Well, hold on tight because this post holds little back.
She was kidnapped, raped repeatedly and locked in a home where a candle caught on fire and burned her so badly her legs had to be amputated. Through counseling with her mother, we learned that she barely survived the genocide in 1994 and was staying in a shelter when a Ugandan man started "caring" for the women and giving them money. In exchange, he raped them. Jaime's mother was basically a sex slave for this man. When she got pregnant with Jaime, she stayed but hated suffering the man's abuse. When she got pregnant again, she finally left and left Jaime behind with her father.
When you watch the video, you see Jaime tell her story. She doesn't talk about the case, or about the intricate details of just how horrible her childhood was. She speaks of God's ability to instill hope when it seems it is lost forever.
I met her mother and father, who both abandoned her. Baraka, who speaks in the video, counseled with both of them and her father has actually been to visit Jaime and has helped financially support her. An incredible feat! I worked on her legal case against the two perpetrators. I met the principle one who kidnapped and raped her in court, and have never felt such a strange and disgusting feeling. The first guy claimed that he was under the age of criminal liability and caused us to go find his birth certificate. He was actually around 40 years old. As a legal strategy, we ended up asking the court to join the two men's cases together so that they would point fingers saying, "the other one did it" and that the Judge would see they both should go to jail for a long, long time. I do not know the outcome of the legal case, and it isn't relevant. I share this video with you because you prayed for her, because you prayed for me and my heartbreak after we met, and you pray for the incredible work that IJM does. The people and places in the video are REAL to me. I share it with you so that for four minutes, you have insight into IJM, into the emotionally charged nature of this kind of work, and into Rwanda.
Her smile is real, her hope is palpable, and her courage is astounding. I think its very possible no other client for the rest of my legal career will touch me like she did.
Please share her story, I know that I always will.
My original blog post when I first met Jaime: http://defineyourdestination.blogspot.com/2013/06/from-field-into-field.html
To read more from IJM and to donate to IJM's incredible life changing work: http://ijm.org/jamies-story
No comments:
Post a Comment