Dear All.
Imagine fleeing your country and all that is familiar to you after suffering years of abuse—now compounded by death threats to you and members of your family.
That is the desperate situation Christina* found herself in, after a life of misery and affliction.
Will you help us to help Christians like Christina, who have been forced to flee?
Christina was born in Karachi, Pakistan. When she left school she began working in a shop. Her harrowing story begins the day she arrived early to work and a Muslim man locked her in and raped her. In the days that followed, she was gang-raped by some of his friends, who videoed her and threatened to post the video on the internet if she did not comply with their demands.
Eventually she told her story to another Muslim man who said he would help her. However, he, too, took advantage of her. Threatening to tell her parents what had happened, he raped her over a three-year period, during which time she had three miscarriages and two secret abortions.
‘I began to hate myself,’ she said. ‘[The man] said I would have to convert to Islam for us to get married.’ She complied and they were married in secret. When she fell pregnant again she told her husband she wanted to keep this child. At this point she discovered her husband was already married with a child.
For a while she lived with her husband’s family in another city. During this time she was abused and ridiculed for her former Christian faith. Her husband would visit and abuse both Christina and her son. Finally she took the courage to leave and separate from her husband.
By God’s grace it was at this point in her life that she realised the folly of denying her previous Christian faith. ‘I confessed and repented of my sins and returned to my Saviour, Jesus. I apologised to my parents and they accepted me with my son. I moved back to live with them and my son started school.’
However, it was at this point that her son’s father re-entered the story. One day he grabbed her son from the doorstep. She said, ‘I hurried after him when I heard his scream, but they had already gone. The police ignored my request for help. I cried throughout that horrible time and pleaded with God to pardon me and return my son to me.’
Eventually she and her brother went to where her son was being kept and took him to a shelter home. Her husband responded by filing an abduction report against Christina and members of her family, but at a court hearing Christina was granted temporary custody of her son.
Her husband began issuing death threats to Christina and her family and it was at this point, as fleeing from the country became necessary, that Christina was connected with a Release International partner.
| 
.jpeg)