April 2010
Tomorrow I will see the culmination of three years of dreaming and planning and hoping! Tomorrow we get to welcome five women into a new life in our community. Tomorrow is the first day of Suti Sana!
For the last few months, we have been slogging through details and preparations for this economic and therapeutic option for our friends. We’ve bought sewing machines, construction paper for art therapy; we’ve tuned up the guitar for morning worship times and attended conferences on dialogue education ( so we can teach without putting the women to sleep). We don’t feel ready (not hardly), but we can’t wait to see what will come from it.
The whole process has been difficult, but the hardest part is the personal brokenness. I have rarely been as aware of my own sin as I have been this last week. Just one example was when one of our candidates showed up late to her interview. I told her firmly that punctuality was very important, and asked her when she had left her house. When she told me, I put on a dubious face and basically called her a liar. Minutes later she ran out of the Casa de Esperanza, after telling another worker that she was too ashamed to be interviewed at all. I was speechless, and after a moment of self-righteous justification, I found myself sobbing in the office. I had shamed her, taken her weakness in my fist and shaken it in front of her as evidence, shattering the dim specter of hope that she had arrived with.
The next day I nervously climbed up a long dusty hill to her house. She greeted me shyly, and ushered me into a room plastered with movie star posters and smelling of cat. “I’m sorry,” I told her, as I sat on the edge of her bed. “I shouldn’t have spoken so harshly. You deserve more than that.” Before I could say another word, she hurled herself across the bed and hugged me.
“No, I’m sorry,” she sniffed. “Sometimes I give up too easily. I want to try harder. I just need a little support sometimes.”
Simple, guileless words like that remind me, like a punch to the stomach, that though I came ready to show women the right path, they are often the ones that show me. They show me my pride, my lack of sensitivity, my anger. And they forgive me for them with hugs. At the same time I offer them a chance at a new life, they offer me another chance at renewal, at salvation.
Thank God, I’m not alone in this. I am surrounded by a stellar team that makes up the support structure of Suti Sana: two fantastic counselors, a social worker who is also heading up our discipleship, an administrator, and a tailor who will head up the sewing part of our factory. Each of these co-workers has a miraculous story of how joined this ragtag group. And we’ll struggle forward, together with five women, to build Suti Sana into something beautiful.
Love,
Cara Strauss Contreras