We have been sexually abused, we have gone to bed hungry, we have suffered emotional pain. We are girls who have had to look after our own children, whose fathers we often didn’t know and could not name. We have struggled with these problems so much that we cried ourselves to sleep on most nights. We were often confused. We didn’t understand the strong and insulting language that people speak about refugees. We appreciated and loved our host country, Kenya, but we also always missed home.
What The Voices and Faces Project did for us was different from anything anyone had ever done for us. We knew each other by our names, but none of us really knew what united us. The Stories We Tell writing workshop helped us reveal our true identities and realize that we are all survivors, united by the common circumstances of having been through horrific trauma. Each of us has experienced events that came to define our lives, events that we did not ask to be a part of but were forced into. Yet each of us survived.
The Stories We Tell writing workshop helped awaken our inner confidence and develop the skills to write our stories. It helped us become women of strength, power and kindness. Hearing words and poems and the magnificent roar of others in the workshop who have survived violence was uplifting. Together we could unearth the bright light that the darkness of trauma had buried within our hearts.
No longer would we stand by and let what we had experienced define and limit who we are. We are stronger together than when we are isolated and alone. Our voices, no longer soft and weak, became like the roar of a lioness protecting her cubs.
Voices and Faces Project founder Anne K. Ream said to us, “Change is a chorus, not a solo.” The Stories We Tell writing workshop and its magazine, LEAP, unite us as survivors and give us a platform to use our stories for change.
If you are a refugee girl or woman, you will be reading LEAP to gain confidence and learn to believe in yourself and to turn the poison of your past into medicine. If you are not a refugee, you will have the chance to listen to the stories of refugee women and girls who dare to use their voices to change the lives of their families, their friends and the communities they live in.
The cold of the world has touched the hearts of many refugees. We hope that they will hear the girls in LEAP saying: You are not alone. We are here with you, ready to help you take the leap that can change your life.
