What Inspires me in Life by Kendyl A.
“WELCOME TO THAILAND!” the sign shouted its warm welcome at me in the airport of Bangkok, Thailand. It housed a photo of a tropical paradise with local’s bright, smiling faces. Seeing this sign left a hopeful excitement in my stomach as I anticipated this new adventure I was embarking on. This lighthearted feeling lingered with me as my team and I embarked on a long trek through the city to the safe house that we would be stationed at for the next four months. Our untroubled and carefree eyes soon realized the pain and heart break we would witness during our time there. We began to understand that behind Thailand’s beautiful beaches and smiling faces was the harsh reality of modern-day slavery. As we walked down the bar filled streets, women and children forced into prostitution would greet you with faces down casted in shame as they stood in glass windows, unclothed and vulnerable. The women each had a number branded on their arms saying that she was not a human being, but a piece of property. Instead of calling the fourteen year old child, Thom, by name; the hungry men and onlookers would growl “number 4” to satisfy their desire. Women and girls with their identity taken and replaced by a number was not uncommon in the streets of Thailand, nor were toddlers forced by their pimps to perform and sell roses to earn food for the day.
It was in the moments sitting in the bar with the girls as I learned their names and heard their stories, the moments of crying with my team as another woman left the safe house to go back into the red light district to provide for her family, the moments of giving ice cream to the little boy wearing a shirt down to his ankles selling roses; it was in these moments that I knew that I could not sit idly by and watch countless victims being forced into this ruthless system. My name is Kendyl Arden, and I am going to give a voice back to the victims trapped in sex slavery through my passion for cooking and for art.
For the past four years of my college career I have had this hope of one day opening up my own café and art center with a mission of relieving financial burdens off of safe houses around the world through the goods I am going to sell. Because of my trip to Thailand I knew that I wanted to help trafficked victims, but this desire to specifically relieve financial burdens off of safe houses was realized through seeing women in need of a safe place, and the willing owners of the safe home scrambling to make ends meet. As an eighteen year old fresh out of high school, with all of my graduation money put towards volunteering abroad, you could say I was not the most financially stable human being. My heart broke as I longed to do something more, but could only sit with fingers crossed and urgent prayers that the safe house would stay afloat. Since then I have looked into many other safe houses around the world hoping to volunteer again, but a common statement that I keep seeing is that they don’t need volunteers, they need financial donations. This trend that I was seeing led me to want to start a café and art center called Muse.
I chose this name because the word “muse” means; “a woman or a force that inspires an artist”. I am an artist, and the women that I met at the safe house and on the streets became my inspiration. I want to be an advocate for them and others trapped in modern day slavery, to me this is success. My vision is to start Muse in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Grand Rapids is ranked number four in the nation for the best places to start a business. Not only that, it has a large refugee population that I could provide services to such as English lessons, art lessons, and music lessons through the Muses’ art center.
When I think of the word success a lot of what it is not comes to mind. Success to me isn’t the typical American dream of owning a big home, a fancy car, and making millions. It isn’t constantly consuming goods and never giving back. To me success means to help other people in need and to give much of myself. There is a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson that says, “To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.” This is a simple pursuit, but a noble one. I truly believe that chasing after the American dream is empty and makes people unhappy more than anything. For me, success looks like bringing hope to other people and caring for their needs, not caring for my own. This is why I want to start a café and art center that focuses on helping victims of human trafficking.
Human Trafficking is something that weighs really heavily on me and it would be wrong of me to not act on this conviction. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.” The crime of not doing something is what pushes me to succeed. The hope of bringing freedom and changing a person’s life through food and art inspires me to push forward and turn this dream into a reality.
