I Am in Africa

By Therese Noah

Have you been in such a dark season where you've wondered if God cares about your current situation or even hears your prayers? There is an enemy who desires to stop us from receiving all that God has for us. The power of darkness is real. Spiritual warfare is real. It's when we understand that the battle is in the supernatural and not the natural that victory is ours! This is a story about how an encounter with the Lord revealed what the enemy was trying to steal.

You'll see the God I fell in love with is a God who speaks and a God who reveals Himself to us if we seek Him. He is a God who still delivers us from the power of darkness, a God who saves us, and a God who still blesses His children. I pray that your eyes would be opened and you will be equipped with simple steps to use the proper armor of God to win the battle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098000424

Book preview

The House

This house is an inheritance from my dad to my siblings and me. Over the years, the house became the focus of our conversations whenever we got together as a family. It became our greatest asset and our biggest problem.

We hear a lot of stories about inheritances that created heartaches for the heirs where they had to fight, argue, or even scheme about who got what and why. An ugly battle in many cases. But not with our family, thank God. It was not an issue of who got what share and why; rather the question was, how do we get our inheritance?

See this house is in North Africa, in a country called Sudan. It is hard enough to deal with liquidating real estate in the United States, let alone a house located outside the United States. Not only outside the United States but in one of the most corrupt third world countries.

Sudan is predominantly a Muslim country with a government that does not like Christians and persecutes them every chance they get.

My siblings and I were born in that country, and we spent our childhood there. I am the oldest of six, one sister and four brothers.

We went to private Catholic schools. The great thing about that, we learned English at a very young age. That helped us a lot when we finally left that country. We were taught English as a second language in elementary school and English as a main language in middle school and high school. It was British English, which could be its own language when compared to American English, but nonetheless, it made all the difference when we left Sudan.

The house where we grew up was part a home for us and part a school, where my parents taught typing and shorthand in the evenings. By day, my dad worked a lot of different jobs, including a job for the labor department. He also worked as a translator and a liaison between the church and the government. He wore many hats. He worked six days a week from eight in the morning till eight in the evening. My mom helped my dad in the evenings in his school by teaching typing and shorthand. With all that endless work, my parents still struggled financially to raise six kids.

The problem seemed to be that my dad wouldn’t charge anyone who couldn’t afford his services. He worked mostly for free and charged on occasion when the person could pay. In his typing school, he taught many students for free because they couldn’t afford the class but needed the certificate to get jobs. Over time, this took a toll on my dad’s finances. He didn’t charge people, yet he had to repair the typewriters and keep up with his business and feed his family. Somehow, the Lord always provided.

The one thing I remember about my dad, he never worried about not having money. As a matter of fact, my dad never worried about anything. He would tell my mom there is no need to worry. God will provide.

Sure enough, he always had just what he needed when he needed it. My dad would run into someone that owed him money for services or classes, and that person would pay my dad what they owed, months later, sometimes years later. I remember the countless times we were hungry and my mom was worried about how to supply our needs. My dad would come home with enough money to cover our expenses and sometimes with more than what we needed.

Looking back, I can see the Lord’s hand all over my dad and his work. At the time, though, I didn’t see the Lord in the picture. I didn’t know the Lord then. Now I do, and now I recognize He was always there.

One day, my parents piled us up in the car and drove a long way from home. It was such a long drive. It seemed that we were chasing a mirage in the desert. It seemed that we would never arrive, and when we finally did get to our destination, we were in no-man’s-land, in the middle of sand dunes, an endless ocean of sand and no one in sight. We were the only ones there. After what seemed like eternity, people started to arrive at our location. It became apparent that my dad knew them all and they were there for an important event.

This was a planned meeting to decide on the boundaries of land in this vast ocean of sand. The government decided to reward their employees, my dad was one of them, by allowing the employees to take a portion of their pension and purchase land in no-man’s-desert.

To determine which lot each employee would get, they put the names of the soon-to-be retirees in a hat. They surveyed the location and determined the lots. As they identified each piece of land, they would draw a name out of the hat. That person would purchase that lot with a part of their pension. It was pure luck that determined what location each one got…or was it?

Few years later, roads were built to that place; and what seemed to be far away, in the middle of nowhere, became near as the outskirts of the city grew out. My parents decided to build a home on that piece of land. Eventually, a town was birthed in that location, and a lot of people moved to that little community. We moved to that house and lived there till we came to America in the early nineties.

I was the first of my family to leave the country. My siblings followed a few years later. My parents stayed behind. Christian persecution grew unmercifully, and my parents were happy that all their children were out of the dungeon, so to speak.

My brothers and my sister refused to ever go back to Africa since their first exit. They all had terrifying memories of that place, and they simply will not return, not even for a visit.

One of the worst memories my oldest brother has is when he was a teenager in Africa, a few years before he came to America. He was a few minutes late, walking home with the neighbor’s kid, past the curfew, when they heard a whistle and someone yelling at them to stop.

It was the secret police. They were both picked up and taken to the police station. As they arrived at the police station, there were a couple of people in line. Within a few minutes of their arrival, the line got longer and longer. It seemed that a lot of people were getting arrested for breaking the curfew. The trouble in these situations, you never knew what the punishment would be. There are no set rules of how this would turn out. It all depended on which police station and who was in charge that night. It was not a good thing to be caught after the cutoff time.

As my brother stood in line, as the tension built up, waiting for the announcement, the man in charge of that station decided it would be fun that night to play Russian roulette with a pistol and one bullet. The punishment for that night is someone’s life. He loaded his pistol with a single bullet and rolled the clip. Can you imagine being in that line? If they would get lashed, beaten, imprisoned, or fined for something as petty as running a few minutes past curfew would be horrific but someone’s life for breaking curfew rules is unfathomable. Extreme punishment is used to teach people a lesson to obey.

If you don’t think it’s a fair punishment, who would you object to, who would you complain to, who would you call? This is at night when most people are at home locked up anyways because of the curfew. My parents were home unaware that my brother was in that line to be executed for running a few minutes past curfew to get home. They obviously knew he wasn’t home, and they were panicking not knowing the outcome. They couldn’t break the curfew themselves by going out to look for him. During that era, there were no cell phones, there was no communication. They sat and waited for someone to knock on their door.

So here is my brother in line with a lunatic with a bullet and a pistol who wants to have fun, and no one to stop him. Was he joking, or was he really going to fire the gun? My brother describes the tension and how fast his heart was beating at that moment. Sure enough, the man fired at the first person in line, but it was a blank. As the tension, the fear and the panic filled the room. Someone grabbed my brother’s arm and pulled him out of the line. As my brother looked up, he saw the neighbor’s driver, a familiar face. The man grabbed him and the neighbor’s kid as well and took them out of the station.

My brother did not know that the driver was secret police, not only a regular secret police but high up in the ranks. That’s why the driver was able to get them out of the line and out of the station. My brother recalls the bullet firing as they left the building, and he finds out the next day that someone was killed in that line that night.

Thank God for His mercy and for sending help in times of trouble. That was a very traumatizing experience for my brother and the whole family. Needless to say, when my brother got out of that country, he had no desire to return, not even for a visit.

The purpose of such injustice is to scare people. The whole country knew they could not reason with the system. This was and is a very successful tactic to scare people from attempting anything against the government from the simplest of things from disobeying curfew to planning a coup.

There have been endless stories of horror in that place. I have been back to visit over the years, and it never seemed safe to be there. An overwhelming sense of insecurity would sweep over me every time I visited that place.

My dad passed away within a couple of years of our departure, and my mom followed us to America a year later. We left our home and other properties that my dad had bought in the mid-fifties. We got out—that was it. Left everything behind.

A lot happened in our lives here, and a lot happened in the country we left as well. A decade later, when Christian persecution wasn’t at its peak and it was safe to return, my mom went back to see her siblings and their families.

Unfortunately, on her arrival, my dad’s only brother filed a lawsuit against my dad, my mom, and all of us. He claimed we owed him land that my dad promised him back in the fifties. This lawsuit forced my mother to relocate back to Africa for seven years. She had to battle with my uncle in their court systems to defend our land. We are so thankful that she was able to do that. None of us would have been able to live there and fight this legal mess, and surely not for seven years. It was a frivolous lawsuit in a corrupt society with bribery and the like. Only by the grace of God did we win. It was truly the Lord saving my family from injustice in that lawsuit.

Back to the house, over time, this house my parents built in the middle of nowhere now is on a premier street in the most desirable location in the whole country. You couldn’t find a better location in the whole country. If I would compare it to America, it would be like having a big house on Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills. As they would say about real estate—location, location, location.

I believe that’s God’s grace to my dad for helping so many people throughout his life. Even though he went to be with the Lord, twenty-five years ago in that town, to this day, he is still remembered, and often strangers would stop my mom and me in the streets; they would recognize my mom, and they would tell us of my dad’s good deeds, how he impacted their lives and made a huge difference in their families.

Growing Up in Africa

Growing up in Africa sounds exotic, people are always intrigued and fascinated when I tell them we grew up in Africa. They think of safaris and nature and beautiful sceneries, maybe something like the Loin King movies. Timon and Simba and the gazelles running by, with springs of water and lush green trees, with birds singing in the sky. That is a beautiful place that I would like to visit as well except that’s not this part of Africa, not where we grew up. It is nothing close to that picture.

This place is the desert part of Africa with the most corrupt government. With oppression and injustice running rampant. Bribery, false witnesses, Christian persecution as the norm. Attempts to overthrow the government is the norm, whereby waking up in the morning to the sound of gunfire and machine guns, chaos and confusion happens more often than it should.

In this part of the world, it is not your typical struggle to raise a family, not just the personal financial struggle but the bigger picture. Here are a few other worries a family would face.

We had a lot of coup d’états in that country. Their government is not based on democracy, on voting or elections. Their government is a dictatorship. They ruled and continue to rule with an iron fist. The only way to get a new president, or a new regime, is by trying to overthrow the government through a coup d’état, overtake the government by force, and the new government would then reign by force. Any attempts to overthrow the government usually happen over a weekend. Weekends in that part of the world are Friday and Saturday, so these attempts happen early Friday morning. If we heard gunshots on Friday morning, we knew there is an attempt to overthrow the government. The usual thing is to stay indoors until we found out the outcome and if it is safe to leave our homes or stay on lockdown till further notice.

If a coup d’état is successful, the new government in turn would rid itself from any potential thread by killing all their opposition and all previous government officials that would not comply with the new regime.

The new arrivals in power would place their new people in critical government positions and critical locations to secure their reign.

Another aspect of living in that country was the idea of curfews. Curfews are a set time by the government, whereby, the entire country is shut down. No one is allowed outside their front doors. Anyone caught in the streets after that appointed time is punished severely and without mercy as my brother encountered. These curfews could be for a few days, weeks, months, or even years.

A typical curfew is from 11:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. If there is political unrest, they could start at 6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m., sundown to sunrise. In other words, no one is undermining the government at night,