PROJECT DAWN
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In Project Dawn, women with three or more prostitution convictions--and no other criminal convictions--accept a final chance to rehabilitate themselves through the imperfect but stalwart Project Dawn Court’s intensive program. Sister Carol, an activist nun, has been called into court against her will.
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SISTER CAROL
Your Honor, if I inform on the women, they won’t attend the drop-in center and they will forego the small necessities we provide.
These women are victims of a culture that says it’s okay to use prostitutes. Songs, jokes, entertainment all say you can buy a person for sex, go ahead. No one is going to take that liberty from the man, the man must have the liberty to rob another of her liberty and humanity and dignity.
There are more slaves in the world now than at any point in history.
More than twenty million human souls are in bondage today. That is more than during what we think of as slave times. The Rahenga people have been expelled from Thailand, they are bought and sold – the boats that stored fish now store people. Some are sold for sex and some are sold for their labor.
Power over the weak enforced by brutality.
And we do not care. Our culture does not care.
Where is the rage?
I’m on this side of the fence, I don’t need to follow the process. We held some lovely anti-trafficking meetings in Philadelphia, “awareness raising activities,” but where is the underlying what I would call rage to say this has to stop?
I served thirty years as a nurse midwife in what we call developing countries, war torn societies: Beirut, Rwanda, Sierra Leone. When I returned to Philadelphia for what I thought was a retirement ministry, I found that the condition of our women here, physically, psychologically, even nutritionally is equal to what I saw there.
It is challenging and heartbreaking and makes you so angry at an affluent society that we have women and children on the streets.
I founded May’s Place. But May’s Place must have rules, and some souls are not ready for rules. They may never change. Yet they too deserve love and help. So I founded my drop-in center for women who are still on the street and need a respite, no questions asked. Comfort and dignity for a night, for an hour, in a world in which they are lost. And today you ask me to betray even that small privacy.
When I sit and break bread with women who are the outcasts of society, or when I comb a lady’s hair after she has bathed, that is my glance into the kingdom of god. That’s what it will be like in heaven. We will sit with our brothers and sisters and it won’t matter what they’ve done or where they’ve been.
I have served God for eighty years across this earth and still I fear I will die angry.
I have no interest in prosecuting women and unless you force me to do so I will not assist.
Your Honor, if I inform on the women, they won’t attend the drop-in center and they will forego the small necessities we provide.
These women are victims of a culture that says it’s okay to use prostitutes. Songs, jokes, entertainment all say you can buy a person for sex, go ahead. No one is going to take that liberty from the man, the man must have the liberty to rob another of her liberty and humanity and dignity.
There are more slaves in the world now than at any point in history.
More than twenty million human souls are in bondage today. That is more than during what we think of as slave times. The Rahenga people have been expelled from Thailand, they are bought and sold – the boats that stored fish now store people. Some are sold for sex and some are sold for their labor.
Power over the weak enforced by brutality.
And we do not care. Our culture does not care.
Where is the rage?
I’m on this side of the fence, I don’t need to follow the process. We held some lovely anti-trafficking meetings in Philadelphia, “awareness raising activities,” but where is the underlying what I would call rage to say this has to stop?
I served thirty years as a nurse midwife in what we call developing countries, war torn societies: Beirut, Rwanda, Sierra Leone. When I returned to Philadelphia for what I thought was a retirement ministry, I found that the condition of our women here, physically, psychologically, even nutritionally is equal to what I saw there.
It is challenging and heartbreaking and makes you so angry at an affluent society that we have women and children on the streets.
I founded May’s Place. But May’s Place must have rules, and some souls are not ready for rules. They may never change. Yet they too deserve love and help. So I founded my drop-in center for women who are still on the street and need a respite, no questions asked. Comfort and dignity for a night, for an hour, in a world in which they are lost. And today you ask me to betray even that small privacy.
When I sit and break bread with women who are the outcasts of society, or when I comb a lady’s hair after she has bathed, that is my glance into the kingdom of god. That’s what it will be like in heaven. We will sit with our brothers and sisters and it won’t matter what they’ve done or where they’ve been.
I have served God for eighty years across this earth and still I fear I will die angry.
I have no interest in prosecuting women and unless you force me to do so I will not assist.