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There are all sorts of reasons why your company may decide to relocate you. Maybe it’s a promotion too good to turn down. Maybe there’s a new office opening, or operations are being consolidated. Or, maybe you’re being relocated to save your life. Literally.
There’s a World Vision staffer in India - let’s call her Anna, since it’s too risky to use her real name. Anna has been with World Vision for many years, and had risen to a position of leadership in the rural community where she was based. When you pause to remember that World Vision’s goal is to help children and families and communities become healthy and self-sustaining, you can imagine Anna’s commitment to this place, the relationships built over so much time and labor. There should have been a happy ending to this story for Anna. She should have one day soon celebrated what World Vision calls a “closing” – the community at last able to stand on its own . Instead, Anna was forced to take her infant and flee, leaving behind her husband and her home, and the work of more than a decade.
Part of Anna’s work with World Vision involved counseling and education on HIV/AIDS. The disease has spread throughout the poverty-stricken of Indian largely unchecked. Anna explained that tribal sexual practices played a role, along with the taboo against speaking openly about sex, and of course, always against the backdrop of the appalling devaluation of women and girls. Anna was used to receiving visitors at her home, villagers with HIV/AIDS who were only willing to be counseled or treated so long as their anonymity was protected. So a knock on the door late in the evening wasn’t unusual. It was part of the job.
One evening Anna was home alone with her baby when a man appeared on her doorstep. She invited him in, assuming he needed help or advice. He said to her – in what she described as a soft, pleasant, utterly calm manner – “I have something for you and your husband.” He dropped a small parcel into her hand and turned to leave. She unwrapped it to find two bullets. “One for each of you”, he said. And then he was gone.
Here’s where Anna’s story gets crazy. Through some twisted misunderstanding, motivated by politics and driven by suspicion and contempt of a woman in a leadership role, a powerful man in the village decided that Anna was somehow responsible for the misappropriation of funds. He claimed that Anna had diverted funds meant for World Vision. But remember, Anna in that place was World Vision. There wasn’t a scrap of evidence to support his claim. It was a complete fiction, a joke, almost. Except there wasn’t anything funny about his intentions. The bullets delivered to her home were no empty threat. He had singled Anna out as a target, and she would be made an example. Her choices narrowed to two: stay and risk her life, or leave and try to start over.
Forced to relocate, Anna was fortunate to find a different position with World Vision in another part of the country. The move was swift, with little time for planning. Her husband plans to follow, hopefully within the next three months. In the meantime, her unemployed brother joined her in her new city to help care for her child and to offer her what protection he can. Housing is very expensive in the urban centers, which means a two-hour bus ride to work each way. She hasn’t seen her husband since the move. The distance and the difficulty traveling are just too great. I asked her if she was afraid that simply going away wasn’t enough, that she could be found and killed anyway. She shrugged. “I don’t think so, but I don’t know, of course. I think my leaving is enough. It was like my defeat, and they know I’m afraid. But I think that God brought this into my life for some purpose. My husband and I, we accept that.”
If you saw Anna on the street, you’d never guess her story. What’s amazing is that she has the courage to live it, and to tell it, so that other women won’t have to share it.
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