Portrait of a Costa Rican Prostitue

Her name is Yamileth and she is no longer a prostitute.

But she was.  For 41 years she worked the streets, starting when she was 13 and needed to support a drug habit.  She's 54 now; has had eight children, and spent 35 years living on the streets, turning to crime and prostitution so she could buy drugs.

But since coming to the Rahab foundation several years ago, she's gotten off drugs, has become a Christian and is going to church, and for the last four years she hasn't had to sell herself once.

I've talked about the Rahab foundation before, but I wanted to give you a picture -- even just a brief one -- of the sorts of work they're doing; the sorts of lives they're changing.

There are also Lady and Evelyn and Jasmin and a half dozen other happy women and their children whom I've met at Rahab:  whose lives have been changed and whose stories I don't know yet.  They are one of my biggest incentives for learning Spanish, actually.  I want to know these women, know what they've come from, to see the world, even briefly, through their eyes.  If they can find so much joy in life, there is certainly hope for the rest of us.