There will be moments during the challenge when the course instructor stops a sister and issues a penalty. Perhaps she has skipped an obstacle, arrived at a waypoint late, fallen too far behind the pace, or left a teammate struggling alone.
Perhaps the penalty arrives for no clear reason at all — arbitrarily assigned by someone she has only just met, reflecting nothing she has done wrong, echoing the senseless encounters that refugees face at borders and checkpoints: the demand for a bribe that was never mentioned, the criminalisation of a journey undertaken only because staying was impossible, the refusal of passage that carries no explanation because no explanation is felt to be owed.
Your role in these moments is not to penalise but to interpret. You are the person the sisters know and trust, standing alongside them as a stranger with authority over their passage makes demands that may feel bewildering or unfair. You are a companion and a guide, helping them understand not just what is happening but why it matters that it is happening in precisely this way.
What arbitrariness teaches
Spend a moment, before the day begins, considering what it means to be stopped for no reason. To be told you must do something you did not anticipate, without explanation, by someone who holds authority over your passage and feels no obligation to justify it.
Refugees know this experience intimately: the border guard who waves others through but singles them out, the official who demands payment for a form that should be free, the detention that arrives without warning and ends without apology. The rules, such as they are, apply unevenly and without mercy.
The instructor’s penalties can carry something of this texture, and the fact that the instructor is a stranger makes it more honest, not less. When the person stopping your sister is someone she has no relationship with, someone who does not know her name or her story, the echo of arbitrary authority becomes more authentic. Not harshly — never harshly — but honestly.
When a sister is stopped at a checkpoint and told she must complete twenty squats before she may continue, without being told why, something registers that a lecture never could. The slight indignation, the flash of but I’ve done nothing wrong, the quiet resignation as she begins: these are small, manageable echoes of feelings that refugees carry at enormous, unmanageable scale. Your role is to stand near her as this happens, and to help her name it afterwards.
The penalties themselves
The instructor will draw on a range of penalties designed to add discomfort without causing distress, in the spirit of a PE lesson rather than anything more severe. Press-ups, sit-ups, squats, and the plank are reliable tools: physical, costing something, but costing only effort and briefly aching muscles.
They are familiar enough not to frighten, demanding enough to matter. Ten press-ups at a checkpoint, completed on muddy hands whilst waterlogged fabric pulls at shoulders, is a different proposition to ten press-ups in a gym. The obstacle course has already done its work; the penalty only needs to add a small, purposeful weight.
Repeating an obstacle is another option the instructor may deploy, particularly when a sister has clearly rushed through or skirted what it requires. There is something honest about this: the obstacle does not disappear simply because she found it inconvenient. Neither do the circumstances refugees face.
And then there is the mud. A smear across the forehead or cheeks, applied matter-of-factly and without cruelty, carries its own gentle symbolism on a day already defined by mud. It marks rather than punishes. It adds to the story the day is writing on her without adding genuine pain.
You do not control which penalties are issued or when. What you control is how the sisters receive and understand them, and this is no small thing.
Arbitrary penalties, honestly explained
Some penalties the instructor assigns for clear reasons: the skipped obstacle, the abandoned teammate, the checkpoint arrived at too late. These are straightforward enough to understand, even if the sister receiving them protests mildly.
Others will arrive without explanation, or with only the barest gesture toward one. These deserve a word of framing from you at the start of the day, before anyone has experienced them, so they are not bewildering when they arrive.
You might say simply: “Some of what happens today will feel unfair. Some penalties will come without obvious reason from people you don’t know. This is part of what we’re exploring together.” That single sentence transforms arbitrary authority from something potentially distressing into something anticipated and purposeful, without diminishing the moment when it arrives.
When a sister is penalised arbitrarily, watch her face. What you are likely to see, in quick succession, is surprise, indignation, something like resignation, and then, if the day has done its work, a flicker of recognition. Sit with her briefly in that recognition if you can. A quiet word — “that felt unfair, didn’t it?” — is enough. You do not need to labour the teaching. She is already understanding something important.
The abandoned teammate
Of all the reasons an instructor might issue a penalty, reserve your most serious pastoral attention for the moment when a sister is penalised for leaving a teammate behind. This can happen easily and without malice: she finds her own rhythm, moves ahead, loses track of where the others are. But the effect is the same whether intended or not, and it matters.
Refugees rarely travel alone by choice. The bonds formed between people making dangerous journeys together are among the most profound human connections imaginable. To leave someone behind, or to find oneself left, is one of displacement’s cruelest dimensions. This challenge is, among other things, a lesson in solidarity, and solidarity is not only about enduring together when it is easy.
When the instructor penalises a sister for leaving a teammate behind, come alongside her gently and without adding shame to what the penalty has already communicated. She is not a bad person. She did a very human thing. Help her notice that the instinct to move ahead, to preserve one’s own pace, to let someone else manage, is powerful and recognisable — and that noticing it is the beginning of choosing differently.
When sisters resist
Some sisters will accept penalties with good grace, even laughter. Others will bristle, particularly at arbitrary ones. A flash of genuine indignation is not a problem; it is actually the response the experience is designed to produce, because it means something has been felt rather than merely observed.
What you are watching for is the sister who becomes genuinely distressed, who feels humiliated rather than challenged, whose spirit is being diminished rather than tested. If you see this, move quickly to her side. A quiet word, a steady presence, a gentle reframe: “You’ve done nothing wrong. This is part of what today is teaching us.” The instructor’s role is to issue the penalty; your role is to ensure no sister is left alone inside it.
It also helps to remember that the instructor, though a stranger to the sisters, is a professional who understands the parameters of the day. The penalties are designed to sit within a range of mild discomfort, not to wound. If you ever feel a penalty has crossed a line, you have both the right and the responsibility to say so quietly to the instructor. You are not undermining the experience by protecting the sisters in your care. You are fulfilling it.
What the role teaches you
There is something this position — standing alongside sisters as they receive penalties you did not issue and cannot override — will teach you that no amount of reflection beforehand can fully prepare you for.
It is uncomfortable to watch someone you care about being stopped by a stranger and made to complete a physical task in the cold and mud, particularly when the reason given is thin or absent entirely. You may feel the urge to intervene, to explain, to soften the moment past the point of usefulness.
Resist this, gently. The discomfort you feel watching a sister submit to arbitrary authority is not unlike the discomfort a refugee advocate feels when confronting systems that punish people for the simple act of seeking safety. The inability to make it fair, the necessity of bearing witness to frameworks that do not always make sense: these are not abstractions. They are the lived texture of the work.
Stay close. Stay calm. Be the steady presence that allows the moment to do its teaching without tipping into distress. Know that the mild discomfort the sisters are being asked to endure is purposeful, that something real is being opened in them, that the sister completing her squats in the mud whilst a stranger watches is not diminished by it but is, in some small and real way, honouring the experiences of women who face far greater demands with far less choice about whether to comply.
The day’s accumulated weight
By the time the challenge nears its end, each sister will have accumulated her own small history of penalties: the ones she understood, the ones that felt unfair, perhaps one she brought on herself by moving ahead without looking back.
Together these make up something more than a series of inconveniences. They form a pattern that resembles, in miniature, the experience of navigating systems that do not account for you, of persisting through demands you did not ask for, of continuing anyway because what waits at the end matters more than the cost of the journey.
This is what the day builds, penalty by penalty, checkpoint by checkpoint. Not a catalogue of grievances, but a body of experience that opens onto understanding. The sisters who finish having been stopped, made to repeat, asked to hold a position in the cold until muscles burn, will know something in their bodies that they did not know before. And knowing things in the body is, as the challenge teaches throughout, the beginning of empathy that lasts.
