Let’s Bring These Girls Home

Jen Lemen with Odette’s daughters, Grace and Lilian, shot by Stephanie Roberts in Konombe, Rwanda

“You’re writing your story everyday,” she told me. “You just need to decide what happens next.” It was precisely what I needed to hear at that moment from my friend and Picture Hope partner, Jen Lemen. It reminded me that the act of living one’s life on purpose is nothing like reading and everything like writing. And the work of writing a story most often begins as a whisper or a quiet feeling of knowing from within. It may not make sense, but you just have to learn to let it guide you.

So when Jen called to tell me that she and our Rwandan-native friend Odette had decided it was time for her to leave home and join Odette’s daughters, Grace (age 15) and Lilian (age 12), and their guardian, (Odette’s brother Innocent) in their temporary housing situation in Uganda on a moment’s notice, I knew there was no need for my predictable dose of questions and analysis. “How long will you be gone?” I asked tentatively, knowing we had more than two handfulls of planning to prepare for our next Picture Hope commitment in Nepal.

“I don’t know… but I’m not coming back without them.”

So she went.

She went because Odette has been apart from her daughters for four long years, not by her plan or choice. She went because the girls need their mother. She went because Odette needs her girls.

After several years of hopeful wait littered with road blocks and wrong turns… and the most recent several weeks of unraveling red tape, triggering slow into action, plotting what-if scenarios, traveling dusty roads and crossing sketchy borders, texting on battery fumes, rubbing coins for food, and painting hopeful stories in the dim of a future that is to come for Odette’s young daughters… Jen will very soon guide Grace and Lilian into their mother’s arms here in the United States.

And this story, a story of Turikumwe (meaning “We are together.”), is one that must be written. I’m honored to be a witness and to document and share this experience for you as it unfolds, with Odette as my guide. I will join her on Saturday to help prepare for their arrival.

But we can’t do it without you. Please chip in to help us decide what happens next.