Fifteen of us sat in a circle on the cool marble floor, drawing birds and flowers.  The girls ranged in age from Jasminda, a tiny seven-year-old with uncanny artistic abilities, to Rishi, a clever 20 year old who just started at college and probably should have been studying, but couldn’t resist joining in the fun.

Leela stood alone in the corner, silently watching.  She seemed to be about 16.  She wrapped her arms around her body, looking cold despite the warm temperature. Her eyes were impossible to read.   Angry, afraid, yearning to join the group, depressed or completely detached?  I couldn’t tell.   She is in a safe place now, at the new shelter we built last year near Darjeeling, India, but until recently was living a nightmare existence that is hard to even imagine – used every night by 15-20 men on a filthy mattress without even a sheet, outcast and judged by passers-by on the street, betrayed by her family, controlled with physical violence, or worse, with shame, a tool her traffickers used with great skill, knowing it to be even more powerful than pain.

Leela was rescued only last month.  She showed physical and emotional signs of trauma and was not going to trust again easily.  The risk of hoping and being disappointed again is too high.  But we have been in this situation before, many times with many wounded girls like Leela who seemed impossible to reach.  At first I despaired of them ever recovering.  But they did.  With love and time, their spirits came back into their bodies and they began building a new life.

I inched backwards until I was sitting near Leela’s feet.  Not looking her directly in the eye (too threatening), I gave her a sideways glance, inviting her to sit and draw with me.  She shook her head.  A younger girl came over and we drew together for a few minutes.  Eventually Leela got tired of standing, or maybe it felt culturally inappropriate to remain looming over me, an adult.  She sat beside me, still unsmiling and remote.  We made the briefest eye contact.  I pushed across a piece of paper, and then my pencil, and pointed to an image in a book that I wanted to copy for the mural we planned to paint on the shelter wall.  She shook her head no.  I shrugged, that’s okay, no pressure.

But a few minutes later, Leela bit her lips, pushed the hair out her eyes, and began to draw.  She did so brilliantly – an exquisitely detailed peacock, a garden of flowers.  The others were called for lunch and the project came to an end.  Leela stayed on the floor, drawing for hours until we lost the light.

The next morning she was waiting at the shelter door when we arrived, eager to begin painting the mural.  On our last day, she cried the hardest of anyone.  But I know she will be okay.  She is a survivor.  She found the courage to come out of her isolation to sit on the floor with a stranger and draw a peacock.   Next she will learn a trade and start earning money, or go back to school.  Slowly she will begin to believe that not everyone is out to hurt or use her, that life can be sweet again.   We are building a third floor at this shelter to add a vocational training center, so Leela and 100 other girls at this shelter can have more choices in life.

(UPDATE – THE THIRD FLOOR WAS COMPLETED IN SUMMER 2017!)