Freedom Companies

“From Slavery making bricks to Freedom making dresses”.

FREEDOM FASHIONS

In winter 2020-2021, we met SANA in a brick yard where she had been born 20 years earlier. Like generations of girls before her, she would have grown old making a few million bricks. I asked what her dream was.

Sana

I asked Sana what she dreamed of doing if she was free. She pondered a few seconds while her eyes looked straight at rows of bricks, reaching to the horizon of her world, the lifetime ‘achievement” of her Grandfather’s and Uncle’s large family, in grueling debt bondage that put her mother in the brick yard grave. After curing in the sun for several days, they are lowered into a massive furnace, the size of a European football field, and if it rains before, the families’ low pay would be cut in half. She squinted not from the brickyard bright, bare sun this time, for no one from the outside world had ever asked her what she wanted to be. She answered ( through Shaffaf interpreting) ; “I would want to sew cloth, (a dress maker).” Millions of girls in generational bonded labor have such a dream.

In this short video We meet Sana in the brick yard , where she spends her life making bricks. And Wendell asks what her dream is.

A boyhood friend, Mark Christiansen, who had been tracking with me in Pakistan, one day called and said; “Phil, a girl in one of your videos was telling you her dream of being a dress maker. How can we make that happen; LET’S MAKE THAT HAPPEN!”

Mark and I had won a three legged race when we were boys in the Awana Church Olympics, and now, 55 years later another three legged race from the USA to Pakistan has us running again in sync.

Sana, the 20 year old gal who Mark Christiansen heard in the video above telling her dream if ever freed from her Brick Yard; “Sewing dresses”. Mark went on to have the ‘Freedom House’ built, where Sana and her cousin, Sonia having been trained, are now training other freed girls, along with poor villagers in dress making.

Sonia

Once ‘Freedom House’ was built, the first two sisters then trained the second two freed sisters, Misha and Minisha in design and sewing, in the peaceful village of Fetah Puhr in Pakistan.

The building of Freedom House in Fateh Pur Pakistan

Putting Smiles on Faces

Misha and Minisha after their freedom, on their first day to be trained in Freedom House and Freedom Fashions.

Before their freedom from making bricks in inclement climates to sewing clothing in comfort.

It was a cold day in their brick yard, their young lives robbed of education, laboring in 110 degree heat in summer, hands and feet cold and wet in winter. Their father had passed away 7 years earlier when the two sisters and two brothers were small. Two years later after their ransom from hell was paid to their brick master for their freedom, every day after school they stopped by Freedom House, to be trained in making garments.