All of the names have been changed.

“My name is Molly Reichert, R-E-I-C-H-E-R-T,” she told us, and the nurse. You could get drunk from just being near her uneven breathing, that's what the nurse told me once she was out of the room. But I was too young and too naive to recognize that, despite semi-debaucherous teen years. Throughout my Senior year of high school and the following summer, mine was the disobedience of sneaking small amounts of alcohol out of my dad's liquor shelf. Half-filling water bottles with gin and vodka so that my thievery might go unnoticed were I to run into my father as I passed through the kitchen, I would run from where he kept the bottles in the basement to my bedroom closet.  I would nervously store my nabbed goods until there was a bonfire at a friend's house or a road trip to the beach.

I thought I was very rebellious. It turned out boys had a respect for girls who could drink hard liquor, or at least found us more interesting. I fancied myself dangerous, the delinquent you'd never expect, the one who could get away with it for that very reason. It seemed like Molly had never gotten away with anything, no matter how far or hard she ran.

She's originally from Wyoming. Came to New York City for God knows why. I'm still not sure why we were designed to meet, but I know that it changed me and that I've always been curious if it changed her, too, no matter how insignificantly. This is how it was.

The Spring of my Junior year in college, I decided to join a mission team to New York City. There were several teams of people sacrificing their Spring Break to do good works in various locations on the East Coast. It seemed to me to be an okay way to meet people, albeit a slightly awkward one. Step one: go to a large meeting. Step two: get assigned to a small group of people with whom you have avoided eye contact for three years. Step three: share a small van, a small dorm area, one week, and intense group dynamics with these people. My group was five freshmen and two or three upperclassmen, including myself. We took advantage of the planned get-to-know-you pre-trip meetings and bonded accordingly. Even more so on the trip up to the city in a fifteen passenger van that (eep!) our eighteen year-old team leader drove. And the final bonding stage occurred when we got to our host organization and shared the living space and mealtimes with what we considered to be evangelical fundamentalist crackpots from another college. In reality, I'm sure they were very nice people. To us, they were the antithesis of our liberal Christian college mentality and as a group we found endless ways to ridicule their close minded attitudes regarding philosophy, science, and society.

My teammates and I spent our days going to various non-profits in the city and volunteering. Cleaning, cooking, serving food, experiencing, learning, opening up to each other and the people we worked with. In the afternoons we went to the projects and volunteered with kids in an after-school program that was grim - except for the kids themselves. Contrary to my expectations, I liked the kids. They came from a lot of different ethnic backgrounds and at their age, they were unconscious conduits of culture to their peers. And to me as well.  I loved being among the children, I think because it was so wholly different than my suburban elementary education. So many different cultures in one place, in the middle of the city that's at the center of the whole world...it was overwhelming and awesome and so evident in these kids. I missed the last afternoon, though, and I hope they didn't think it was because I suddenly didn't want to be there. I had just suddenly met Molly.

On this last morning, we were at the last soup kitchen and it ended up having the most interesting people behind the serving line. The theory was to have people seated and to serve them on trays, attempting more restaurant-style than poverty-style. I got behind it wholeheartedly, it suited my holistic notions of feeding a person emotionally, not just physically. It was a crazy few hours with a few rotations of guests and I had a lot of fun shouting and being shouted at, moving fast and for goodness' sake, no one gets extra crackers for their soup! When it was all over, we took photos with the staff, everyone wearing hairnets and staticky, white plastic aprons. We wiped down tables, flipped them, knocked in their legs and then stacked chairs, too. At the end of it all, as we were preparing to leave, there was a small knot of people off to one side, guests and staff, around a girl.

How old was she? I ask myself that now. I think I've perhaps reached her age. She couldn't have been more than her late twenties, I think, but could you really tell once drugs had leeched the love of her own self from her skin? She was hunched over, sitting cross legged on the floor and the people standing above her offering her words of encouragement, pats on the back, and nervous glances at one another. A few members of my team and I walked over with some trepidation. It seemed like she was not in a good place. She kept saying, “They took my baby. He took my baby.” She started crying, sobbing, and the words became a wail. “He took my babyyyyy! What am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to do?”

This was beyond a group of college kids. She was in an altered state, to put it delicately. We, too, looked at each other nervously. It was time to get going. To my lasting shame, I did not decide to reach out to Molly in that moment of our departure. It was a freshmen, Liz, who approached her and knelt to hug her. She pulled away, patted her back, and looked at me helplessly. So I did what felt natural, a way to end the scene and show solidarity not with Molly, but with Liz and her brave compassion. I went and hugged Molly, too, murmuring, “It'll be okay.”

It wasn't true. It wasn't going to be okay. I couldn't promise that. I was thus totally startled when Molly responded and wrapped her arms around me. She started crying harder and clung to me like she had been drowning and someone had thrown her a lifeline, me. So I did what was natural, again, and held her tighter. Molly has long, big wavy blondish-brown hair and it smelled terrible, but I buried my face in it and stroked her hair and tried to say comforting things. I tried not to cry, but failed. Her distress in that moment became my own and the melding of spirit was total.

I was confused and scared, I didn't know what to do to make things right for Molly. We were at a church and she wanted to smoke, so we went outside and I sat with her while she smoked. Eventually, Liz and our team leader came outside. A decision had to be made about who was going where this afternoon. Liz said she wanted to stay with Molly and I said I did, too. Our team leader said he would stay with us since the others knew how to navigate to the after school program in the projects by themselves. Molly wanted to use the phone, so we got her some change for a payphone. Molly needed clean clothes, so we got her some from the church's clothing donation bins and Liz and I helped her change in a bathroom. Molly said she wanted to meet with the pastor, so we met with the pastor and we prayed over her. She was shaking. Withdrawal or the Holy Spirit or both or neither. She said she wanted to be clean, to be sober, to get her baby back. The three of us kids and Molly and the Pastor got in a van and he dropped us off at the nearest hospital.

“My name is Molly Reichert, R-E-I-C-H-E-R-T.” The four of us had been hours in the emergency room, waiting for a bed for Molly. The nurse was not one to bet money on starry-eyed college dreamers who were going to fix the world, starting with our friend, here. Molly would stray outside for a smoke until our team leader hid her cigarettes. She would get distraught, paranoid, angry, teary, heart-wrenchingly sad, and sorry. Once she was in a hospital gown and had an IV drip, she quieted down and even slept some. She woke up and demanded food, so we got her a sandwich. She slept some more. Five hours after I met Molly, I was talking with a security guard at the hospital. “She's here now,” he said, “and as long as she's checked in here, she's not getting out past me.” It had ended for us, then. Weary, we got on the subway back to our host organization in the Bronx. The guard had given us an out, and we took it.

I haven't been out, though. “...Molly Reichert, R-E-I-C-H-E-R-T.” In the last four years I've Googled her name a few times, comma, Wyoming. She shows up back in Wyoming local newspapers, in and out of county jails. I don't know how she got back there, but I can't help but feel relieved. The vibrancy and resiliency of the children in the after-school program is juxtaposed with a maelstrom of urban poverty and cycles that don't break. Maybe Wyoming isn't a good place to be for Molly, but I know there was something absolutely dark in the city that was swallowing her whole.

Molly was the first woman in trouble that I met randomly. Since then, I met Aliyah in the airport and Katherine through work. All three have a common “him”, a shadowy man who has caused serious damage. And all three seem paralyzed, unable or unwilling to make a move to help themselves.  As a Peace Corps Volunteer, I've met women in developing nations who are second class citizens and somehow, when people say, “It's cultural,” it almost becomes okay. There's a numbing effect in numbers. When millions of women are treated as little more than vacuums for abuse and wombs to fill with children, when men assert that might is right, when women accept that they do not belong unto themselves, it is a mistaken opinion that this is acceptable - regardless of how commonplace these sentiments may be.

Similarly, and to no less detriment, there are women in the developed world who are drawn into these unhealthy standards of existence. It is subsidized by a modern culture that yet has deep roots in class distinctions between men and women. While it may not reach the overt, epidemic proportions of the developing world, the answer to this problem remains the same: It is imperative that women be educated to take ownership of themselves. It is a necessity that we create a world that allows this education to have a practical expression. That is my fervent desire for Molly, that, “He took my baby,” will one day become, “I have a family that cherishes me and whom I cherish.” That Aliyah's bruises, the ones deeper than her skin, will heal when she says, “That's not love.” That Katherine will experience self-nurturing, a certainty of her own completeness that renders a discerning choice of a worthy life partner.

I have no idea how to do it. But I'll spend a lifetime trying to.