DESCRIPTION:
My parents worked for the government and we lived a very privileged life with a big house and materialistic comforts. One of my favorite things as a child was to leave the gated area of my neighborhood and play with my friends running through the village. ​We made up crazy games and ran around climbing trees just being free. Sometimes while we were playing and running around, one of the boys in our group would freeze and point when he saw a butterfly and without saying anything we would run around trying to capture the butterfly in anything we had available. Once we caught the butterfly, he would place it in a jar he had tied to string and yell for his sister. She would poke her head out of the window, pull the butterfly up, and smile down at us. It was the only time she smiled. It was not until later in the war that I discovered that her father had kept her in the room and prostituted her out. She became so numb to having her body used that when the soldiers came and publicly raped her in the street, a common occurence, her lack of a reaction scared the rebel soldiers. When I think of her, I think of her smile. I wrote Butterfly Girl to acknowledge her painful story but to highlight the ability of a brother's love and the beauty that exists in nature to bring a smile to a broken soul.