Remembering

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!