May 4th, 2023
I have been holding this story for a few months, trying to decide if I can print it. All our MAP moms have a tragic story but sometimes it is just hard to write them and hard to read. It is easier to read about puppies found in a trash can.
But I can’t let it go and I think you need to hear it. If it helps it does have a happy ending.
One of our lead nannies at Neema Village, was walking home recently when she saw an old friend from her primary school days on the street. Her friend was begging for help from anyone who would listen. She had been beaten up, cut and badly bruised and had a two year old with her and a four day old baby on her back. After talking with her friend, our nanny called Anna, the MAP Director at Neema Village.
The next day Anna and a couple of volunteers went to the house to see her. It was not much of a house, one room mud, just big enough for a double bed given to her by the people who owned the house and a thin foam mattress given by a neighbor. Since she had no money, the neighbor was also giving her food, a little dagaa (dried minnows) and corn meal. But the house was soon to be torn down so the little family would be homeless again.
We will call her Imani. She is 34 years old and had two children with her, she had left her three little boys out in the village. The baby was only a few days old. Her husband had left her and Imani had been working the streets to buy food for the family.
Street beggars are fairly common here since there are no government programs to help the poor.
Imani’s family was hungry so she agreed to carry drugs by swallowing them in a bag and walking across the border into another country in Africa.
On one of the trips, she and her friend were caught and the friend was shot and killed. The police threw her and the body of her friend into the back of a truck and took her to prison. It was a horrible ride, she told Anna, with her friend dead, blood everywhere, bouncing in the back of the truck with her. In prison, in a foreign country, she had not realized she was pregnant again and after having the baby a kind policewoman tried to help her by getting her a ride back home with a driver hauling corn across the border. The driver asked for sex and she begged that she had a new baby and could not. She was raped anyway.
As she talked to Anna she was crying, “I’ve learned a lot and I really want to change my life, I just do not know where to start.” She didn’t want Anna to leave and was begging her to please come back.
Imani had no idea she had just come in contact with the One Power who could actually change her life!
We moved Imani into the MAP houses at Neema Village and she began meeting with other women who have been through abuse, and abandonment and had made really bad choices. She started classes; sewing, English, Bible, women’s rights, counseling seminars and twice a week she joined a Bible based group therapy session with the other women. (Imani has the red scarf on)
She began coming to church at Neema and one afternoon Kelle Samsill spent a couple of hours talking about Jesus and the power to have a new life and how to become a Christian. Imani knew that was what she had been looking for. She was a Muslim and one glorious Sunday morning Imani decided to announce to the world she is now a Jesus Follower by being baptized. As we were walking back to the baby home Imani suddenly fell on her knees, held her arms up to the sky and thanked God for her new life.
There is much more to the story of Imani, faith is not always easy but she is growing. She has graduated out of the MAP house now and began her small business selling items like soap, salt and cokes. She returns to Neema for seminars where one day hopefully she will tell her story to encourage other young women coming in for help.
I love this!! Imani with her new MAP business. May God richly bless you if you have been supporting the MAP (Mothers Against Poverty) program through “Outreach” at Neema Village! It is amazing to see Hope come alive for these women!
There are classes everyday in the new Preslar Mothering Center. Women like Imani. who have been marginalized from society, kicked out, told they were unworthy and unloved are coming to know and accept Jesus and are being baptized. Lives are being changed. It is pretty exciting to watch God work at Neema Village!
Yes, God is still in the business of changing lives!
Love,
Dorris and Michael