My (True) Fairy Tale from Strongheart on Vimeo.

All of Us

all of us from Strongheart on Vimeo.

strong hearts

I don’t think I realized how long I’ve been holding my breath until this moment. Charity, Elizabeth, and Grace Freeman just arrived at Strongheart House. I met these kids years ago in Buduburam Refugee Camp in Ghana. Charity & Elizabeth were both born in the camp – Grace arrived when she was only 5 months old. Their parents had fled the fighting in their home country of Liberia but by the time I met the girls, their father had disappeared back in Liberia and their mother had died of unknown causes in the refugee camp.

There are six incredible kids in the family total. They’ve stayed together despite incredible odds. They ran their own business in the refugee camp – a precious little shop called The Freeman’s Family Video Games Center – a “video game parlor” composed of tv’s run off a generator and Playstations donated by my friends. It was a real business – entirely their idea, based off a business plan they wrote and presented to me. It enabled them to buy food and clothes and special treats at holidays. (To those of you who gave videogames – THANK YOU!)

Freeman Family, 2006

But we always knew the refugee camp was only a temporary place. The war had ended in Liberia but the kids had no surviving relatives that they could return to. The UN offered to send refugees back and give them $100 for each person over 18. That would have meant the kids could return to a country where they knew no one, with sky high war inflation, with $300 total to begin a completely new life. (It costs about $50 just to get any form of transport from the airport to the main town! Don’t get me started on prices in Africa. Look it up on the Mercer Cost of Living Scale.)

More and more people were leaving the camp – either resettling in other parts of Ghana or returning home to their families in Liberia – but the Freemans had no where to go. Way back in 2006, we started planning that they’d be the first kids – along with Lovetta Conto – to enter the Strongheart program. (“We” is the Strongheart team – a small NGO I co-founded with the best people on earth.)

Our goal was to  establish a healing & education community for exceptional young survivors of conflict & extreme life circumstances, in the hopes that we’d be able to give young people like these a place to heal, learn, and transform into who they could be.  They were perfect candidates for our program: resilient, resourceful, open hearted – the blaze of life/love/creativity alive in them no matter their surroundings.

From idea to outcome, it seemed to take FOREVER. We were creating something new – not an orphanage, not a girls school “like Oprah.” (We welcome kids who have parents or not, boys and girls equally.) We weren’t creating a school and we weren’t just warehousing them until they could grow up and figure something better out. We were creating a program that offered true transformation and healing, that focused on each young person individually and combined the best elements of what we had all gathered on our own personal journeys through life.

We had to create a structure – both physical and organizational – that would hold these kids with enough strength and integrity to allow the work to be done. We had to create the details of the program – the ‘how to’ – that would do what we had hoped. We had to grow into the roles ourselves. It wasn’t a no-brainer. Lovetta Conto – who so many people now know through her work with her Strongheart project AKAWELLE - came to live with us and we piloted the program with her. We searched for the right city in Liberia, the right house, the right people on our team, and then we dreamed and worked and met and created.

The kids were so patient. We had so many delays – finding a house, raising money for the renovation in the midst of the economic crash, putting together staff. Every time I’d get on the phone with them, I’d feel awful telling them “Not yet. We have roof problems. Four more months.” “Not yet. We have erosion problems. Two more months.” They were so kind, “Don’t worry yourself, Cori. We want to go when it’s right.” We’d talk about the house and their dreams for a new life and a home that would be theirs and place where they could finally BE. From the time we started talking about finding them a place to live – to deciding to begin Strongheart House – to finding it – to funding it – to opening it….it was just 2 months shy of four years. (I just checked an old email. Nov 14, 2006 was when it was decided.)

In June of 2010, we finally decided the house was good to go (leaky roof and all) and were able to bring in three of the six kids from Ghana to their home country of Liberia: Georgia, Gabriel, and Emmanuel, who joined other Strongheart Fellows at what everyone now calls Strongheart House.

Charity, Grace, and Elizabeth stayed behind – we had more delays of various kinds – until finally …. TODAY.

Today just now – about five minutes from the time I started writing this – Charity, Elizabeth, and Grace walked through the front door of Strongheart House and into the arms of the beautiful Strongheart family.

Charity & Elizabeth, 2008

Their whole lives they’ve been identified as “refugees” – from the UN cards they carry to the signs identifying the camp where they lived. And now – that’s over. They have a new identity, one that comes from who they really are: STRONGHEARTS.

NOW I can breathe.

(If you want to become a part of our team, join our Circle of Mothers. We need as many “Moms” as we can get!)

This Piece of Truth & Beauty

“When all the words have been written, and all the phrases have been spoken, the great mystery of life will still remain….The world is a great mysterious place, and its possibilities are infinite, governed only by what our hearts can conceive. If we incline our hearts towards the darkness, we will see darkness. If we incline them toward the light, we will see the light.

Those of great heart have always known this. They have understood that, as honorable as it is to see the wrong and try to correct it, a life well lived must somehow celebrate the promise that life provides. The darkness at the limits of our knowledge; the darkness that sometimes seem to surround us is merely a way to make us reach beyond certainty, to make our lives a witness to hope, a testimony to possibility, an urge toward the best and the most honorable impulses that our hearts can conceive.

It is not hard. There is in each of us, no matter how humble, a capacity for love. Even if our lives have not taken the course we had envisioned, even if we are less than the shape of our dreams, we are part of the human family. Somewhere, in the most inconsequential corners of our lives, is the opportunity for love…. There is no tragedy or injustice so great, no life so small and inconsequential, that we cannot bear witness to the light in the quiet acts and hidden moments of our days.

And who can say which of these acts and moments will make a difference? The universe is vast and is a magical membrane of meaning, stretching across time and space, and it is not given to us to know her secrets and her ways. Perhaps we were placed here to meet the challenge of a single moment; perhaps the touch we give will cause the touch that will change the world.”

Kent Nerburn wrote this. It’s almost unbearably beautiful to me.

Remember the time…

…we hung out in Nigeria, built the school in Ghana, worked our a**es off in Liberia…and met all these beautiful people?

I feel like Emily in Our Town. The heartbreaking final scene:

“Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”

authentic adults

“The most potent seeds of cultural renaissance come from the uniquely creative ventures of authentic adults, those who have consciously discovered and committed to the one true life they can call their own, a life that emerges from the largest conversation one is capable of having with the world. All such adults are, by definition, true artists, visionaries, and leaders, whether they live and work quietly in small arenas or very publicly on grand stages.”

from www.animas.org

For My Strongheart Fellows.

“Your identity is not equivalent to your biography. There is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there’s a seamlessness in you – and where there is a confidence and a tranquility in you. And I think the intention of prayer, and spirituality, and love is now and again to visit that inner kind of sanctuary.”

Again, the beautiful John O’Donohue.