by Sara Shahriari, The Guardian, UK – Honoria lives on the edge of Cochabamba, a city in central Bolivia, in a small adobe house on the side of a dusty hill. When she decided to leave her abusive husband after 11 years together, she faced a series of obstacles. She didn’t have money to hire a lawyer and had difficulty understanding legal documents in Spanish – she is more comfortable using her local language, Quechua. She worried she would lose her house, and wondered if she’d get child support.
That’s when one of her neighbours, who had trained as a community educator with the Voces Libres Foundation, stepped in. The neighbour brought Honoria to the organisation’s centre for legal aid and shelter for abused women in Cochabamba. Today, Honoria still has her house and her children, and is a community educator herself.
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