Last night, I had the opportunity to watch Session 3 of Passion 2012, a Christian conference focused on social justice and freedom.

A woman named Christina Caine got on the stage and began to talk about her initial exposure to social injustices — namely genocide and human trafficking — and her experiences since then. Over the course of about 40 minutes, she shared anecdotes from her life that shaped her understanding of what it means to be a Christian in an unjust and broken world. Her driving point was that we weren’t created to live within some kind of “Bless Me Club” with fellow Christians, but rather were saved by grace (Ephesians 2:8-9) so that we could do good and fulfill a purpose beyond ourselves (Ephesians 2:10). Specifically, she added, God intended for “rescued people to rescue people” – those still in captivity, both literally and figuratively.

But a lot of times, in Christian America, we do just sit around in our Bless Me Clubs and forget that we’re not just saved by grace, end of story. Or we push aside the pressing need to make an impact in this world.

“What is it about our temporal world that would take us away from the eternal purpose that God has us here on earth for?”

She shared a number of stories, some of which I may write about later on, but the one I want to retell right now is the one she ended with. Caine travels a lot and is an activist against human trafficking, leaving her with a lot of enemies including Eastern European mafia. People tell her often that she needs to be a more responsible mother and stop bringing such “darkness” upon herself. In response, she commented, “…as if the purpose of life is to arrive at death safely.” I laughed.

“Death is the ultimate statistic, sweetheart – one out of one will die,” she quoted someone.

Her final anecdote began with one of her daughters really wanting a Barbie flashlight. So Caine brought her to Walmart – evidently a big deal in Australia – and found a Barbie flashlight. She put in the batteries so that the girl would play with it right away as Caine paid for the item. The girl turned on the flashlight and, of course, that one light among all the fluorescent lighting in Walmart was ineffective. The little girl wasn’t able to see her own light’s impact because it had none.

“Mommy,” her daughter asked, “Can we please go somewhere with darkness?”

Caine stood on the stage and told the audience, “At 3 years old, my daughter had a realization… Light is most effective in only one place – darkness.”

I’m a metaphor person. I love them, maybe a bit too much, but they help me a lot in my thought processes. As I’m writing this out, I’m thinking we’re a bit like solar lights; we need to charge in the ultimate source of light of course, so being among light is necessary to our growth and carrying out our potential. But ultimately, we’re not made to sit in the sun or other light sources. We need to stop hindering our impact, leave our Bless Me Clubs sometimes, and go find where it’s dark and get our light on.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to do a bit of light-shining in 2012…

I’m entering my final week of my trip. I want to say right off that it doesn’t feel like I’ve been gone for 2 months but when I really think back to when I was in China or previous places, it seems like quite a bit of time ago.

This past weekend was my last weekend before heading back to New York, and I’m glad this was my “concluding” weekend. It was absolutely awesome.

I’ve been staying with Shaina, the India program coordinator for NEST (which I plan to write about soon!). She’s here in Kolkata for at least one year — possibly more — and lives in a quaint and relatively convenient part of town. It feels like “real India” in her neighborhood, and I’ve had the chance to meet her local egg man, sweets man, and tea man, among other friendly folks.

Shaina also knows a good number of ex-pats living and working here, as well as short-term volunteers, so I got to meet some people — Americans too, finally!

So a breakdown of my weekend?

Friday:
Went with Shaina to Destiny Reflection, one of the social enterprises that NEST partners with in India. I met the founder Smarita Sengupta, whose birthday it happened to be!

 
Trekked up to Sari Bari, taking the Kolkata Metro for the first time. Will make a post about Sari Bari later on.

 
Stopped off at South City Mall, a super modern mall that makes me feel like I’m in another world within Kolkata.

 
Met up with Shaina and we headed to dinner at Bar-B-Q on Park Street with a bunch of Americans living in Kolkata.

 
Went to the cutest coffee shop in Kolkata, Mocha, where I somehow managed to finish an entire Kit Kat milkshake. Great menu and great ambiance.

 
 
Saturday:
Met up with Kate, the other volunteer at FTBK, up at New Market. Got some henna so that some of the older girls at the center could do some mendhi. Ended up spending far too much on jewelry made of real silver and stones. Said bye to our friends at New Market (Babalu’s family) since we weren’t going back after Saturday.

Kate left to go to the movies and I met Clementine, a MakeSense member who is currently doing a traveling tour to meet social entrepreneurs involved in addressing hunger and malnutrition issues. Ate at Blue Sky Cafe, a popular ex-pat and tourist restaurant in New Market (clean food is key in India!).

Met an Indian man on the street who just returned from a trip to Hong Kong and whose brother attends Boston University (“Have you heard of it?” haha). He spoke French as well as some Chinese.

Walked to Maidan Park and walked through a religious festival for Krishna and Rama before discovering an open park with families sitting around. Reminded me of Central Park. But a small, Indian version.

Met a nice family with a young son (high school age) with whom we chatted for a while. He took a picture with us on his phone, haha.

On our way out, we met a man named Munoj. He works with the Children’s Welfare Committee in conjunction with the U.N. and is very proud of Kolkata. As he walked us to the Metro, he gave us some history and stories behind some of the buildings, including a government building he described as “where the corruption begins.” He also recommended a restaurant to us that has the best Bengali food in all of Kolkata.

Got back too early to Shaina’s so I wandered her neighborhood and stopped by a sweets shop. Chatted with the couple who owned the store, as well as several of their customers, for over an hour! They welcomed me to the neighborhood, invited me to go for morning walks with them, gave me free food, discussed culture and language, suffocated me during their incense burning, and shared parts of their lives with me. It was fun.

 
 
Sunday:
Went to Kolkata Christian Fellowship with Shaina, a church with mainly local Bengalis but also a good amount of ex-pats and visitors. Service is held in English translated to Bengali.

Went to lunch with some of the folks from KCF at South City Mall. Met some interesting and encouraging folks. Tried to get a pedicure and massage with Shaina but that failed. Instead, we caught some street cricket action.

At night, we went to Kewpie’s, the best Bengali restaurant as recommended by Munoj, with Clementine and Melissa, an IJM summer legal fellow. The food was super yum.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been doing some work at Free To Be Kids, an organization that works with kids who have been exploited or were at extremely high risks of trafficking. Many of them have been in abusive/violent domestic situations. FTBK has multiple sites but the main one is here in south Kolkata, with a 25 kids living in the center (5 of them are boys). After a rigorous screening and approval process, the kids are admitted into the Home (which the staff does a really good job at making into a family model) where they live, can attend school nearby, get 3 meals a day, and are involved in other activities.

The main focus of FTBK (next to providing a loving home) is education. They have the kids go to the English school nearby during the mornings* and then they run a tutoring program in the afternoons after lunch. Tuition time includes about half an hour to an hour of working on homework and then about 2 hours of additional lessons by FTBK on life skills, soft skills, and more academics.

*I had asked why they chose an English-speaking school rather than a Bengali- or even Hindi-speaking school. I found out that in India, in order to graduate high school, you need to be pretty fluent in English, as the last two grades are conducted solely in English and university is often in English.

 
Tuition Program:
Last week, our tuition program revolved around understanding careers and helping the kids develop their dreams for the future. This week, I’ve been working on increased self-confidence and building resilience, which will allow the kids to better develop those dreams. A lot of them are relatively happy children, being in this safe and loving environment, but at the same time I’ve noticed they don’t have a very good concept of their strengths and talents. They also have a lower level of self-awareness than most kids their age (of course, I’m not sure if this has anything to do with culture too, which it might). So the focus is on creating activities for this week to help them be more aware and to build up esteem and vision, and developing a program that the staff can continue to carry out later on.

And of course, I did some academics with them. For instance, teaching them what vowels are and why it’s important to know them; sounding out words; addition, subtraction, and multiplication; etc. But I’ll probably write another post on my views of education in places like Kolkata…

 
Counseling:
FTBK also doesn’t have any formal or informal counseling in place currently. They don’t have any social workers, which is new to me in a non-profit like this one. So Jeanette had actually contacted me to specifically develop a training for the staff on basic methods of counseling. But after having been here for a bit of time, I’m realizing that there is a need to lay the foundation of understanding what counseling is and why it is needed for populations that have experienced trauma, because it’s just not a concept many Indians, like the staff, comprehend.

So the rest of this week and next week, I’ll be focusing on training the staff on “counseling 101″ and basic counseling skills — being attentive to the kids, noticing signs in behavior and affect, listening to and validating the child, etc. as well as a specific overview of TF-CBT (trauma focused cognitive behavioral therapy) and easy therapeutic methods that work well with kids, like art therapy and relaxation methods.

When i’m back in the States, I’ll do follow-up with Jeanette and continue to help her prepare the staff for the implementation of a structured counseling program within FTBK.

Exciting that they will be doing this! We both agreed it’s definitely needed. In my short time of observation, I’ve noticed a few of the kids exhibiting some troubling signs. I think FTBK’s program will be a lot stronger and more beneficial for the children after a few tweaks here and there.

 
 
Oh, and the kids are unbelievably adorable.

A few weeks ago in the Philippines, I had the opportunity to visit a number of organizations. One of them was Red Window, which focuses on developing economic opportunities for adolescent girls and young women who have been sexually exploited — many at a high risk of re-trafficking.

Red Window was actually founded by a former board member of Restore NYC who had also previously worked in a number of anti-trafficking initiatives such as Hagar. I was not able to meet Laura unfortunately as she’s actually in New York getting her PhD at Columbia School of Social Work (we’ve swapped locations).

I met with Amy Collins, who was the first social work intern at Restore back when it was just launching and is currently part of the staff at Red Window. After talking over dinner with me about her work at the organization, she invited me to observe a day of class with the students.

A few days later, I hopped on a jeepney and headed over to her building, just in time for a class. I actually recognized a few of the students from working with them at The Haven and at Welcome House and was glad to be able to take part in a bit more of their post-care experience.

I actually connected with Red Window because they had helped Restore quite a bit this past year in developing our own job readiness program for our clients. It was pretty exciting to see where our program first stemmed from and how it’s tailored for the two different populations in NYC and in Cebu.

The lesson I observed was conducted pretty much all in Cebuano by two locals but fortunately I understood enough to get by. The focus of the class was developing their vision statements.

I cannot express how much I LOVED this class and how it was run. The teachers were phenomenal and handled everything so wonderfully. I can’t go into the details of the lesson for the sake of respecting Red Window’s lesson plan and program that they worked so hard to create, but I’ll try to give a small glimpse into it.

After the first part of the class, which entailed an exercise that encouraged the girls to develop a sense of their strengths, interests, and aspirations, they were given a short explanation on how to create and write a vision statement. Each girl was given a card to write out her statement.

After each one presented her statement, they moved on to a self-awareness portion. When asked how they felt about their statements — what thoughts and feelings they were experiencing in relation to the statement — they began to shout out things such as “hopeful” and “inspired” and “excited.” I started to wonder how the teacher would handle the girls having completely negative reactions of discouragement towards this activity. And then the girls must have read my mind because some began to say things like “not real/possible” and “too ambitious” and “inadequate.”

I loved what the teacher did then. She wrote each one down on the board, just as they were calling them out. After the list was compiled, she acknowledged the positive feelings/thoughts and then circled the negative ones. She asked, “These statements are not as encouraging, right? These feelings can overwhelm us at times and hinder us greatly. But they’re not true statements. What true statements can we tell ourselves to counter these negative ones?” And as she went down the list, each of the girls began to shout out things targeted to each negative statement.

As she wrote them down, she had them all say it loudly.

“I will be strong!”
“You can do it!”
“I will be confident!”
“Keep going!”
etc. etc.

I then had to butt in. I turned to them and said, “You shouldn’t say ‘I will be strong.’ There is no need to tell yourself to be strong and confidence because you already are strong and confident. Do you know what I’m saying?”

And they all began to nod and rephrase the counter statements to be assertive.

“I AM strong!”
“I AM confident!”
“I can do it!”
“I will not quit!”
etc. etc.

The teacher asked for added phrases or quotes or verses as well. Since the girls expressed that they enjoyed Bible verses (it’s a heavily Catholic society) I shared with them Joshua 1:9 — “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid for I, the LORD, and with you wherever you go.”

Each girl chose one or two statements to write down for herself before sharing with the class. A number of them recited the verse from Joshua, which was encouraging to hear from them. The teacher made them re-say it if they didn’t say these positive statements with oomph too, haha. It was nice.

Before I left, I noticed their goals and dreams collages on the wall, which was the first lesson that Kelly had conducted with our clients at Restore and which I had conducted with the girls at The Haven also. Loved seeing it done in so many places!

 
Though I was at Red Window just for one day and only to observe, I absolutely loved my experience there. The program is great and the staff is great. The students there definitely display some difficulties in seeing their own potential and self-worth but at the same time, there is a lot of resilience shining through which is being encouraged even more by Red Window’s program.

Father Hynes told this story:

One time when I was here [in this Redlight District], all the little kids [points around us] were running around me like this. Two little boys, about 5 or 6 years old, came up to me and were very excited to play and talk with me. I chatted with them for a bit and then asked them what they wanted to be when they grew up. The first boy immediately said to me, “I want to be a priest!”

The second boy didn’t answer. The first boy then elbowed him and said, “You want to be a priest too, right!” The second boy furrowed his brows and pushed the elbow away. He said, “No, I want to be a pimp.”

Now you see what kind of environment they grow up in.

I’m going to try to section up the time I’ve spent here in Cebu, Philippines in separate posts rather than one giant post about 3495879 things I’ve done. Here goes!

 
The first weekend here, I had the chance to visit Good Shepherd Welcome House, a drop-in center for women who are involved in the sex industry in Cebu. Welcome House provides food and temporary safe shelter for women who are sexually abused or exploited, as well as supportive counseling and some case management, especially for heroin-addicted women (whom they call “shooters” in Cebu).

I spent the day with the women who lived there as well as some who were stopping by for food or other services. Some of them were working on the IGP (Income Generating Project — basically a “social enterprise”-like portion of the program at Welcome House), making necklaces that attached to conference name-tag covers. I thought that was an interesting product to focus on…

It was good getting to know the ladies — they were all pretty excited to talk with me and teach me a bit about their lives and the culture in Cebu, especially in the poorer areas and in the Redlight District.

In the late afternoon, before the night-time outreach, the social worker there (her nickname/alias name at the House is “Nice”) took me to walk around Colon Street where most of the women hang around for “work.” She introduced me to some women as she passed out condoms and tried to encourage those who haven’t been around the House to come by.

 
Much later at night, from around 7:00pm until about midnight, we went out to Camiguyan (don’t know how to spell it & I can’t seem to find it online), the Redlight District of that area. Essentially, it was a squatters’ area with all the “houses” (really just individual small rooms) and stores so close to one another that it seems almost like one giant house with hundreds of people living in it, walking in and out of rooms and running down the hallway-like streets.

I went with Nice and Jiji (my host here in Cebu, and a counselor/professor) as well as Eliza (a local UNICEF worker) and Father Hynes. Father Hynes is a German priest who’s lived in Cebu longer than I’ve been alive. He’s well-known in the community, especially because he helps distribute medicine and supplements to people in need. Also, he’s a riot — everyone thinks he’s hilarious (I have no idea since I don’t speak Cebuano…sadface).

Spent the night chatting with the young girls of the community who are involved in the sex industry. Many of them feel stuck in what they do for various reasons but the most common stories seemed to be:

1. “I get good attention and love here.” A lot of them seem to be longing for some form of affection. They didn’t get into it with me but I’m sure they each have their own stories about why there is that unfulfilled longing.
2. A LOT of them met men — often foreigners — who tell them things like, “I love you” and “I will take care of you, I promise.” And in the end, they have a baby and then men leave them with no means to take care of the child. As a result, the Barangay Captain of the Redlight District takes their babies and “takes care of them” (oftentimes grooming them for trafficking purposes) and tells the young moms that the baby will be taken care of if they work for him in the sex industry.

It was heartbreaking to see so many of them just weaving in and out of the streets and rooms, some leaving our conversations when a customer came for them at their stores (one disguised as a KTV room).

 
Thus far, a lot of the Philippines is very similar to countries like the Dominican Republic (former Spanish colonies) but I had never seen a place like Camiguyan. It was definitely a new experience for me.

It’s currently almost 9:00am here in Hong Kong. I arrived yesterday around 3:00pm local time and spent the evening with relatives. Internet access is limited.

Nothing too exciting thus far.

And of course, I’m already covered in mosquito bites. But I’m trying to save the repellants for later on in the places where I’ll really need it.

Hong Kong is just an intermediary destination for me: somewhere that is removed from my home in New York City but somewhere in which I am not fully immersed in the unfamiliar.

* * * * *
I spent the plane ride sitting next to a woman in her late 30′s who was returning home to the Philippines for the first time in 18 years. When she told me her final destination was Cebu, I told her that I would be visiting there in a few weeks as well. She assumed I was visiting family as well and was oddly surprised when I said that I was not Filipina nor had I ever been to the Philippines. She then told me about her kids, her husband in New Jersey, her manicure, her love for shopping, the beach resort she was visiting in Cebu…and she watched every chick flick offered on the plane and reported back to me her personal reviews of them. Nice lady.

When she asked me what I had gotten my Masters for, I mentioned International Social Welfare and Social Policy. Not really understanding what that means (Who does? It’s so vague), she asked me what I did and was planning to do work-wise. I started telling her about working in anti-trafficking and counseling foreign-born women in those situations, and that I was actually going to Cebu to meet with people doing similar work but focused on local trafficking. She nodded along, mentioned that it seemed interesting, and said NYC was a big spot to do that kind of work.

It wasn’t until later on when I mentioned something about women and children in oppressive situations that it occurred to me that this woman didn’t know what trafficking was. She actually thought I worked in traffic control or something (as in…transportation).

I shouldn’t be surprised, but the fact that I was made me analyze my biases. Perhaps I had assumed that this woman knew about trafficking because she had grown up in the Philippines, which is completely ignorant on my part. I can’t and shouldn’t assume anything like that ever.

First mini reminder lesson of the trip.

 

The DNA Foundation, created by Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore to fight sex trafficking of girls, launched a campaign this past Monday titled, “Real Men.”

It’s a series of videos that show Real Men like Bradley Cooper, Adrian Peterson, Drake (as seen above), Jason Mraz, Justin Timberlake, and other men-of-men doing “manly” activities — whatever that may be. But one thing is for sure: buying girls is not an activity that Real Men engage in.

You can watch the videos on DNA’s YouTube channel. My favorites are: Real Men Are Distrustful Of Robots; Real Men Know How To Start A Fire; and Real Men Have A Sense Of Direction.

I can’t speak on behalf of all females but I for one prefer Real Men.
So fellas, are you a Real Man?

I’m very excited for tonight’s Freedom Gala hosted by Restore NYC. The best parties are parties for causes, right? (Especially in big fancy venues!)

In addition to good food, music, and company, there will be a silent auction and dance performances. Photographer Jordan Matter is also going to be there shooting — I believe it will be related to his Dancers Among Us series. Award-winning novelist Patricia McCormick (author of Sold) will be emceeing the night.

What: Annual Freedom Gala to support the efforts of non-profit Restore NYC, bringing holistic aftercare and counseling to foreign-born women who are survivors of sex trafficking
When: Tonight! Thursday, March 24th @ 8:00pm (VIP reception is at 7:00pm)
Where: Angel Orensanz in the Lower East Side (where SJP & Broderick got married!)
Who: Restore NYC & fellow New Yorkers rallying together to restore freedom

See you in the LES!