Her

 Please take a few seconds to look at this picture. Drop everything else, all your emails, work place responsibilities, family ties, personal needs and wants and everything else in between for just a few seconds. Replace the word ‘me’ and ‘I’ with ‘her’ and ‘she’ and divert your attention the focal point of this picture, at this present moment. Focus on her. Not how she came to be there, or what will happen to her in the future. She is now putting together a bead necklace. You don’t know how she got there, or how the story will end for her.  The ‘her’ you see here, carries within her, another child. But she is also child. The world order that went about making this happen is the world order that you and I live in. 

Words fail me if I were to describe the insides of her mind. No one can. I bet even she can’t. She couldn’t possibly put to words the pain and the trauma that she had been made to endure within her 12 or 13 years. Instead she puts it into the bead chain she makes; trying to make sense of how the color of one bead matches the color of the next in the loop that seems to be endless. Her thoughts can probably never be related to by people like you and I who are seated comfortably behind our computer screens. We focus on our emails and paychecks and cars and music and clubbing and gaming and boozing while she calmly sits in a corner and makes her bead chain. Because that is what helps her bring back a little bit of peace and sanity to her new world. The new world where she now knows her father to be the father of the child she carries. The new world where right and wrong isn’t the two sides of a coin but an endless string of multi- colored beads.  

The picture you see is from Emerge Lanka Foundation. They are a non-profit organization that helps young girls who are victims of abuse get back on their feet.  Shunned from society and held back from education, these girls don’t have the confidence or the resources to live a normal life. As victims of rape and incest, the strength that takes them to stand up against their perpetrators, most of the time their own fathers and to have faith in their own strength to rise from their tortured past is a massive step for them. They are torn and battered in ways that you and I cannot imagine. Emerge Lanka wants to restore hope through projects like ‘beads to business’ where they help the girls discover what it feels like to be alive and in control of their own lives, to be financially stable and to learn to live again. Every piece of jewelry is as unique as the girl who made it. 

Each piece of bright metal and plastic are strung together in the hopes that life becomes beautiful in the end. Isn’t that what we all want?

If you wish to help them out in anyway, please visit their website 

Images courtesy http://emergeglobal.org/