Names
May 18th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
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 embrace of community. 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. 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 . And they have beautiful names: Minu, Shopna, Putul, Shakina, Arotun, Josna, Bharoti, Chaya, Rohima and Champa.
Reposted from previous blog www.princesslightbringer.blogspot.com July 2009
Death is only fertilizer
May 12th, 2012 § 1 Comment
Two of the funniest women we know! Celebrating Life and showing us how!
In Kolkata, it seems that there are an endless series of deaths. Death to self, being one of the most regular and painful aspects of life here. And then there are the departures of long terms friends and short-term friends and to the sense of loss that these comings and goings create. There are the physical deaths, losing dear friends to murder, HIV and addiction. The fragility of life crushed so easily in the grubby palms of a broken place among broken people. The death overwhelms at times. The losses feel like they might be too much to bear. One on top of the other, everyday there is some story of loss. A child has run away, a friend is left by her husband, another friend is being beaten, another is pulled from our embrace by addiction, my own personal failures and brokenness exhibited harming another, life in community sometimes causing us all pain, these daily losses complied feel a little like being buried alive, struggling for air. They are a tomb of sorts. A burial site that we live in feeling as if we have no choice but to sit in the darkness and let the pain roll over us.
And as we sit and mourn and rail against God with angry tears there comes a crack, a single steam of light, another type of story that disperses the darkness of the grave we live in. A story of freedom, of 18 year girls meeting a Sari Bari woman on the train and instead of being trafficked she get a real job, a path that she did not expect. A divine moment of grace, a hug, sometimes simply walking through the door into the embraces of friends, a kindness, an easy visit to a government office, the truth instead of a lie, silence instead of violence. The light comes in and everything changes. We see the losses amidst in the gifts, existing together and see how they make a strange kind of nonsense. Maybe just enough light so that long dormant seeds begin to sprout. The tomb becomes the womb.
The pain of losses 10 years in is a little different than it was in the first two years. Walking the train platforms, bringing in God’s beloved who were left to die in the streets and train platforms was devastating. There was not much hope in it. Just obedient acts of service, hands and feet, doing what hands and feet were meant to do. The losses were losses to be sure. Seeing what humans are capable of doing to one another is profoundly breaking. We brought in many many people who died in the Taxi on the way to the MC home. I brought in a young woman who had been raped, her bruises bringing tears to both our eyes as I washed away the blood and dirt. Her face still seared on my brain. We saw thousands and thousands of people walk by as someone died on a train platform. This was beginning of understanding the tomb. But we did not know many names or stories in this season, we were hands and feet and that was enough.
Ten years later, I know names and stories and the deaths are equally disturbing and far more painful. When Rina died, I lost my friend. I lost a part of myself, a part that was just for her. I know her story, I know what she left behind, I know that now she is a peace and hopefully cracking jokes and getting someone to make her some pasta and bring her some limes! Rina’s loss still hurts; maybe it will never stop hurting. And still even in the grief of herfuneral, her loss created something new in our community, another affirmation that we are a family, that we are not alone. For the 11% of our women with HIV, it affirmed that they are not alone and we will walk with them to death all the while celebrating their life. And when the time comes 80, 100 women and friends will gather around them, upholding their family and children after they are gone. The tomb becomes the womb.
There seems to be 20 stories of loss for every story of hope and new life. It would be easy to stop looking for the light and let the darkness overwhelm. Most of us here Kolkata have lived in this darkness for months and sometime years at a time. And the longer we are here, the more we can see the cracks (we have learned where to look), the places where the light is seeping in and even bursting in as the stone is rolled away, it’s impossible weight pushed back as if it were nothing. The tomb becomes the womb. It is not always Friday here. At least once a week Sunday comes and the tomb becomes a womb where new life is born, restoration, resurrection, and death is only fertilizer.
(Inspired by Mars Hill Easter Service-Tomb becomes the womb)
Return…
April 21st, 2012 § Leave a Comment
“For most of my life I have struggled to find God, to know God, to love God. I have tried hard to follow the guidelines of the spiritual life—pray always, work for others, read the Scriptures—and to avoid the many temptations to dissipate myself. I have failed many times but always tried again, even when I was close to despair.
Now I wonder whether I have sufficiently realized that during all this time God has been trying to find me, to know me, and to love me. The question is not “How am I to find God?” but “How am I to let myself be found by him?” The question is not “How am I to know God?” but “How am I to let myself be known by God?” And, finally, the question is not “How am I to love God?” but “How am I to let myself be loved by God?” God is looking into the distance for me, trying to find me, and longing to bring me home.”
Put a label on it
April 21st, 2012 § Leave a Comment
The label is our constant security blanket. We constantly label people, places and things. Pronouncing a hundred or a thousand judgments a day with our words. When we say, “she looks like a prostitute.” We are saying something about ourselves. We are saying she is outcast, other, and not valuable. We are sawing we are better. We sadly make assumptions about the personhood and value of the woman based on the clothes she is wearing.
When we call women prostitutes, we are creating an, them, and us scenario. We are stealing dignity from a woman, maybe a mother, and someone’s daughter who may at this point in her journey find herself in a situation where she is either prostituting herself or being prostituted by another. She is woman, a person, a created being who is prostituted. She is the noun—personal pronoun, and the verb or action is to be prostituted. She is not the entire sum of her actions. Her actions are apart of what she does but not who she is in entirety.
Even in the world of Advocacy against Sex trafficking and prostitution we do not know how to use language well. We talk draw the differentiation between the prostitutes (women 18 and older) and girls who are trafficked (sold, underage, did not make this choice). We easily draw a line between those we perceive as vulnerable and those we perceive as choosing something for themselves.
A woman involved in prostitution may be there for many reasons. The women in majority world may find themselves vulnerable to trafficking or forced to make a hard choice because of poverty. The women in the western contexts may prostitute themselves because of addiction, poverty or mental illness or supposed choice. What is true about all women who are prostituted or who prostitute is that they are vulnerable people. Their circumstances have created a lack of options that make them targets and easily exploitable.
Many advocacy organizations, advocate poorly, rather than educating and reframing the language, labels are used to differentiate. The historical, multicultural and international conversation is narrowed to two words: victim and prostitute. We want to help the victim and assume the prostitute chose this dark path. Who really chooses this path? Who dreams of being raped bloody she is 19 years old? Or being murdered by a customer when she 30? We have forgotten the women who may not have been rescued, who moved beyond the age of rescue 10 years ago when no one cared about trafficking. Now having moved beyond being “underage” it has somehow become their choice, an identity marker that no longer deserves our advocacy or compassion. From victim (one who is victimized) to one whom we call prostitute (one who is prostituted) is not a very long journey.
When we call things by their right names and use language that honors the dignity of personhood, humanness, we reveal a spotlight on something that has been in darkness. We recognize the value of human life no matter what it’s condition and honor the divine imprint on humanity.
We are broken. We will not fix this by choosing a side and labeling them. God helps us if we are labeled as the sum of our worst actions and behaviors. Liar, thief, narcissist, porn addict, manipulator, adulterer, slut…
Can we choose to heal, reconcile, redeem and restore? Can we do that using dignifying language? Can we do it through partnership and incarnation? Can we do it without choosing to use a label?
Saturday
April 7th, 2012 § 3 Comments
God is dead. Saturday space is where I have spent more than a little time in the last years. A potentially liminal space, of not knowing, doubting, feeling lost, like I have lost my way, has been a majority space. Mostly full of darkness, lament and feeling like I do not understand where God has gone. This is hard space.
Today is hard space. The day after God died. The one who we thought would save us from our oppressor’s and rule with the certainty of presence and power seems to have abandoned himself and us to death. We are, uncertain of the future and doubt the reality of what we have seen and heard. The words, those promises, fall empty on hopeless ground.
The restoration of hope remains unknown, unseen, and unthought-of of in the midst of this dark space. The focus is on what has been lost. We do not even comprehend the loss to larger humanity, only to ourselves. This is a deep chasm of space where we can only feel sorry that we have personally lost something, someone. A few around us have held to hope, we think they are foolish and naïve. The darkness and the losses so profound, why don’t they see it? Faith in such circumstance seems childish, something like the denial of reality. Maybe sometimes, on some days, it feels easier to live here on Saturday. We are not even waiting, because we expect nothing and feel at angry with those who do.
From that night to this, there is only darkness. Saturday. A day for losses being felt and doubt being born within us. Where is God? Can God not see our brokenness, our fear, and our pain? Can God not hear the cries of those around us? Rescue was promised. Where has our rescuer gone? To death.
This space can transform us. It has transformed me. The liminal space between here and there. Between the darkest of night and the deepest of losses, there waits the unknown future. On many days, I have lain in the rut of Saturday. This grave with the sides kicked out. Hopeless, devastated, unbelieving. Who would not doubt on a day like this? Everything is lost. We are lost. A yet a tug comes. A remembrance, like a whisper tickles my brain and then my heart and I want to hold on.
And then dawn. Still full of doubt, anger and tears. A glimmer of something forces me to open my swollen eyes. Still unable to see clearly or comprehend I reach out. And I am surrounded by a host of witnesses. Women in Sari’s, revealing Jesus in Flesh, revealing resurrection to my Saturday stuck heart. This is not what I expected, it is better than I could have hoped, more than I could have imagined. The impossible has become possible.
And Saturday will come again. Maybe next time I will be one of the crazy foolish ones who can hold tight to hope. May it be so.
Business: Tailor Made
March 10th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Have you ever thought that the parable of the workers should be your business paradigm? I am mean a paradigm of work where each person is considered in the production process and their emotional, physical and spiritual well being is taken into account and where everyone gets paid the same, even though some products are easier and some are harder. It’s not “fair” and yet is creates an opportunity for something more than being just “fair.”
In the early years of sari bari, we realized that same product would not work for everyone, especially if we wanted a diverse range of women of all ages to find freedom and new life within the doors of sari Bari. We in those days had more than enough work with Sari Bari Blankets alone, demand was high, and we did not need to make anything else. Except we did, not for our customer but for our women, the reason for doing the business in the first place. We introduced bags at Sari Bari because it was our women who need the product diversification for them to be successful. Some of the women were just not succeeding at making the blankets, their age, their emotional difficulties, their own fear of hand quilting such a large surface area were holding them back from successful production and wages. So bags were born. About 30% of the women at Sari Bari are engaged in hand making our beautiful bags and putting them together on the sewing machines. The needs of the women guided and directed how we would move forward and grow as business.
Their needs continue to shape not only what we make but also how we do business. It is not so with all businesses where sometimes profit comes before people.
The generally practiced fair trade paradigm of business has always irked me a little. Mainly because it is possible to run a profitable efficient fair trade business when you do what most businesses do: hire the best workers, at the highest price, to get the most efficient production in order to make the highest profit. It is a reasonable way to do business and can be profitable.
And it may not be the best way to do Justice. Social Businesses seeking to implement fair trade practices often hit some walls. In many cases, the target employee may not be the most efficient, most productive or most cost effective way to make the a product. And of course, these businesses still want to pay fair or better than fair wages and at least break even in the process. Yet, it may in fact take years to empower and encourage an individual employee to reach the place of doing their best. They may have years and years of trauma, negative internal and external messages, and culture barriers to overcome. And their personal growth process may never translate into efficiency but always seems to translate into life change.
We can confirm that it happens…I have seen it with own eyes over and over again. A woman transformed, almost miraculous in front of our eyes. The “I can’t” is replaced with “I can” and “I not only can and will but I want to be excellent.” This belief in self, the ability to change the broken paradigm of one’s identity is what we hope for through the work at Sari Bari. If you were to ask the women at Sari Bari what work they do, they would not tell you about you about the beautiful bags and blankets that we make, they would tell you that work of both their hands and hearts is FREEDOM. And you if you asked them what mark’s their life and their identity, they will say VALUE. A profound value that is affirmed daily in the presence of other women who journey with them.
These women, my friends and hero’s, are not what they do. This is a true statement both now and before they came to find freedom. The women you will find when you walk through the doors of this socially oriented, fair trade practicing business, are a beautiful tapestry of uniquely made human beings. They are unique, broken and healed, transformed, efficient and inefficient, mother and daughter, friends and family. They are the fabric of our reason for doing business. We partner with the women for freedom, empowerment, wholeness, generational and community transformation, personal transformation and new life and we find it together.
The women, human beings, shape the whole paradigm of how we do business at Sari Bari. We may not be efficient, we may only break even but we have earned something more important along the way: A journey toward new life that we do not have to travel alone.
Why I don’t know any prostitutes…
February 19th, 2012 § 5 Comments
I am not a big fan of labels. Of easy words that make it easy to classify and categorize people into the good ones, the bad ones, and the one’s that we like and the one’s that are harder to like because we find them different. Labels to me to seem like an easy way out of understanding how complicated and complex we are as human beings.
There are few among us who are all dark and no light, all good and no evil. We are complex, layered, intricately woven and not completely understandable, even to ourselves much of the time.
My time in India, in Kolkata particularly among people who are poor and among women who prostitute or are prostituted has helped my reframe my paradigm of labels. I was once asked, by some visitors to Sari Bari, “How many prostitutes work here?” My response was “none, no prostitutes work here and in fact I do not know any prostitutes.” Prostitute is a label that I find abhorrent. Because I only know women, mothers, daughters, sisters and friends who have been involved in sex work for one reason or another. They have in fact been prostituted by poverty, exploitation, and the greed of other human beings. The women I know are intricately woven works of God art. Within them are darkness and light, pain and joy, beauty and ugliness.
We would like to draw a line between women who are prostituted, say men, women and children who have been trafficked and the others who we see as making a choice. Much of the western paradigm of prostitution carries with it a stigma of a person who has made poor choices and therefore does not deserve the dignity of personhood. Some lightly dismiss the women whose weary faces may appear in the newspaper on arrests for prostitution…somehow this feels like justice to us for their crimes to be listed for all to see in a newspaper. I have read through these pages of newspapers many times and what I see are women destroyed by addiction and often controlled by a pimp. Women arrested for prostitution 60 times did not make that choice. She has been victimized. She is likely to have been abused (95% of all those engaged in the act of prostitution internationally have been sexually abused) and whether it is an addiction or pimp that is keeping her enslaved, this is and was not the life that she chose for herself. And to choose to find freedom requires a tremendous amount of resources that may or not be available to her. She may be 35, if she is under the control of a pimp, she may not even able to decide when she is able to use the bathroom. So she may not actually be able to make the smallest choices for herself. There is a requirement of safety and the basic needs of life being met before she can even begin to take a step in the right direction. If we call her a prostitute, we can easily dismiss responsibility for walking with her. If we see her as a woman, a mother, someone like us, it becomes much harder to dismiss and hopefully much easier to want to help.
It is not only the word prostitute that bothers me. It is any label that prevents us from seeing others as whole human beings. The word victim is not among my favorites. Many have been victimized by human trafficking and calling women and children who have been trafficked a victim limits them. Words like victim help causes raise money and may fail to consider the human being who has a complex story and who though victimized will move beyond a label as their story moves forward. I heard Luis CdeBaca (http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/biog/124083.htm) the Anti Human trafficking ambassador speak a couple years ago and his words have continued to ring in my mind when I hear the word victim. This is my paraphrase of what he said: “People who have been trafficked are vulnerable because of poverty and other circumstances, but often those who are trafficked for labor or sex, are the ones who believed that opportunity and taking a risk for that opportunity is worth it. Unfortunately taking the risk did not pay off and when rescued, we should not count them as victims for long because they will again make a new way to a new life.” Many have been victimized we should not dismiss the complexity of who they are by calling them victims.
Can we change they way we use our language to something more humanizing. Instead of saying victims of human trafficking, can we say women and children who have been victimized by human trafficking? Instead of calling women engaged in prostitution, “prostitutes”, can we say women who are prostituting or women who have been prostituted? The words victim and prostitute are nouns, indicating a person, place or thing. Prostituted and victimized are adverbs or adjectives that describe what has happened to living, breathing, complex and complicated human beings.
When I describe the women that I know at Sari Bari, it will never be with the words victim or prostitute because I do not know who that is. I know women who have been victimized and trafficked and prostituted. I know their names, their stories of trauma and their stories of new life. I see their darkness and their light, their good and their bad and they see mine.
What are some more labels that can be reframed with dignifying language?
