With My Voice, I Roar

“You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows what they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift.” I have always enjoyed a good story. Both reading and telling. There is such an enjoyment in how words can be linked together to move people, to allow them to feel something deeply. Team conversations with the project leaders this morning lead to the sharing of such stories. Many stories of hope, many stories of tragedy, and how all these stories have lead up to be where the project is today. One is already moved by hearing how they used where they came from and what they’ve experienced to reach people and uplift them. That a boy who grows up in São Paulo, Brazil grew up to be a man who leads a project in Brazil, Ethiopia, and now India to reach the poorest and use education as a means to break the chain of poverty. The stories of th

“People from my first home say I'm brave. They tell me I'm strong. They pat me on the back and say, 'Way to go. Good job.' But the truth is, I am not really very brave; I am not really very strong, and I am not doing anything spectacular. I am simply doing what God has called me to do as a person who follows Him. He said to feed His sheep and He said to care for 'the least of these,' so that's what I'm doing, with the help of a lot of people who make it possible and in the company of those who make my life worth living” In the fourth grade, we had to write an essay about our role model. I had chosen Mother Teresa and dreamed of possibly moving to India one day to work in a children’s home myself. It’s the weirdest and most wonderful feeling to finally be in India after a decade of dreaming. I knew I would fall in love with the country, it’s just an unexplainable feeling that I’ve always carried in my heart. For as long as I can strongly remember, I

A few months ago I had the word “Breathe“ tattooed onto my arm as a visual reminder of the victory that has been won for me, a story of overcoming what I once thought would drown me. Many know the story to some extent, and some not at all, but what I’ve tried to do in my journey is talking to others about the power of the individual voice, and how we can use our own voice to fight against what convicts us and to be a voice for the voiceless. But before I could do that, I had to fight for my own voice. Recently I was in a conversation with my old flatmate, and as per usual our light chats changed into a deeper conversation. He is someone who I had trusted to tell my testimony to and had grown to me in some ways after spending a year sharing an apartment. I told him about how the topic of women’s rights, especially when it came to sex trafficking and the sexual abuse of women, was breaking my heart continuously. How my small experience of pain had taken years of healing and work whe