As we talk, Saji wraps her fingers around the loose end of her neatly braided hair. Her voice is gentle and every now and then a radiant smile lights up her face and her earrings shake as she speaks.

Rebel, combat, violence, rifle are perhaps the last words I can possibly associate with her.

“I remember that day”
Saji was only 14 when she joined an armed group to save her family.

“I remember that day,” she says, “They (the group) had come for my brother and seeing his condition had threatened my parents that they would be arrested and never be able to see us again, if someone didn’t join them by evening.”

“‘I’ll join’ I said. I couldn’t allow my parents to be arrested. My family needed them.”

“One of the first things they do after you join is cut your hair really short,” she tells me. “I cried so hard that day. For us girls, hair is a mark of beauty and we take such care of it.”

Saji made new friends at the camp but the girlish chats that used to consist of ‘she has beautiful hair’ and ‘I like your earrings’ were replaced with ‘she can shoot really well’ and ‘were our camps attacked?’

Short Hair Shouts “Rebel!”
A couple of years later Saji’s camp was attacked. The group scattered and she returned home.

 “I wanted to start my life over,” she says. So she returned to school.

But wherever she went her short hair confirmed she had been a member of an armed group. Her village community looked at her with suspicion and children in her school didn’t want to associate with her.

The once hardy combatant left school and stayed at home, in hiding—waiting for her hair to grow. But feelings of rejection and despair grew faster than Saji’s hair.

When World Vision counsellors working with the Vulnerable Girl Child Project reached out to her, Saji was on the verge of ending her life. But the counsellors did not give up. Soon—along with over 30 girls from her community—she was taking part in activities run by the project.

Growing Vegetables and Hope
“The first thing I learnt from the project was home gardening,” smiles Saji, “I was so excited the day I learnt about making vegetable patches that I came home and prepared the garden immediately for planting.”

As her garden grew, Saji’s hair grew also and along with it, her confidence.

“I felt so happy when my mother made the first curry with the vegetables I had grown. It was so tasty,”

She made new friends too and their conversations changed to ‘I want to be…’, ‘It is so easy to make’ and ‘What do you grow in your garden?’

Saji hopes to start her own business one day. She has other dreams too, “I hope to fall in love, get married and build a good family,” she blushes as she tucks behind her ear a strand of hair that escaped her braid.

The Vulnerable Girl Child Project
The Vulnerable Girl Child Project, funded by World Vision Canada focuses on the wellbeing of adolescent girls between the ages of 15 and 20 years. The project aims to empower adolescent girls and increase their social, economic and socio-cultural status through its many activities. Activities include counseling, gender awareness, healthy nutrition, child and women’s rights, life skills, vocational training and more.

In the six areas in Sri Lanka where the project is implemented, communities have seen a decrease in early marriage and an increase in employment opportunities.

Help girls at risk in the developing world.