I am a counselor at a 3-month shelter for girls and women who are the victims of sexual abuse. Lessons on shalom and listening are most important for me. Even though I can do my job effectively, I was always very quick to judge people and decide that I knew everything that was important to know about them.
Sex workers are the hardest to love. They are trained in their profession to lie and keep their mouths shut. Now I listen, even when they are lying. And I sit with them as they tell lies or they say nothing- sometimes an hour, sometimes 45 minutes. My job is to listen. ...
Before participating in the course, I dismissed all those girls who seemed to lie about everything- their age, where they come from, their lives- I was able to dismiss them by thinking there was no way I could help them and also that they didn’t want my help anyway because they wouldn’t talk to me truthfully. Now I am determined to just be there with them without any agenda. Let them speak or draw or whatever, the role for me is to just be with them and help them to feel that they are not alone.
There was another girl recently, who came to us very traumatized. She refused to speak at all and during our first visit we sat for over an hour together and didn’t say a word. The next visit, after 45 minutes, I asked her if she liked to draw and she nodded and drew a rose and then I asked her who the rose reminded her of and she wrote the word “mother” on the paper and then I asked her if she’d like to write about her mother and she started writing and writing and writing. And after that, after she began to trust me, she opened up to me and shared her stories and her experiences.
I’ll never forget the lessons from Peace Bridges- get to the core of the main problem, help people to voice their feelings, and provide them with the opportunity to consider how they might solve the problem. It’s amazing, but those three simple questions have helped me tremendously.
They Are Not Alone
-Female NGO worker, C2
Return to Stories Index
