“The poorest person is he whose only wealth is money.”
-Our Daily Bread Devotional

SUPER BABAE
Laura Joyce Davis

Sweltering smog. People who avoid walking at any cost. The mindset that fitness is a luxury for the rich. A group of women from poor circumstances who haven’t had so much as a gym class since dropping out of high school. How is this possibly the recipe for a successful fitness club? The story of Super Babae (Tagalog for “Super Woman”), however, is a story of the life-giving, healing power of exercise—-and the effectiveness of a well-placed donation.

In 2009, I was a burned-out track-and-field coach at Mills College in California, preparing to leave my job and take a year off to write a book about human trafficking in the Philippines as a Fulbright researcher, and volunteer at Samaritana. While my main project was going to be writing, I also wanted to use my coaching experience, if possible, to benefit these women who have been through barely-imaginable suffering. I had seen how running had helped athletes at Mills to work through physical and emotional challenges, but would it translate? And how could these women work out in pants and flip-flops? It was with great joy and excitement that I learned that Nike would donate $1,000 in equipment to help get Super Babae to the starting line. For the past four years at Mills College, I’ve seen the smiles on my teams’ faces as they try on their new uniforms for the first time. But when the Samaritana women—most of whom had never touched anything like a Dri-fit shirt—geared up and tried on their running shoes, their beaming faces of near-disbelief touched the core of what I love about coaching. Would the smiles stop, though, when they started sweating?

I can happily report that the answer is no. Three mornings a week we rotate through yoga, strength training, and jogging (once around the block to start!), and each meeting is filled with giggles, the awkwardness yet camaraderie of learning new movements, and the natural boost in energy and mood that comes with working out. In addition to these morning exercise sessions, we meet once a month to talk about how success in fitness can lead to success in life. The women are setting goals, mastering the exercises, and slowly beginning to understand how fitness can empower them. My hope for Super Babae is that it becomes another important component for helping the women heal, reclaim bodies that have suffered abuse in the past, and become leaders in their community.

In God's Chains
Maria Theresa Aboga Gayares

When I joined Samaritana years ago, it was clear that this NGO aims to build a safe environment for vulnerable women and survivors of prostitution. We aim to be a community that supports these women to live a life with dignity and respect, and to model and empower communities that embrace rather than ridicule these women, and support them through their transformation. Each day that I meet them, I am in awe at how God singles out each of them as unique, special and significant in His eyes in spite of who she thinks she is. The painful reality where she grew up, the poverty that wakes her up in the morning, the chaotic relationships she has, are but few of the strands in the complex web that entangles the lives of each woman who comes here. My heart bleeds as a woman tells how she was abandoned by her mother who then started a new family. She burns in anger as she saw her mother caring for her other children with a love she never experienced. But then, she shrugs her shoulders and just does not care anymore. In all of our hearts, there is that deep longing for intimacy, to be near or close to someone. It is an intimacy that we start learning from the nurturing arms of the people who brought us into this world, a desire that grows as we learn to trust the people around us.

But what if we have received painful words and deeds instead? How do we fill the aching vacuum inside? As we see with the women who come here, we attempt to strategize, control, and protect against being vulnerable again; we project an image that we want others to see. But inside, our wounds compound the fallen nature we inherited from Adam and Eve. This deep mistrust of God was in their hearts as they believed that God was holding out something good. Even today, we too often believe that there are ways to find fulfillment without having to trust anyone, especially God. This wall of mistrust we all create for self-protection makes our work at Samaritana difficult. The women we serve struggle to believe that helpers are not awaiting payback. We offer counsel they seem to agree with, but then they often go out and do otherwise. They often perceive discipline as punishment, rules as bondage, and regulations as oppression.

So why do we staff, volunteers and supporters continue doing what we do at Samaritana? Are we caregivers spared from hurt? Are we more sanctified, so we heal better from the slashes of our own past? We survive in service because God uses us not because of, but in spite of who we are. It may not show as clearly in our bodies or minds, but we are as wounded as the women we serve. We have our own daily concerns, family problems, financial difficulties and more. However, we do not allow these to hinder us from doing our small part in letting others know that there is healing in this life, and hope for the next. By grace we continue serving God here, since God loved us and wants this love to be known to these women, so that they can minister in turn. It is a chain that must never be broken. A chain of love that God started, and in which each Christian is a link.