Today, our focus was on the aid and development of young women who have been abused or who have self esteem issues. While we expected to have heavy-handed conversations with these women, our time with them proved to be much more lighthearted and enjoyable. We ended up receiving self defense lessons from the girls and a man named Saldra who had 22 years of experience in martial arts. We we were all taken aback by the ferocity of the girls.

In a group perspective, it was a productive day. We all had adequate participation in the day’s activities; all of us were sweaty and laughing by the time our lessons were over. On a more serious note, it was satisfying to see that the same women who had tortured pasts could now defend themselves and now had bright futures and genuine smiles. Today was different, rather than experiencing situations worse than our own, we saw improvement of these situations among those who actually live them.