the reminder we all need
There I was in June 2015, stepping out of a van in the middle of a local village in Uganda with a small group of women from the States. I could hear the red dirt shift as I walked through the town. Small solar lights lit up the small wooden booths, and you could hear the fun African music blaring through muffled speakers.
A woman met us at the van and directed us toward the back of a concrete building. I turned around to see the driver and the men who rode with us staying behind. At that moment, I knew this was something intimate.
A group of women who were sex workers were waiting for us in the back. Ahead of time, we were told there was a group of sex workers in the local village from where we were staying, but we weren’t given an exact number. When we walked through to the low dim room, it was filled with women sitting in plastic chairs, with their heads slightly lowered and gazing at us as five privileged white women walked in.
At that time, I was 22 years old, and I knew I hadn’t lived a glimpse of what they had experienced. I sat down in a plastic chair given to me and watched as other team members went up to the middle of the room to share their testimony. My mind was swirling with ideas and trying to formulate a story of how I overcame tough times to encourage them, but nothing in the ounce could relate.
My friend sat down after she shared her testimony, and the team looked at me simultaneously to nudge me to go. My stomach was overwhelmed with nerves. The last thing I wanted to do was be the white woman telling other people what to do when in all reality, I’ve never been in their shoes.
So I shared all I knew at that moment:
how incredibly worthy, valuable, and capable they are.
From that two-week trip, I didn’t realize how much it would change many things for me.
Perspective. Open-mindedness. Compassion. But more importantly, an opportunity.
A lot of people ask why the name YOU ARE. As I was trying to decide what to call an organization, I had no idea how to run then, I kept thinking about its purpose, the heart, and the intent for its existence.
Often, people don’t need us telling them what to do. It becomes a missed opportunity for them to truly become who they are meant to be. Sometimes, all we need is a reminder of our potential.
And that’s exactly why we chose the name YOU ARE. Because in every conversation and every act of service, we want each woman and girl to be reminded of how capable they are and how worthy they are of reaching their potential.
