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| Little Girl with maternal Grandma and 2Face |
'I say you can't beat yourself up. When you know you've made the wrong choice in a guy you look, you do some introspective work, and you try not to make the same mistake.
If you do, get back up, dust your feet off, and start walking and moving forward.'
Dear everyone,
I am writing you this letter because I need to be heard. I have been the prisoner of a horrible man for almost fifteen years now. I have been trying to get away from him practically since I met him, and even more so in the past four years. He has taken over my life, and now taken my children away, and I am at a loss for what to do. I do not want to be forced into making any rash decision that would impact my kids forever, and I certainly do not want to end up in jail, as my children need me to raise them; but I really am desperate, and I am at my absolute wits end. I do not know what else to do. I have decided to make a public appeal. Maybe someone will hear me and come to my help, because I really need help. The Canadian justice system has failed me many times, and even now, continues to fail me. I am hoping and praying that someone out there will come and rescue my children and me.
My name is Amaka and I work in Medical Laboratory Science. I am a BCIT Alumnus. I am also the mother of two fantastic children, a nine year old boy and a seven year old girl.
I am still trying my best to take the children to another province to begin our lives again. I know that if I am better educated, my children will be better for it. I will be more financially able to provide for them, and they will not have the constant influence of C who keeps on telling them that education is not important. He mocks my educational goals. The children says that he says all this 'book book and school school thing is not important'. I, on the other hand, cannot stress enough how important an education is to their lives. So, they're getting conflicting messages. My son recently tore up a homework paper saying it wasn't important, and that, of course, is because of the message that has been hammered into his head by C.
My mother's youngest brother moved here from the UK in August 2012. He is not much older than I am, and my mom raised him, so I often call him my brother. He started to talk to C immediately when he arrived, and C assured him that this time if I wanted to go to school that he would not do anything to stop me. My uncle let him know that I would not be able to leave the children behind and go to school, so they would need to come with me. C agreed. My brother told me, and I immediately told C that I wanted it documented by the courts. He said he would get his lawyer to do it. I said “Let's just go and get a consent order from the courts, so we will not need a lawyer.” He refused.
After I had bathed and got dressed, I called a woman called Uyi who was mostly looking after the children at that point. I told her to please come over as soon as possible, that C was raging, and I had to go to work, but that I was afraid of leaving him alone with the children, seeing as he was so angry. I felt that if there was another person in the house, he would not be able to do anything to them. Uyi said she was in Vancouver and that she would come very soon.
I called another person from the church, and he was fairly new at the time. His name was Manas. I wanted there to be somebody around C to provide a buffer between him and the children, seeing as he was in such a very angry state of mind. Manas soon arrived with another man called Emmanuel. These were both young guys in their early 30s, I believe. Also, unbeknownst to me, there was a third person, called Michael, who was in the car who had driven them down. I met them at the door and I asked them to come in. I said, “Please wait until Uyi arrives.” C then came down and asked them to leave. I gave Manas my key and I said, “I invited you, if he locks you out, just open the door and come in.” C said, “Okay, you're not going to work then! Get back inside!” And he started to drag me back in. I fought him off, and I think one of them held him, and I asked the men again to please wait for Uyi, who was going to arrive soon. I wanted there to be somebody there with my kids and with him. So he said, “Okay, if you guys want to stay, that's fine, but I'm taking the children and I'm going to go out.” So when I got outside to go to work, I went to the van that he usually drove – it was my van, I had got it – and I disabled the gears. That way he would be unable to drive the car with the kids in it, seeing how enraged he was. I went to work.
After C had called me a baby killer and a murderer, even after I had suffered through the ordeal I had just suffered through, and humiliated me in front of people, I knew I could no longer live with him. I made up my mind to move with the children once I was well enough to. At this time also, a woman from Nigeria came to visit her daughter who was a student here. She said she was a bishop and that she had told C she wanted to meet me. So, she came to the house. I was still ill and in bed, and she advised me to take my children and to return to Nigeria. I said, “No, I have nothing to go back to in Nigeria, and I have a good job here, and I will be able to care for my kids here once I am feeling better.” She said, “Look how sick you are. You need to be taken care of. Go home. Go to your mother.” And I said, “No, I am fine. I am already recovering. I will soon be much better.” I thanked her and I said, “I will survive. I am well. Very soon I will be back to work.” I reiterated to her that I was making good income, and that when I was sufficiently recovered I would take the children to Disneyland and just other child-centered resorts so that they could start making some happy memories.
To my intense surprise, after about a week after this woman that said she was a bishop had come and visited, I was served court documents. C had gone to court and got an order that said I was not allowed to take the children out of BC without the express written permission of the courts. He said that the bishop woman had told him that I was planning to leave Canada. That really was the absolute last straw for me. I packed up all of his clothes from his room, I threw then all outside. His shoes, his jackets, just everything – I threw them all outside, I was done. I decided that if I was going contrary to the bible, that I didn't care. That I could not live this hell for a single day longer.
My daughter was born in the spring of 2006. She had a foot deformity at birth. I started to take her to the pediatric orthopedist when she was only four months old. The morning she was born, I had been woken up at about 6:00 am by intense labour pains. I had a quick shower and I went to the kitchen to get breakfast for David, who would soon wake up since I was gone from the bed. C came out while I was in the kitchen and said, “Where are you going so early?” I said, “The baby is coming so I have to go to the hospital. I am getting food for David. If you will get him, I will get his food and you can drive me to the hospital.” Well, he said, no, he wasn't going to drive me, he was going to stay at home and look after David. I said David could come, just drive me and drop me and then you can go back, but he still refused.
I called Evelyn's mother, Hannah, and asked her if she could come drive me to the hospital, but I'm not sure what delayed her, and the times were getting shorter and shorter between my contractions. So, I just went to my car and I drove myself to the hospital. When I arrived at the hospital I parked and I started to walk toward the family birthing unit. I was walking and just trying to hold on to the sides of the wall, I was in so much pain. I looked up and there was a wonderful woman standing beside me. She looked at me and she said, “Oh my god, you're in labour!” She ran for a wheelchair, which she brought back and sat me in, and then pushed me to the reception. I told them there as were checking my preregistration that I was very close to delivery. I said, “I can feel the baby coming!” And they rushed me to a room. I could also hear them paging the doctor stat. Two nurses were putting sheets on the mattress with a plastic cover, and another one was setting up an IV pole. The one nurse kept saying, “Are you pushing? Stop pushing!” Well, I couldn't hold back. While they were still trying to get the bed made, I pushed the other nurse aside, got on the bed, and I just had my baby. It was about 9:00 am by then. One push – boom – and she was out, just screaming. She was born so fast, her eyes were blood shot for two days afterwards. She was the most adorable baby girl I had ever seen, and I was completely, just completely in love with her. And my love for my dear Ctine has only grown more and more as each day reveals a new aspect of the beautiful, wonderful, kind, cheerful, loving girl that she is – my Ctine.
I continued to dote on my son. I couldn't get enough of him. I breast fed him exclusively. I spent every dollar I had on his clothes, his books, and his toys. I started to read to him before he was 4 months old, and David could read by the time he was 4 years old. I also, of course, had to go back to work at the Surrey Tax Centre, after he was 4 months old. My maternity employment insurance benefits were not very much, and I had to think about the baby as well. I was breastfeeding, but we lived only about a 5-minute drive from the Tax Centre, so on my breaks (I had two half-hour breaks), I would run home and feed him. I did not know at that point about expressing breast milk. I was on my own. I had no friends with whom I could discuss things like expressing milk.
C and Mary got even more close at this point, and after C had prevented me from going to bury my father, I did not want to stick around the house and watch he and Mary carrying on in front of me, so I figured I better go back to work – and I did.
I now had to come to terms with the fact that, whether I liked it or not, and that whether I wanted to or not, that I was involved with the church. I was, after all, in the sight of all the world, apparently married to him. I was the 'pastor's wife'. Nobody knew my secrets, or my hurt, or my pain. Human beings are, for the most part, about themselves. How could I have expected the people that came to church to be different? “Church is like a hospital,” to quote my pastor today, Pastor Wes Daase, “everyone comes to be treated, and if in the course of being treated you are able to help others, than you are doing well.” And I now know that part of healing is helping others to heal as well.
Anyway, nobody knew of the anguish that I was in, and if they suspected anything, well nobody ever said a word to me. People kept coming to me for different reasons. Mostly it was to complain about C – how he would never close on time, how when you told him something he either said it on the pulpit or he said it to other people. That was a really disgraceful aspect of him. He was a gigantic gossip, and he soon came to be known all around the community that you could never tell him anything and expect it to be kept confidential. It didn't matter how big or small it was, he would soon spread the news around. I really attributed this to his having too much time on his hands, and also he had absolutely no concept of time. Up until I ran from him in 2009, I had never, ever, seen him be on time for anything, not even once.
I kept on trying to call my supervisor, and soon started to get worried about not being able to return to my job, or even to get a new job. I had only ever attended three job interviews in Canada, and all three times, I had got the jobs, so I was really worried about not even getting a single call about a job. I began to be afraid that C had indeed put a curse on me and that was why I was unable to get a job.
Rose and I attended Calvary Worship Centre, a predominantly black church in Burnaby at the time, pastored by a Ghanaian, and after my ordeal in Ghana, I was loathe to have anything to do with any other Ghanaian; but the pastor of that church called me up and asked me to bring C to the church. He and his wife had been very kind to me when I first arrived in Canada, so I took C to his church to meet him. I hadn’t been going to church since coming to Canada with C. He had been going out and about, and I don’t recall now if Rose took him to Calvary Worship first.
When he came back from the church, he decided he was going to start his own church. He said he would start by having prayers for people there in the basement suite. He kept going to Calvary Worship, and was soon telling people he would perform deliverance on them and cast out whatever demons was causing any problems in their lives. I had many comments that I really badly wanted to make, but since most of them would be vitriolic in nature, I kept them to myself.
The rest of my days in Ghana were a blur. I stayed for about a month, which I spent mostly vomiting from anxiety, and the stress of how I was going to inform my parents about the awful things that had happened to me. Eventually, I did not have the courage to go to Nigeria, so I returned to Canada, without going home to Nigeria knowing that my life was over. Back home in Canada, I got a new job at the then Revenue Canada, it was part of the Public service, and I still wanted to fulfill my promise of service to my adopted homeland. I didn’t think I would be able to pass the physical tests for the army or the police, so I was happy to get into Revenue Canada. I started to work for the GST section and then as an Error Inspections agent in the T1 individual returns section. I started to eat to mask my misery. I would eat a 325g box of Rice Krispies with over half of a 1.5L bowl of ice cream in one sitting until I was so full, I would start to vomit.
A German friend of mine Udo who I hadn't seen in years was in Vancouver, saw me at the convention center and came to talk to me. I must have seemed like a madwoman to Udo I said “Sorry Udo, I cannot talk to you. I cannot be near you,” and just ran from him. He couldn't have imagined that in my complete fear of C that I was trying to save his life and/or my life too. I continued to work and to send money to C.
The phone calls were unending. I had given up all hope by then. I called my sister Ifeoma, and told her everything. She said she would go to a pastor in Redeemed church who she was sure was a real pastor, and she could ask. She called me back within a week to say that she couldn't see a Redeemed Church pastor, that it took too long, but that she had been to a church called Mountain of Fire and Miracles, and that she had been told that a blood covenant was a deadly thing, and that two people involved had to break it in agreement, if at all, and also that it frequently involved death. My sister and I agreed that I was completely trapped, and that I really had no choice but to put in my sponsorship papers for him.
