join our journey: April 2013

After a roller-coaster of a six months helping Rita set up the Pink House project in Medina, (the last post says a bit more about what the opening week there was like!) we’ve recently made the heart-breaking decision not to return to Brazil with Meninadança. This is due to many factors, and it has been the most difficult decision we’ve ever had to make.

As we know many of you will understand, we now feel a great deal of grief and loss, which we have been processing with the kindness and insight of friends and our extended team. Thank you so much to each and every friend who has supported, loved, affirmed and encouraged us. This is the first time in our lives that we’ve felt this depth of brokenness, and the support of our wider family has been an incredible gift to us.

Probably the most excruciating factor is having had to break our commitment that we made to the girls and community - that we would be journeying with them for a longer period of time than we have now been able to.

However, although we have struggled immensely with these feelings, if this is the last time we are to talk about the girls in Medina from personal experience, we want to use it to say that far from just ‘poor victims’, each of these girls is a bundle of resilience and strength, bursting with personality and character, and full of seeds of potential. Sometimes in their lives these seeds have had space to grow, and other times they have been tragically trampled upon. And yet the seeds remain, their energy and perseverance shines through, and they really are overcomers of more than we could imagine.

Furthermore, we know that in all this we are not the rescuers; that is only ever God’s work, and we can only hold His hand and go where he leads us. This is the beginning of the next phase of that journey, and we know that it is just the beginning for the girls in Medina, with Rita and the team doing an amazing job of walking alongside them… So as we leave, we want to say “here’s to them”.

After the last couple of months recovering and resting, we are now gradually starting to look at next steps. The passion in our hearts to journey with the marginalised and exploited has only deepened through this experience, and though we don’t feel ready to return to Brazil for a while, we will be continuing on this journey in London… We are hopeful, peaceful, and ultimately trusting in God to show us the way. And it means we’ll get to see more of our friends and family which is wonderful!!

Laura Rodger, one of our supporters and very good friends, is a beautifully creative woman with a real outworking passion for justice and to see other women set free to be creative and reach their potential. A few months back, she had shared the idea with Claire of providing each of the girls with a box, that they could decorate and would possibly be the one space in their world that no one else would touch, that was special and personal.

After we had brought the idea to Rita, she loved it too and so Mark (Laura’s husband) and Laura immediately sent out the money to buy 50 large boxes and four long shelves to put them on, as well as loads of decorations. Claire and Lauren (the dance teacher) put their heads together and came up with an activity for each day of the first week that would help the girls to get a sense of what the Pink House was about, and to give them a sense of identity and ownership over their box and consequentially over the whole space.

So this is how it went…

Colours and emotions On Monday, Aline got the girls to paint their box with a colour or colours that they felt most expressed their personality or expressed emotionally where they hoped to be in the future. There was oil-based paint everywhere and we had to run to buy masks, gloves and aprons to protect us from the fumes…it got quite messy and was certainly an expensive activity, but so worth it for the girls to feel that they really were being treated to the best and to invest something really special into their boxes. Their painting even on the first day was so creative and spoke of the personality and potential innate to each of these girls.

Names and the power of words On Tuesday we looked at the significance of our name and our unique identity. The girls had to write a simple acrostic of their names, getting them used to the idea that in this house they would be encouraged to think and speak positively about themselves and others, and that these words would be accepted and validated by the team.

Women
Every human being has a special power
It could be intelligence
Or strength
The ability to invent something from nothing
The special talent to make others laugh

Valuing women! Cristina created Wednesday´s theme and was really passionate about it. By the end of the session, one of the girls had painted in bold purple, glittery letters: ‘women should be valued by men’. Another had cut out a quote from a magazine saying ‘she didn’t think of her wardrobe, she was trying to change the country’, and another had said that she wanted to head out to the streets in protest to make men treat women better!

Women should be valued by men

Dreams! Thursday’s arts session was all about ‘Dreams’ and some of the girls found a corner of the yard to secretly write or draw their dreams onto the bottom or into the inside of their boxes, dreams that could be brought out into the open, but for now could remain sensitive and personal. We had also bought a diary for each girl the day before, which they were encouraged to use to express themselves and reflect on key points in their journey. A couple of the girls shared what they had done, and one girl who had written a poem the day before, then brought in two pages of poems for Claire!

To be a doctor

My dream is to be a dancer

At the end of this session, with the afternoon group, the team had the amazing opportunity to speak out some positive truths about the girls, encouraging them to believe in and pursue their dreams, and in the future, to hold out for a boyfriend and husband who would truly stand up for her and support her in fulfilling her dreams and potential. It was such a beautiful time, and we pray that those few words take root in their hearts.

Of course there were many other elements to that first week that weren’t perfect: I had to immediately define my presence in the house as Claire’s husband! ( which could have been one of the first times that they had ever heard a man speak of a mutual relationship of respect and care); there were a few testings of boundaries by some of the stronger characters; and also some real structural struggles. From our perspective it was one of the toughest but also the most joyful weeks of our time in Brazil and for the girls we believe that it was a symbolic week that gave a taste of new beginnings. After five months of building relationships with precious but broken girls and their families, and frantically building a project that would meet their needs and walk well with them into their full potential, the Pink House in Medina was finally open – a team that loves them and a space that is safe. This first week will remain in our memories as a ray of light into these girls’ lives - a safe and creative space, which now over the last six weeks we have heard they have been exploring and owning and using to build their own way to a different present and a very different future.

You can check out their weekly progress through Lauren´s eyes on her excellent blog, or on the Meninadança website.