She looked small for 13 and hid herself away in a cardigan worn like a cape. It was sticky in the room, even for January, a particularly damp month in the Philippines . She reached for my hand as she told her story, while Cecilia Oebanda-Pacis — the founder and director of this tucked-away refuge — translated from Tagalog as she spoke. We were sitting in a circle of 30 girls at a campus hidden high in the mountains. There were girls on either side of me as young as five, waiting to tell their stories. But Arianna, as we’ll call her, needed to speak first. Her past was practically punching its way out of her.

“Before I came here…when I was 11,” she began, “I had a baby from my grandfather…”

She wore a smile when she started — a willed expression of strength — and held it till she burst

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