Month: March 2016

Mary Owusu

Mary Owusu is a 14 year old girl. Her sister is Grace Achiaa. Her mother was crazy, and she passed away. The two sisters were living with their grandmother. Their Grandmother had diabetes, which caused blindness and a stroke, and she passed away. When the landlord found out that the grandmother was dead and the two girls were living in the house alone, she kicked both girls out into the streets. They didn’t have any other family, so they were forced to live in the streets. They both went their separate ways. Mary was 12 years old at the time, and she was living in a wood store that was under construction. Some men found out that she was living there, and made plans to rape her. They gave her some drugs that are similar to a date rape drug, which caused her to lose consciousness. She laid in the streets all day before anyone took notice, and they took her to the hospital where they were able to wake her up and help her recover. She doesn’t remember being raped, or anything else during her period of unconsciousness. No one would pay her hospital bills, so she had to live and work at the hospital doing cleaning and stuff in order to work off her bills. After about a month, she found out she was pregnant and the hospital did not want to be responsible for her, so they decided that her bills were paid, and kicked her back into the streets. She went back to living in the same building because she didn’t have anywhere else to go. A lady saw her living there, and took pity on her and gave Mary her porch to live on. She gave birth to a boy on the porch with the help of a local midwife. One day a man came along and told her that he would help to take care of her and her baby. Mary was so relieved for the help and took him up on his offer. He helped her for about a year and a half when one day he came to her and asked her to have sex with him. She told him that she would not do that, and because the man had taken care of her for so long, he felt that he had the right to have sex with Mary, and he raped her. She ended up pregnant for a second time at the age of 14. They cannot find the guy anywhere. We delivered food to her on March 16th, 2016, and will try to get her a place to live that is not a porch. Richard is actively searching with his church members to find a place for her. We will be getting her some education as well so that she can support herself.


  
  

Our first delivery!

Good evening! I am positive that this update is the one you have all been waiting for. 🙂 we were finally able to deliver some food to two of our girls today. We delivered food to Ruth Opoku and her baby, and Mary Owusu (we haven’t shared her story yet). Tomorrow we should be able to do two more deliveries. We want to say a very big thank you to my brother in law Bernard Osei Bonsu, and to our friend Richard. They have been doing a lot of the ground work in Ghana, and we couldn’t do this without them. We wanted to show you where some of your hard earned money is going, and that we appreciate you all very much. We love each and every one of you. May God bless you.  
  
  

Another day, another case…

There is always something new happening on a daily basis. We now have 12 girls that have been referred to us, and there is no possible way that we can help them all until we get more established. Our combined incomes and donations can only go so far. We are currently helping 4 of the girls, and are considering taking on one more. We are working as fast as we can to get everything organized so that we can become a 501 c3 non profit organization. Each step is its own process, which makes things much slower than we would like. As soon as we have non profit status, we can start applying for grant money. That should help things a ton.

 Yesterday we heard such a sad story. We have a baby in the hospital in an incubator fighting to live. The babies mother died giving birth, and her parents have passed away as well. This makes this sweet innocent baby an orphan. I told my husband that “we have to adopt this baby too” he laughed at me. 🙁 while I know that we cannot adopt another baby at the moment, I want to just say yes! How can I let this baby go live in an orphanage? It just makes me so sad. We are looking for a couple of people who might want to be monthly sponsors for this baby. If we could get 5 people to give $10.00 each month, we can help this baby with formula, diapers, and maybe we could even convince my nanny to take on another child 😂. If you are interested in being a sponsor for this baby, please send me an email and we will let you know all the details. I am hoping that in the next couple of days, we will have more information about the baby, and that the hospital will let our photographer in to get some pictures. We will post pictures as soon as we have some. 

The heartbreak continues

As we continue on the journey of trying to help young rape victims in Ghana we keep hearing horrible stories that just make me want to cry. They make me want to borrow hundreds of thousand of dollars to go fix their situations immediately. While I know that this is not reasonable, and while I know that I can’t currently help them all, I want to so badly. I will continue to take one step at a time and to trust that God has put me where I need to be at this moment. I will trust that eventually I won’t have to turn anyone away and that I will be able to help all of them with time. I have been deliberating all day about the story that I am about to tell you. It is graffic and horrible and I will warn you that it will probably be hard to read, so if you don’t want to continue, I will completely understand. Tonight I am going to tell you the story of a girl named Sandra Agyei. 
Sandra Agyei is a 17 year old girl. We are still trying to figure out if she is living in the streets, or if she has someone that is letting her stay with them, but we will know by tomorrow what her current situation is. Sandra grew up living in a room with her parents. I am going to describe how these rooms work in Ghana so that you can better understand the story. A room is not very big, and is basically a cinder block square room with a couple of Windows and a door. There generally aren’t any partitions or walls, so the whole room is open. There is sometimes electricity in these rooms, but no running water or bathrooms. As you can imagine, having any sort of intimate relationships in these rooms with children living in there can be tricky. Well as Sandra got older, her parents started sending her to sleep outside when they wanted to be intimate and would call her back in after they were finished. On one of these nights, a man was walking by and asked Sandra why she was sleeping outside. She told the man that her parents had sent her out, and he invited her to come sleep in his room that night. She quickly obliged because as you can imagine, sleeping outside is not very comfortable. That night she stayed safe, and returned home the next morning. A few days later her parents kicked her out of the house again and instead of sleeping outside, she went and knocked on the same mans door again. That night she was not so lucky and the man raped her and ran off. She decided that she was going to go home and tell her parents what had happened and ask that they not send her outside to sleep anymore, but when she got home she knocked on the door and nobody would answer. After knocking for some time, she called to some people and had them help her break the door down. When they broke down the door and looked inside, both of her parents were dead. They had been struck by lightening and were burned to death in the middle of the night. You can imagine how horrible this was for her. Not long after, she found out that she was pregnant. She is pretty far along in her pregnancy, but hopefully we can get her a little prenatal care before she gives birth. 
I hope this story will touch your hearts tonight.