Stephen Lungu’s mother gave birth to him when she was fourteen. Things went downhill from there for both of them.

The Zimbabwean teen-age girl had been forced to marry a fifty-year old man. A brother then a sister quickly followed Stephan and the young lady found herself with three children before her twentieth birthday.

Horror ruled the home. The child watched his father, a respected man in his church, beat his mother. Church was one thing but the man was an animal at home.

“The only time we smiled was when he left for work,” Stephan remembers.

The four-year old tried to intervene to help his mother when the beatings started and got pushed against the wall for his troubles. Once his head was bleeding and a rage burned in his young heart, “Let me grow up. I’ll kill you!” he thought. “I wanted to kill him every day.”

Finally his mother could take no more and she ran away to another city. There she left the six-year old with little brother and younger sister while she went to the bathroom.

She never came back.

The children waited for hours and finally the police found them. They were separated and it was 39 years before Stephan saw his sister again. Continue reading →