Traffic Jam event poster

Coming up 1-5 November in New Delhi is "Traffic Jam," a festival to increase awareness of human trafficking, discrimination and other forms of injustice.  Courage Homes will sell greeting cards featuring art by Hiroko and girls who live in the home.  Roger will emcee the music/drama program on 2 November, and Hiroko will do live art.  Friends from our local church are involved at many levels in organizing this event.

community art

Friends from our church sometime get together to do art.   
Our pastor has been preaching about seeking God's face.   So we decided to have a collage around that theme.

                   Cutting, gluing, stamping, painting--and, of course, eating together afterwards!

The first night, each of the 4 women created their own collage.  Sorry that some of the pictures are not high-quality, but I wanted you to have some idea of how things looked by the end of that night.   We had 4 completly different pieces of art...

However, we did not feel that we had actually finished what we were meant to create.

So two weeks later we got together again.   We (reluctantly) decided to tear our pictures apart to make something completely different.   Since we could not bring ourselves to rip up our own pictures,  we took somebody else's collage in hand and tore it into two or three pieces.   After taping big white papers together on a table, we started to glue the torn pieces onto the new, larger background.

We were not sure what we are doing or where it was leading to.    Together we tried our best to make something beautiful out of the broken pieces.    Honestly, at that point it really did not look that great.  Then we selected warm colors of acrylic paint (orange, red and yellow) and brushed pigment around the scraps of torn collage.    As we did so, one of the women said, "Look--there's a hole in the middle!  Let's make this hole look like light."   We did so by adding white paint as highlights.
 
Yet still, it looked like something was missing.  So we decided to put the
the words "This is Jacob, the generation of those who seek your face, O Lord." (Psalm 24:6)

When the words were put onto the picture, something magical seemed to happen. We stepped back to gaze at the picture.  A powerful, shining piece of art now lay on the table.  It looked  as if we had planned it out from the beginning.   How had this happened?  We were not sure, except that we knew it had somehow grown from our creativity-in-community.  

The process of making this art was as precious to me as much as the end result.

I learned not to hold onto my individual artwork, since for the sake of the community each woman had allowed her own collage to be broken in order to make a bigger picture.
I learned to keep going, and to trust the process, even when you do not know what will be the end result.
I experienced that when you work as a community, something unexpected and beautiful can be born.

We shall overcome

https://www.opendrive.com/files?NV8yOTg1MDYxXzlGYWpF

The girls at CH sang this song in Hindi at the Indian Independence Day celebration which we held recently.
This is the protest song  that became a key anthem of the African American Civil Rights Movement (1955-1968.  (If you click on the link above, you can hear the audio of the girls singing.)

We shall overcome
We shall overcome
We shall overcome someday

Oh deep in my heart I do believe
We shall overcome someday

They were trafficked, abused, now rescued.  They have started the long jorney towards healing.
It is not an easy road.
But yes, deep in my heart I do believe that they shall overcome.

International day

Kids's school had an international day

Satoshi sang a Chilean song in Spanish with guitar.

He just started taking guitar lessons a few weeks ago!

Sawyer dressed like "Pope Nicholas IV" in the medieval room.

With that red bath towel, he looks pretty good.

Meena dressed in a casual Japanese Yukata.
She looked beautiful, though it is actually Roger's bathrobe!

I wish you were there to enjoy with us the pot luck food from many different countries.