Part 1: Awakening Within – Reconnecting with Formerly Imprisoned Women in Narok

Today, as I sat among the formerly imprisoned women at Narok, I found myself not just observing — but remembering.

I sat. I observed. I asked questions. I facilitated. I inspired. But deep within, something was stirring — a quiet awakening. I felt the weight of my own journey pressing gently on my chest. I saw myself in 2015, fresh out of prison, full of anger and unanswered questions. I remembered what it felt like to sit across from someone who had walked a similar path and made it — how that moment had sparked something in me.

And today, I became that someone for them.

This self-awareness workshop was never just about a session plan or activities. It was about mirrors — about helping women look inward and see beyond the scars, beyond the silence, beyond the shame. It was about asking, “Who am I beneath the weight of my past? Who do I get to become now?”

We shared reflections that were raw and deeply personal. We wrote words that hadn’t yet been spoken aloud. We laughed in between the heaviness. We cried when the memories cracked through. And as I facilitated, I was being facilitated too — led back to forgotten parts of myself that needed compassion, not judgment.

There’s something sacred about sitting with women who know what it means to lose their name and rebuild it from fragments. There is a language we speak without words. A knowing. A resilience. A softness we had to fight for.

As the session ended, I looked around that room and saw more than women who had survived incarceration. I saw women awakening. I saw possibility. And I silently prayed that each of them would hold onto this spark — and fan it into a flame that no system, no past, no voice of shame could ever extinguish.

Because today in Narok, healing didn’t whisper. It roared.