From CMS

A widow in Delhi has been reunited with her two daughters after they were lured away by a human trafficker, reports Elizabeth, a CMS mission partner who must remain anonymous.

I help with a small Christian organisation that works with children and women in a slum and at a resettlement colony.

With the refugee community, we do a series of workshops among the women, covering subjects such as self confidence, sexual harassment, politics and refugee rights.

We try our best to empower women through these workshops but it is a slow journey. The women are generally not leaders in their communities; most of them never went to school, and most are unemployed and are among the poorest in the area. Sometimes there are barriers, including difficulty in understanding concepts, difficulty in listening for longer than 10 minutes, and so on.

However, when we incorporate biblical content and start talking about God, the women really come alive and want to share how God has looked after them and shown them his love. From a worldly perspective they hardly have anything, and face countless hardships. Yet most are able to rejoice in the Lord.

I would like to share one story. Mary (name changed) is a widow in her 40s. She came to Delhi as a refugee a couple of years ago with her five children. She tried to find work, but this proved difficult and they couldn’t afford rent.

One day Mary was befriended by a woman, Sarah, who claimed to be a Christian. Sarah offered to find a good job for Mary’s daughters (11 and 13 years old) and the girls went off in good faith.

A couple of weeks later, Mary met a girl who warned her about Sarah. This girl had been sent by Sarah to work as a housemaid in a house where she was locked up, ill treated and only escaped by jumping off the balcony.

Alarmed, Mary went to the police, who rescued her daughters and several other girls, most of them under 16. Sarah wasn’t imprisoned. Mary, on the other hand, had a court case filed against her and her daughters were placed with the Child Welfare Service.

We found Mary a good Christian lawyer who was willing to take her case for free, but she was now too scared to meet with the lawyer. We prayed with her over the next few weeks. The family went to their church and fasted and prayed.

And miraculously, the girls were released and the court case against Mary was dropped! We don’t know what happened to cause these good events, but Mary’s family and their community see this as an answer to prayer and take heart that despite their poverty they have God.

Life has not suddenly improved for this family; they continue to live in poverty and in fear of Sarah, who threatened them with reprisals. When working with such families I cling on to God’s promises in the Bible that he cares for the weak and oppressed, and that, in the words of one theologian, “God weeps with our pain.”