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I woke up one day and he told me he couldn’t marry me again. In his own words, he told me, “I can’t marry a woman who will go against the dictates of God, the God we’ve served all our lives. If you could disobey me and also disobey God, what else can’t you do?” I thought he was joking. Not too long afterwards, I had a call from a man. He said he was the lawyer for my husband and that my husband had consulted him over a divorce. I whispered under my breath, “Wow, so he meant it.” I called my mom and told her, “He’s leaving me.” My dad took the phone from my mother and I told him the same thing. He said, “Don’t feel bad for yourself. Every mother who has the kind of love you have for your daughter would do the same thing you did. Let him go. Let’s pray your daughter walks.”

As I’m writing this. I’m going through a divorce process but I’m happy for one thing, the miracle I had chased for more than a year has finally happened. My heart is no longer broken. I look at my daughter and the way she walks while laughing and I tear up. I look into the heavens and say, “God, if this is not you, then where could this come from?”

We’ve been married for a little over five years. My husband’s parents are pastors. Both mom and dad are pastors who met in the ministry of God and got married. The first time I met them what they told me was, “This is the house of God. Trouble gets here and it stops. Once you’re here and ready to be married into this Godly family, God is going to be your fortress and you’ll never lack anything.” I said amen and that very day, they prayed for us and told us never to engage in anything ungodly until we got married. We never had sex. We didn’t even kiss. The farthest we went was holding hands while we walked at the beach. We didn’t go to the beach to celebrate love. We went there to pray as we often did.

We dated for a year and a half and got married. Not too long afterwards, I got pregnant and gave birth to a girl. We called her Givens, a name my husband’s father chose for her. For some strange reason, my daughter didn’t take after me. She rather picked a striking resemblance to her grandmother, my mother-in-law. Everything on her looks like her grandma so my mother-in-law usually referred to her as her replica. She was seven months old when she started learning to walk. No, she didn’t crawl. She just got up and started learning to walk instead of crawling first. We teased her, “Where are you going that you want to run first before you crawl?”

At eight months she reverted to crawling and at nine months, she was back to learning to walk again. It looked strange but everyone said it was normal since every kid is different. At nine months she was walking freely but uneasily. She could walk without holding anything. One day she was walking in the hall and we were both shouting out of joy when she suddenly sat down and laughed. From that day, my daughter didn’t walk again. She didn’t even crawl. If you sit her down on the floor, she will remain in that same spot until you pick her up. And then she started drooling ceaselessly. 

“No, something is wrong somewhere,” I told my husband. He didn’t believe me. He said it was normal but we sent her to the hospital anyway. They checked her up and prescribed some drugs for her. It didn’t change anything. She was a year old and still couldn’t walk or crawl. She became our prayer topic. We would wake up at dawn and pray for an hour for her while she lay sleeping. Each morning we woke up with hope in our hearts that she was going to walk again but this girl didn’t walk. While my in-laws were praying and fasting for her, my parents were also doing the same thing. We never missed any hospital appointments but this girl never got better. At two years old, she was still not walking or talking. The worst thing was that she would lie on her belly and swing around like how snakes crawl.

I would look at her and cry every night. I would look up into the heavens and ask God, “You gave us this beautiful gift to make our hearts happy to serve you in peace. You mean you haven’t seen what is going on? You mean you haven’t heard our payers? What else should we do before you respond to us?” My husband prayed and fasted until he lost all the flesh on his skin but nothing was happening. My in-laws told me, “You don’t need to worry. He’s God and he does what he wants to do. In his appointed time, he would work a miracle in your daughter.”

In fact, I was frustrated, especially when I saw children her age walking and going to school. One evening my mom called me. She said, “I discussed the problem with a friend in the market and she said she knows someone who can help. The problem is that someone is on the other side of the faith—a traditionalist who uses mystery to solve problems of this nature.” I told my mom, “Forget it. We are in trouble so we’ll hear things of that nature. I’m not ready to start moving around with my daughter. God said we should leave everything in his hands.” But my mother insisted and I kept telling her no.

One day, she came with another woman to visit. Immediately the woman saw my daughter she gave a subtle smile. She said, “If you continue keeping your baby this way, she will forever remain this way. Look at her, do you think it’s normal? Does it look normal to you? Let me take you to this woman and your issue will be solved. I’d seen her solve bigger problems than that.” When they left and my husband came in I told him. He got angry. He started screaming at me, “Since when did you start doubting God? Is there any power bigger than what our God has? Woman, tell your mother we are not ready to go anywhere. It’s a test to our faith and we shall conquer.”

I couldn’t sleep at night. I would look at my daughter sleeping and wish for the days when she would turn out fine. I was also thinking about what the woman said—a lot. One dawn after praying, I told my husband, “What if God is directing us to this woman? You know in the bible it happened often. God directed his favourite to certain healers and they all said no but when they finally agreed to move, they got healed. Why don’t we try and see.” As usual, he shot me down telling me God won’t direct his favourite to a fetish priestess.”

One dawn, I had a dream my daughter was running around and laughing. I was chasing after her but she was faster. When I finally caught up with her and picked her up, a woman sitting under a tree nearby said, “You see she’s running now? What kept you so long?” I woke up from the dream and couldn’t sleep again. The following day I called my mom and asked her how the woman we were supposed to visit looked like. She answered, “How would I know unless I ask my friend.” The description I had was very different from what I saw in my dreams but something was telling me I should send her to the woman so I started making preparations.

According to the plan, I would take some days off work and tell my husband I was going to spend some days with my parents. Everything worked according to plan except my husband found out later that we were taking the child to the fetish so he came to my parent’s house to come for us. It was too late, we had already set off on the journey to the north to meet this woman. He called and asked me about it and I confessed to him. He said, “If you don’t bring my daughter back here now, now, now, you wouldn’t like the next decision I will take.” We had gone too far to get back so we kept going until we got to the compound of this woman. 

When we got there I was left disappointed. The way they described the woman, I thought of a very strange woman who would probably descend from the sky with fire trailing her but this woman we met was an old woman who had just returned from the farm with two kids by her side. She was having this long chewing stick in her mouth which she would remove occasionally and spit out a large chunk of saliva. I said in my head, “I should have listened to my husband. I made this long trip just to be disappointed?”

She gave us a seat and offered us water. My mom drank it so I was forced to drink too. The cup looked scary. She didn’t say anything to us. She walked to the baby, touched her forehead, pulled the skin under her eyes with her index finger and looked deep into her eyes. She said something in her language that we didn’t understand. My mom’s friend was our interpreter. She told us the woman said why have we allowed our daughter to suffer so long for something this small. She went into her hut and brought out a pot. She mixed some things into powder, dipped her hand in it and smeared the powder on the forehead of my daughter. She did a lot of things I can’t put into words. She later said, “Your daughter will get better and the enemy will be put to shame.” 

She gave us a lot of herbal drugs, some liquid and some powder. She gave me leaves and told me to chew every morning when I woke up and evening when I was going to sleep. Her instructions were so simple I thought, “Is that all?” And when she said, “After a month if you don’t see any improvement, come back again.” I told myself, “We are not coming back here, no matter what.”

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I came back home and my husband started acting up. He had told his parents and they too called to lambast me. I regretted my actions. My husband left home, he didn’t call and didn’t contact us. He said we were filthy from where we went. My parents became my encouragement. A week later, he spoke of divorce and later followed it up with a call from the lawyer. I had started seeing improvement in the life of my daughter so my heart was at peace. She was no longer drooling unnecessarily and she could sit firm and not fall. I was telling my husband about it but he won’t listen. 

I would call him and immediately after I started talking about our daughter, he would cut the call. Three weeks later, my daughter could walk with a support system, she would hold a chair or table or anything that promised support. I won’t say anything, I would watch from afar and cry. As I write this, my daughter can walk and run and laugh. She says certain words, meaningless words but they are words all the same. She has her beauty back, the beauty God gave her at birth. My husband had refused to see her until I took her to his parent’s house and he was there. His father asked me what went on over there and I explained everything to him. He asked, “No ritual?” I answered, “She didn’t even take anything from us. According to the woman, we would have to go there and give her something from our heart when all is said and done.” 

He nodded and my mother-in-law looked at me suspiciously as if she didn’t believe what I said. Since my husband saw our daughter, he no longer talks about the divorce. We’ve had two meetings he was supposed to be there but he didn’t. I called to ask why and he said he was thinking through things. I asked what those things were and he didn’t say anything meaningful. Currently, he calls often. He comes home to see us. He brings gifts and sends us money. I asked him jovially, “So when are you coming back home?” He looked at me and said nothing. I don’t know what he’s thinking but come what may, I would be here waiting. Waiting for…well, I don’t know. He alone can tell. 

—Dorothy

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