Paper Beads

There are women from Rwanda and Uganda on my doorstep... selling paper beads. There is a trash.. and a treasure.. and oh, yes, a woman is feeding her child today. There is music and laughter and flowers and a band is playing a merry old tune. And they roll faster now. And then they lacquer them and paint them; that's if the colours from the magazine aren't looking so good.

Choice, she said. I came here by choice, when I asked her why she came to Australia and there is silence between us. I can see the women on the floor, sitting in a circle, different to the way we do things here. I observe the 'don't go near my pain' in her eyes; the defiant way she tells me she came here by choice and I honour that. I try to honour it as I feel what I feel and can't deny it. Still, she is here; she is safe, she is beautiful and she wears lots of colour. She brings colour to my process today.

As I sit in my room in my space I am thinking about the missionary. The woman I spoke to earlier from the church I had been taught to reject. The other side of the coin, or the same side, I'm not sure. Funny I should meet them both on the same day. We work with them, she told me. We want people to value them like people value diamonds.

There is a woman in this necklace. And a child. A child who is laughing with the fullness of food. A mother whose eyes shine bright.

And there are women in a circle rolling beads. And a white lady from the church who brings them here. And a woman from Rwanda too.

I am in my middle class suburb in Sydney, safe as chips. I am hosting this party today.