A mother in a tiny house in Delhi cares for her daughter who has brain cancer, arranging a blanket and adjusting pillows in an effort to make her more comfortable. In another part of the city, a young Muslim woman sits at her sewing machine, rubbing her back to ease the pain that doesn’t seem to go away. Across the world, in an elementary school on the New Mexico Navajo Nation, a second-grade girls tries to focus on what the teacher is saying while she worries about her grandfather’s illness. Difficult, challenging life circumstances rooted in longstanding inequities.

The Storydancer Project is not trying to change these outer circumstances. Yet, when Zuleikha comes to the house of the mother in Delhi with the CanSupport Home Care Team, and shows her how to ease her daughter’s headaches with a daily exercise, an inner circumstance is altered. The territory becomes navigable.

And when the young woman at the Hope Project’s Vocational Cutting & Tailoring program learns from the TSP-trained staff member how to sit in a healthier way at her machine and take small breaks with movement throughout her day, another new road is charted.

When Amy Becenti, facilitator of TSP’s program for Navajo schools, arrives in the second-grade classroom in her colorful coat and sets up the day’s story on the music stand, the little girl feels hopeful. When she learns the Navajo word for butterfly, she works hard to remember it so she can take it home to tell her grandfather, and show him the exercises she has practiced.

TSP is changing the way that people move through their daily lives, one step at a time. The openness to look forward is made of these moments—small, joyful steps on new roads home.

by Susan Skeele, Team TSP