Cynthia is just twenty-years old and a mother of 11-month-old baby boy, Leon.  The convoluted story of struggle she has already been through to survive and find the basic necessities of life will break your heart.  Heavenlight shares her story:

Cynthia has a father and mother but they are separated, her father is remarried, and she has 3 siblings. Their biological mother abandoned them when she was two and her father took care of them and raised them.

She had to drop out of school when she was in her last year of secondary school, around fifteen years old, because her step mother was treating her so poorly that she couldn’t stay at home so she dropped out of school. When she dropped out of school her biological mother asked her to come stay with her in another region of Tanzania. She stayed with her mother who was doing “business on the streets”. One day her mother asked her to go out with her for dinner, but when they were there her mother had arranged a man for her and was forcing her to sell herself out to the man. When she refused and ran back home, her mother was mad at her, so Cynthia decided to run away from her own mother and come back to her father and the evil stepmother.

When she came back the treatment from her stepmother was still very bad, so she left again and moved in with a friend. When she was living with the friend she met a man, they moved in together and she stayed for 5 months and she began to get abused, she was young so she didn’t know how to do things like cooking or how to be a wife, so he was beating her and abusing her for not knowing, so she left and went to stay with another friend and the friend said you cannot stay unless you start working and she tried but couldn’t find a job anywhere.  The friend locked her outside because she didn’t have a job and she began sleeping outside. She then went back to the first friend, but while staying there she met another man, she became pregnant and that is the father of her child today.

When she became pregnant and told him he did not take it negatively. One day she got a call saying that the man had died in his house and the body had been there for 3 days and the neighbors had found him because they had smelt his body.  They had to take the body back to his family and bury him. Cynthis stayed with the friend till she delivered the baby and her biological mother came back and wanted her to come live with her.  She didn’t want to go because her mother wanted to sell her off to men.   Soon the family of the man who had died learned about her and the baby and she went to stay with the man’s family till the baby was 4 months old.

Her mother started telling the man’s family bad things about her and they began to treat her poorly so she couldn’t stay there and again went to stay with her father and step mother.  The step mother started to blame her for stealing.  Sometimes the mother would take things and hide them and then blame her.   She left again and went to stay with a neighbor who also had daughters and the women began to complain that she wasn’t making money so they tried to get her to go sell her body for money because the daughters were doing that. She said she could not do that because her baby was still young.  So they did not want her in the house anymore because she was not contributing.

Finally, Thank God, someone told her about Neema Village.   She came and asked our social worker if she could leave the baby and go get a job and when she was financially able she would come back to get her baby. Our social worker told her Neema’s mission is to keep families together, so she will stay at Neema, and she and her baby will both get help here.

Her future plan is to own a business that sells shoes and clothes. Attending all the classes at Neema Village; computer, sewing, Bible, group therapy and other classes so she can learn everything and put herself in the best position possible to set herself up for success in life.

Until we hear their stories, we cannot imagine what these young women go through just to survive.  It is almost unbearable to read.  I tell people all our babies at Neema Village have a tragic story but our Map moms have a worse one!

Cynthia has come through the tragedy and already we see her singing at church with a beautiful passion for the Savior who saw her and came to bring her new life.