Visiting the CEDC weekly now, trying to put in the time, understand the issues, meet the people, convey that I don’t want to make anything worse for them. It got to be closing time today and Corinn agreed to call a woman who lived nearby to see if she’d talk to me; she should be home from work by now. She’d been held up at knife point two times outside her doorway, once when she had her child in her arms.
The woman said she needed to shower, but – I think, to please Corinn – she came down anyway. She sat in a chair and told of her experiences in Guatemala – her family land taken during the civil war, her father taken away and killed. She showed us a scar on her elbow from where her mother had dragged her, as a girl, to safety on that day. She spoke of the peace the family had known before that, and that nothing had been right since then.
As she sat I realized her clothes smelled of fish, from the fish processing plant where she works, and I understood why she’d wanted to shower. I felt so badly, and hoped we hadn’t embarrassed her.
“I wasn’t safe in Guatemala, and I’m not safe here,” she said. “There is nowhere in the world where I feel safe.”