Witness and celebrate the power of prayer: transforming lives and communities in West Africa

Her name was Fatou*, and the grittiness of her reality is something few of us can fathom: abducted off a busy West African street at the age of 15—the victim of a “bride kidnapping”—scurried to the groom’s village, raped, and forced to accept an afflicted marriage. Weeks into the ordeal, Fatou fled her abusive husband but not the darkness of her situation. Pregnant now and desperate to the extreme, she tried on multiple occasions to kill her unborn child and later bought rope at the local market with designs on hanging herself. 

The teenager’s emotional wounds were deep and festering. What could possibly begin to heal them?

For the last seventeen years, Becky and her husband, Shawn, have been serving as Alliance missionaries in West Africa. They met as missionary kids (MKs), attending boarding school together in the Ivory Coast. They returned to do an apprenticeship in Gold Kingdom in 2004 and ended up staying there for thirteen years.

“We’ve been living out a calling to walk with the poor,” Becky says. “Everywhere we work, it’s really in the context of ‘Okay Lord, where are the marginalized? Where are the vulnerable? Where are the people who need to encounter you where they’re at?ʼ”

Shawn’s work in Gold Kingdom included the launching of a sustainable fish farm in S-Town to combat food security issues and providing economic stability. Becky channeled her gifting for mercy, compassion, and justice into the plight of West Africa’s female child laborers. 

Through those endeavors, and more recently through their missionary work in a slum in Senegal, Shawn & Becky have not only witnessed and joined the struggle of the marginalized and vulnerable, they have witnessed the astounding power of prayer.

After escaping from her abusive husband, Fatou made her way back to the Gold Kingdom capital where a Christian family hired her to assist in their home, a common happening in West Africa where amenities are few and hard manual labor is part of daily life. But the nightmare of Fatou’s past left her traumatized. She spent much of her day crying, hardly able to perform her duties.

Fatou’s employer, a member of a local Alliance church, knew the girl needed intensive help and reached out to the staff of a program she’d heard about at church. The outreach was called Hands of Honor, and one of its founders was Becky, an International Worker.

“We began a preventative, church-based program,” Becky says. “It’s a safe place in our city.” 

She and her Alliance CAMA (Compassion & Mercy Associates) Services team started Hands of Honor in 2014 in partnership with a local Alliance church. What started with eight girls in one location now has sixty-eight girls enrolled in three locations. The program provides life-skills training, health and hygiene education, and literacy education. 

“The literacy rate for women in Gold Kingdom is thirty-three percent,” Becky says. “We’re teaching them to read and write.”

The girls, ages fifteen to nineteen years old, pray and study God’s word together. Some receive vocational training. All have advocates in the Hands of Honor staff, adults who will speak up for them in situations where they are being mistreated.

Hands of Honor staff connected urgently with Fatou and got her the resources and help she needed. But more than that, they began to pray for her, and then with her. 

What could possibly begin to heal this teenager’s deep and festering emotional wounds? The power of prayer.

“We saw Jesus begin to heal her deep wounds,” Becky says. 

It was a joyous day, a few months later, when Fatou put her trust in Jesus. Right away, she asked to take a new name, Elizabeth. 

“Jesus had healed her and given her freedom from the past. She wanted a name to express that she was now following Jesus,” Becky said.

Dramatic and ultimately joyful, Fatou’s rescue is just one example of the power of prayer the couple has witnessed. 

Hands of Honor Prayer Cards

In an effort to get people to pray specifically for the girls served by Hands of Honor, Becky and the staff came up with the idea of individual prayer cards. They began distributing the cards at Alliance women’s events, and things started happening.

“From when those cards started being distributed, we saw God answering,” Becky said. “All these girls we’d been walking with, who were so close to making a decision to follow Christ, finally made that decision.” 

That includes one underage teen, a former Muslim, who decided to “follow the Jesus road” and get baptized, but first, she had to call her father for permission. 

“She was trying to convert her dad on the phone, saying, ‘Dad, remember how I was such an unhappy child and I’ve always been really bitter? She said, ‘I’m so happy now and I’m at peace for the first time in my life.’ He allowed her to be baptized.”

Praying for Open Eyes

Becky cites another example of powerful and answered prayer in the very behavior and attitudes of Hands of Honor staff. 

“Most of our staff are lay women or pastor’s wives, and, culturally, they didn’t see anything wrong with the idea of child labor or the way that these young girls were treated. My teammate and I realized that we need to pray that our staff would understand the context of injustice and see a biblical perspective of who these girls are in Christ’s eyes because in culture’s eyes, they are called slave girls… We prayed, ‘Lord, open their eyes, help them to see these girls through your eyes.’ We prayed this for years,” and sure enough, attitudes changed. 

Becky says the staff has “become these mama bears, and they are protective of the girls in their groups… It’s exciting to see how the Lord has answered our prayers and how our staff is now looking at our girls through a biblical lens, through Christ’s eyes, instead of through culture’s eyes.”

“It’s Just God’s Hand”: Shawn’s Experience at the Fish Farm

Shawn believes he’s witnessed the power of prayer at work in the story of Adama, a former Muslim who came to the Lord, was persecuted for his belief, and cast away by his family. 

“When I was looking at launching a sustainable AG fish project, I needed a farm hand. A fellow missionary said, ‘What about Adama?’ When I look back, it’s just God’s hand. Adama is an awesome guy, very teachable and smart, super engaged… God transformed him from this really shy person to someone on fire for the Lord—to the point that he was actually invited to come back to the village to share these stories. That’s largely due to prayer and the Spirit’s work in Adama’s life.”

It’s only through the power of prayer that people’s hearts are going to be transformed and eyes are going to be opened.

From Hands of Honor and the fish farm to the work the couple have been overseeing in the Badalo slum, they say the power of prayer is needed more than ever, another way the congregation at Christ Community Church can continue to support the important work of all CAMA missionaries financed through Alliance Missions (attendees who give to CCC automatically contribute financially to Alliance Missions).

“When we look at prayer—even in the context of praying for laborers or praying for unity among believers—those are the things that are going to help us complete the Great Commission successfully, praying that we can fearlessly make known the gospel,” Becky said. “It’s only through the power of prayer that people’s hearts are going to be transformed and eyes are going to be opened. That’s what we’ve seen, from our staff to our girls.”

Shawn adds, “Right thinking leads to right doing, and I firmly believe that prayer puts us into that posture of having right thinking.”

Beyond praying for their work—and for CCC’s Gilbert family who is now serving in Senegal—the couple wants the congregation to dream with them for what’s next and celebrate what’s been accomplished, to “celebrate the impact our partnership in seeing lives and communities transformed.”

Becky says, “The reason Hands of Honor exists today is because of Christ Community Church. From day one, you all have been so incredibly supportive financially, by praying, by coming and sending teams. You can claim Hands of Honor as your own through your partnership and encouragement.”

Her name was Fatou, a child abducted and abused. It is now Elizabeth, and this is the reality of her redemption: Elizabeth delivered a healthy baby boy, and today, a local Christian family is in the process of adopting him. Witness and celebrate the power of prayer.

*For the safety of those involved, the woman pictured is not related to Fatou or Hands of Honor in any way. Fatou's name has also been changed for her protection.

Dan McCann is a freelance writer whose work appears in the Omaha World Herald.