“Sometimes I regret I was ever born.
Sometimes I wish I would just die”
Chantaline Zerephin says this quietly as she holds her malnourished daughter on her lap. Chantaline’s eyes are empty, her expression hollow. She has no home, no food, no job. The 27-year mother of three has lost all hope.
Left homeless after a 2008 hurricane destroyed her house, Chantaline sent her older children to live with friends. She now moves from place to place in the coastal town of Petit Goave, Haiti. She begs friends to sleep on their floors. Her daily meal is typically a cup of corn.
Chantaline does not have the security of knowing she has a regular place to stay. “A friend once threw water on me so I would leave. I told him, ‘I understand. You want me out. You don’t have to do that.’ I went outside and slept on the porch,” she said.
“This, rather, is the fasting that I wish…
Setting free the oppressed, breaking every yoke…”
(Isaiah 58:6)
Without a job, she can’t rent a home. Without food, her daughter Naika, 2, goes hungry and falls ill. And living without hope, Chantaline once tried to kill herself.
Even though she hopes for a better future, Chantaline is plagued by countless obstacles caused by poverty… and she has nowhere to turn. Each complication piles on top of another until they become a weighty burden on Chantaline’s thin shoulders. This mother simply does not know what to do anymore, and despair is never far away.
“I think I could go even further downward than where I’m at,” she said. “I’m 27 and no one is helping me. The only way out is to go down, down, down.”
Through your compassionate gift, you have the power to help break the cycle of poverty — and restore hope — for desperate mothers like Chantaline. Please, do what you can to help today.
View Food For The Poor’s August 2009 Newsletter.
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