As it turned out, she desperately wanted to tell her story, just not on camera, so she told it to me.

Last night was Isaiah House night and Marti had three professional volunteer cameramen set up in a store room, the garage and the dining room respectively to take private interviews of as many women as would be willing to participate. Marti’s genius was to have them focus their 3-5 minutes on one thing: tell a story of a time you made a difference in someone’s life. At Marti’s direction, she didn’t want superman stories, or “when I was on Meth and my children were drowning in the bathtub” stories. She wanted ordinary stories (“I helped an old woman across the street, I taught my child her ABC’s, etc”.) And her goal was not to get the story, but to get them in the story – “to where she can bring up a picture in her mind that she can emotionally step into and speak from.”

From early reports, it worked. There was not one interview that didn’t bring tears to the eyes of everyone involved including cameramen… good tears, I am told. And every one of the participants came out of their interview beaming, and thanking everyone for the opportunity to experience their story. Why wouldn’t they? Marti went on a treasure hunt and found a gold mine.

While the interviews were going on, I wandered around the patio hearing the stories of those who were considering participating. What I found was that their eagerness to talk defied their hesitation to go in front of a camera. Twice, I heard stories from women who had just insisted they had nothing to say. I found myself wishing for an invisible camera until I realized I could be one if I listened carefully enough.

On one occasion, I had been talking to two women who said they were choosing not to be interviewed when Marti walked up, took one of them by the hand and said, “Ready?” and they were gone.

“How does she do that?” I asked her friend.

“There’s a certain vulnerability Marti has that makes you open up to her,” she said, “and then she’s got you.”

So I sat down next to her as she took up a ball of tangled yarn her friend had been working on and deftly untangled it as if she’d done it a thousand times before while launching into her own story of a time she taught a six-year-old girl in a housing project how to sew on buttons. Soon she was lost in the little girl’s excitement to learn and the details of exactly how she taught her. She told the story as if she had permanently altered this little girl’s life. Then she stopped and stared off. “She’s 23 years old now.”

This woman would not be on camera, at least this time, but she still got the benefit of finding value in her life. In the end, it really didn’t matter if you were on camera or off, if the story was there, it was told to someone.