Even if I finish early, I can’t sleep until 2 in the morning. I worry about so many things. I have had six pregnancies, but I only have one child, Sheila Khatoon. She’s 14 now and she lives in a girls’ home run by the Hope Foundation. I visit her on the last Saturday of every month. I tell her I sweep in a hospital, and I wish I did, but no one would employ me now. She lived with me until she was seven.

She didn’t go to school and I couldn’t really look after her, but I didn’t bring men back to the room with her there. Then the Hope Foundation found her on the street. I wanted them to take her. If my daughter was to take up this trade, I would want to die. No mother can imagine such a thing as this. But she would have had no choice if she’d stayed here.

At night I think of my parents and my daughter. I think of what would happen to her if I died suddenly. I worry about how I got myself into this situation and what will happen to me in the future when I cannot make money any more. Around 2am I fall asleep, and then I don’t dream.

Andrea Catherwood is the UK ambassador for the Hope Foundation

Interview: Andrea Catherwood.

There are many important aspects to the story below:

1) This pr*stituting woman, like so many adult women in pr*stitution, was trafficked as a child;

2) Those pr*stituting women who don't die young from brutality and disease do grow old, and as a result their "marketability" declines making their lives all the more precarious due to their decreasing income;

3) Like so many women in pr*stitution, in order to survive they must have sex without condoms and thus risk HIV infection. Of course, there is great risk for a variety of other STDs as well;

4) Note too how she has lost so many pregnancies. This could be the result of health complications from her s*x industry involvement;

5) In the last paragraph, you can see evidence of Mariam's self-blaming despite the fact that she was trafficked by her "husband";

6) Mariam comments on her alcohol use as a "coping mechanism" -- this is very typical coping strategy among women in the s*x industry;

7) Mariam had to sacrifice bringing up her only daughter, in order that her daughter might have an opportunity to be educated and/or have another means of livelihood;

8) And of course, this article brings to the fore the grinding poverty that flourishes the world over;

9) Lastly let’s not forget demand. The authors of a study centered in Sonagachi (another Calcutta r*d-light district) report that the district’s 4,000 pr*stituting persons serve approximately 20,000 men a day (Rao, Gupta, Lokshin, & Jana, 2003).

Such clear, bright light withers the supposed “glamour” of the s*x industry. So much for sexual agency – this is a brutal, lonely fight for survival plain and simple.

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/article6282309.ece

Taken from:

The Initiative Against Sexual Trafficking
c/o The Salvation Army USA
National Headquarters
http://www.iast.net/

Sari Bari Second Location: The Before Photos

2009-05-06T08:59:00.000-07:00

We just finalized the 5 year rental of the space for our second location. This space will be able to provide for at least 40 women to work for Sari Bari and a small daycare for their kids. We hope to open the doors our friends in August for the first training. Until then keep us in your prayers!

FREEDOM PEOPLE FREEDOM!!

Donate $1 to WMF just by visiting Catalyst website

2009-05-05T19:17:00.000-07:00

We have a great opportunity for you to give to WMF, just by filling out a form!

Catalyst Conference will donate $1 to Word Made Flesh on your behalf when you enter their giveaway for a free Flip Camcorder. Just go here to sign up for the giveaway. Just be sure to choose Word Made Flesh from the drop down list of organizations (it’s the very last entry box).

In the last two days I have...

2009-04-07T08:57:00.000-07:00

Watched 6 episodes of LOST.

Made Honey mustard chicken over a bed of garlic mashed potatoes with sauteed zuccini for Beth and Kyle.

Got a massage...worked out those chronic shoulder knots!

Made sun tea.

Made lime and mint water.

Ate a whole loaf of french bread.

Drank a little bit of Starbucks Christmas Blend both cold(iced) and hot brewed in my press pot.

Went veggie shopping.

Bought a pitcher for the sun tea and a kettle.

Read The Lost language of Lament by Michael Card.

Wrote in my journal lots and lots.

Ate a bar of dark chocolate.

Showered three times in the middle of the night because i was so hot.

Reorganized some house stuff.

Hand washed my towels.

Slept late.

Had maybe 20 minutes of work related conversation but that is pretty good for me on my days off.

Got a bad haircut for the equivalent of 2 dollars and i am okay with it.

rest

2009-04-05T22:10:00.000-07:00

I am talking a extended weekend...resting. Rest heals and fills up when I have been poured out. I am always thankful for rest and its restoration.

My rest is not perfect, some friend's are having a family crises, i am in an unresolved conflict with someone, work comes into my home even when i do not seek it. But still this weekend for many reasons, i feel like i have had to choose powerlessness in these situations and let rest heal me. I can not solve the family crisis or resolve the conflict without the other person or avoid the work that comes to my doorstep. But i am choosing not to let it destroy my rest...i let these things come and let them go. It still takes practice...i still have to choose to sit and wait instead of running after solutions. I admit I have failed this weekend a couple of times...but I can see that when i have just sat and waited, Jesus has met me and rest and restoration has done its work.

Lost Language

2009-04-05T22:01:00.000-07:00

Our inability or refusal to enter into lament betrays the fact that you do not recognize the depths of our sin. We stubbornly refuse to have our hearts broken by it. The only result is that our sins continue to break the heart of God. It is only after lamenting our sin that our eyes can be truly open to the glorious truth that we stand forgiven, with the righteousness of Christ, and realize that we are in the Presence of the One who has heard our cries with tender and sympathetic ears.

Apart from lament, you and I are robbed of our true identity in God. We remain unaware of the depth of our fallen identities as sinners and blind to the reality an depth of our fallen identities as sinners and blind to Jesus Christ. Confession is lament for the sin that began in the Garden. The painful honesty confession demands is the fabric of all lament, as is the deep need for forgiveness and restoration to God's Presence. it is as if worship and confession are on holy fabric held together by the strands of lament.

The Lost Language of Lament, Michael Card

The old woman on my back

2009-04-03T22:57:00.000-07:00

This old "woman" keeps following me around. Showing up when I least expect "her". I have thrown her off many times, sought to leave her behind but when i am most stressed, most vulnerable, she comes back...maybe i let her come back. She jumps on my back again and holds on tight. Makes me feel like i do not know myself, like no matter how hard I try i may never be finished with her. She got her hold on me this week and I have fought to pull her off my back, some days i succeeded, some days i did not. The last couple weeks have left me empty, a lot poured out, not much poured in...that's why I let her jump back on my back, maybe it was easier to let it happen than to fight her off. My choice, my weakness really. It was easier to be angry than alone. It was easier to blame than give it to Jesus. I do not want to be the "old woman", i want to be the new one. The one that forgives easily, pours out unreservedly, does not run from the master's grasp but runs into His embrace. My emptiness is my fault...I poured out but did not find the places i need to receive, to be filled up again. I feel like i am stumbling forward or being pulled backward. That's the way it is I guess. The day we stop growing we die. I have to keep pressing into the embrace even when i am tired and empty...its the only place to be filled up. i have been reading "the lost language of lament" by Michael Card for the second time. It has been a good reminder to press in rather than run away. I can press in with my anger, my fear, my insecurity and trust that God can handle it. When i run away, i only find myself in the arms of the "old woman", the woman i do not want to be, the woman that i cast off, the woman does not walk in her healing and does not live in grace but condemnation, fear and anger. My prayer today is that I will be able to pull the "old woman" off my back and walk forward and free as the new woman that God has called and created me to be...My prayer today and everyday is "lord have mercy, christ have mercy, lord have mercy."

How rich are you?

2009-03-19T20:46:00.000-07:00

I was looking at my friend Faye's blog and she had posted this link. It is super interesting. I looked at the disparity between my potential salary, if I raised the full amount each month, and the salary that the production manager at Sari Bari makes. There is a huge disparity between our annual incomes but we both end up in the top 15% of the worlds population. With so much of the world living on less than a dollar a day, it really puts everything in perspective. Check out this link and find out where you stand. Be prepared for a shock!

Human Beings

2009-03-17T11:02:00.000-07:00

I just read a couple of articles on CNN about a high class sex ring being busted and i need to ask can we please stop using the following words:

Hooker
Prostitute
Whore

These words demean and denigrate human beings. Of the women and girls who work in the sex trade, selling their bodies, 95 percent have been sexually abused prior to entering the trade (this may include men too but i do not know). I have never met a women who at the age of 7, 10 or 19 wanted to enter the sex trade. We live in a world of sexual brokenness and distortions, why would we presume that these human beings choose something that destroys identity and dignity by its very nature and that now they lack humanity because of it. Whether a woman has entered the sex trade due to addiction, poverty, trafficking, trickery, or even choice (as someone will surely say, if do not--however, i do not believe it is a choice when you have no other options), they remain human beings who by their very nature should be given dignity and value. When those words are used, women lose humanity, my friends lose humanity, i lose humanity, the men and women who use these words to describe others lose humanity. The words we use to describe one another can destroy dignity or restore it. Let's restore and give dignity to other human beings, rather than stealing value with our careless names for those we do not understand or care to know. there are other words that we can use to describe professions or lines of work with out making the person their job. None of us are the job that we do...at least i hope not. All of us are human beings...at least i hope so.

neverending exodus

2009-03-16T09:14:00.000-07:00

My heart breaks with every loss, every stumble, every pain that my dear friends suffer on their road to freedom. It is such a long, long road to walk. I have said before that just like the israelites, many may not see the promised land of wholistic freedom. But still I live and work and hope like they will. I was remembering tonight how and why we started Sari Bari...the dream for freedom. We started and began to dream for the impossible, for thing we may never see. We claimed romans 5: suffering produces perseverance, perservrance character and charter hope and HOPE will not disappoint us. We wanted to live like Isaiah 58 was possible...we dream of well water gardens, of places of hope and restoration, we dream of streets and dwellings restored. The dreams glimmer in reality some days and some days it is hard to remember the dreams.

This morning we talked of faith, we HOPE in faith, even though we can not see, we can trust that God IS. These words are begining to answer the question for me of: Where is God drawing you? My sense is that He is drawing me to trust more deeply, not with my eyes but with faith knowing and trusting that what i can not see now will someday be revealed. Maybe that, the dreams I dream for my friends, will be realized, completed. Maybe that the dreams and hope that these beautiful women look toward would become reality. I want to believe it but some days everything tells me all is lost. As I shared my heart this morning about my own journey of faith and I could see in my dear friends eyes that my struggle held true for them too. We talked of our losses and our struggle to trust that God hears us. We named names, we named losses, we named fears, we named hopes...all things that we can not now understand, all the things that we can not see. we dwell in darkness but for the HOPE that in faith what we now can not see will someday be revealed.

So until then we will proclaim with faith that freedom, healing and restoration is possible! May the Exodus one day end and the promised land be revealed underneath the rubble of now!

Never make eye contact with a Kolkata Street dog

2009-03-15T02:46:00.000-07:00

Never make eye contact with a street dog in kolkata. Not because they will attack you but because they will think you actually care for them and follow you where ever you go. I have a standard practice of petting while not actually petting the dogs here. I just make stupid human noises that sound kind, while moving my hand 6 inches above the dog. They act like i am actually petting them. They wiggle and wag all over. I do not have much compassion for the dogs...too much human suffering always out weighs their plight. Sometimes i wonder how it is that they can appear so content with so little, they eat trash, they get stoned and run over, yet that does not stop them from lying in the street, taking long naps, playing with each other and looking for eye contact from humans. They are eternally hopeful and amazing survivors. I try not to resent their contented behavior, i mean seriously, they eat trash, but sometimes after a long day I wonder how it is that they can be content with so little and I who have so much still am not content most of the time. I am embarrassed to have written this blog about the dogs...but apparently even they have something to teach me in Kolkata.

A few pics...

2009-03-10T11:15:00.000-07:00

Yes, I am stealing Chris' Blog posts because they are just so good...

2009-03-09T09:16:00.000-07:00

Vulnerability means to be hurt over and over again without seeking to love less, but more. Divine love is sheer vulnerability—sheer openness to giving…Being vulnerable means loving one another as Christ loved us. If we did not have to forgive people, we would have no way of manifesting God’s forgiveness toward us. People who injure us are doing us a great favor because they are providing us with the opportunity of passing on the mercy that we have received. By showing mercy, we increase the mercy we receive. The best way to receive divine love is to give it away, and the more we pass on, the more we increase our capacity to receive.

— Thomas Keating’s, The Heart of the World: An Introduction to Contemplative Christianity, page 15.

Grace of Brokeness

2009-03-09T09:12:00.001-07:00

good questions

2009-03-08T01:29:00.000-08:00

i love meeting cool people who ask good questions. questions that they have wrestled with themselves. questions that have a sincerety in wanting to know the answers to the questions. questions like what is the difference between Word Made Flesh and Servants? How does the incarnational commitment look different for these two communities? how is simplicity lived out, as singles, as marrieds, a families? why is there on man for every two women in these post modern "incarnational" communities? why do some organizations fail to empower local leadership? Why does community provide a more sustainable model than the single, i can do everything, warrior model? We had really great conversation today based on these questions.

I am particulary interested to understanding how families in incarnational groups make it work...does simplicity have to be lost? or does simplicity even matter? I know one family who has lived in slum for 10 years in single room with their two kids. They are the exception not the rule. they are fairly extreme but truly hold my respect for their longevity and commitment to those they love in their neighborhood. Most families, need or want more for their families, really for survival and sustainability. There is a conflict between wanting the best for their kids and living in poverty contexts where, though people want the best for their kids, they do not have the ability or choice to provide the best. so there is always a conflict...I have no answers really, my love for the families i know far outweighs most thoughts. I just wonder what incarnation looks like for families...i am sure there is no one way but many. I know my parents at one point considered a move to a innercity ministry in the states but decided for us kids that it would be better not to go. they feared we would lose something. when they told me, i actually felt a loss that they had not gone and moved our family to chicago (who knows if i would say that if we had gone but it interesting to think about it).

Incarnation implies presence in the places where Jesus may not be present in the physical sense. So relationship really means more than the things that you have or hold in your hand. But the things you hold in your hand can prevent relationship, stall it or even act as a barrier. I have been wrestling with the issue of simplicity alot lately. Wanting to maintain or even lower my standard of living but also knowing that simplicity is really more an issue of the heart. And my heart is really the issue. i accumulate because i am lonely, or unsatisfied, or trying to fill some hole in my heart. I sway between legalism and grace. fear of outside judgement and a care-less what you think posture. love for my neighbors who are poor sometimes comes into my decision making but more often then not, my attitude of entitlement governs my choices. i am not sure if resolution is possible really, maybe i will continue to wrestle for year to come. this is also something that we do not really talk about, even a community that celebrates simplicity as a lifestyle celebration. We may judge one another but fail to speak into each others life for fear of having others speak into our lives. We do not submit our purchases, we hide them. We do not ask if someone else might be served by the time or money that use, we use it for ourselves. I know i have not submitted in this area. i want to talk about it more. beth and i have been talking, wrestling a bit. but i wonder how we can be more open in submitting our lifestyles to one another. in the context of international partnership, this is an essential aspect. can i not only submit my lifestyle choices to my north american community but can i submit them to the indian staff. can i and will i allow them to speak into my life in this way. I want to...i just need make that choice. in the states, finances are personal, but in india finances are for the family, everything is shared. so i am asking myself, if my community here is my family, can my finances be submitted to them? can we share everything is common? i hope so...i want to continue to move in that direction.