He said I should move to the far side of the room.

I stood up from where I had been kneeling and back toward the window.

My legs were shaking so badly I could barely stand.

My mind was racing, trying to understand what he was planning to do.

He began pouring the kerosene.

Not on me.

On the floor, around the door frame, along the threshold, creating a barrier, a line of fuel between me and the only exit.

The reality of what was happening started to sink in.

He was going to burn me alive.

ug trapped me in this room and set it on fire.

I couldn’t speak.

My voice had completely left me.

I just watched him pour the kerosene in a careful line, making sure to get it into every crack of the old wooden door frame.

When the jug was empty, he stepped back into the hallway.

He pulled a box of matches from his pocket.

That’s when he finally looked at me.

For just a moment, I saw something in his face.

Not quite regret, but maybe recognition of what he was about to do.

Recognition that this was his wife, the woman he had been married to for 7 years, and he was about to burn her to death.

But then the hardness came back.

He said something about this being my choice, that I had brought this on myself.

Then he struck a match.

The sound of it, that small scraping sound, was the loudest thing I had ever heard.

I was paralyzed.

I couldn’t move, couldn’t scream, couldn’t do anything but stand there and watch the tiny flame flare to life in his hand.

Hassan bent down and held the match to the kerosene soaked door frame.

Nothing happened.

The match burned steadily in his hand, but the kerosene didn’t catch.

He held it there for several seconds, touching it directly to the wet wood.

Nothing.

The match burned down to his fingers and he had to drop it.

He looked confused.

I was confused.

Kerosene should ignite easily.

That’s the whole point of it.

Hassan struck another match.

Same result.

The match burned, but the kerosene didn’t catch fire.

He struck a third match, a fourth.

I watched in frozen disbelief as he went through half the box of matches.

Each time holding the flame to the kerosene, each time watching it simply not work.

His confusion was turning to frustration.

He bent down closer, touching the match directly to a puddle of kerosene on the floor.

The match went out.

Not from wind.

There was no wind in that closed hallway.

It just extinguished like someone had blown it out.

Hassan’s hand was shaking now.

I could see it even from across the room.

He struck three matches at once, holding them together to make a bigger flame.

He touched them to the kerosene.

They went out instantly.

All three at the same time.

The smell of kerosene was overpowering.

I knew that fuel was there, pulled on the floor, soaked into the wood.

There was no reason it shouldn’t burn.

No logical reason.

Hassan was breathing hard now.

He looked scared.

He stood up, backed away from the door, and just stared at the line of kerosene.

Then he looked at me.

I don’t know what my face showed in that moment.

I was in shock.

I didn’t understand what was happening anymore than he did.

He asked me, his voice shaking, what kind of sorcery this was.

I couldn’t answer.

I had no answer.

We stood there for a long moment in silence, just looking at each other across that room, across that line of kerosene that refused to to burn.

Then Hassan made a sound almost like a whimper and ran.

I heard his footsteps pounding down the stairs.

I heard the front door slam open and then silence.

I stood there unable to move for what felt like hours, but was probably only minutes.

My mind couldn’t process what had just happened.

The kerosene was still there.

I could smell it, see it glistening on the floor, but it hadn’t burned in match after match after match, and it hadn’t burned.

Finally, my legs gave out, and I collapsed to the floor.

Not near the kerosene, I was still afraid of it.

But by the window, I sat with my back against the wall and started to shake uncontrollably.

He saved me.

That was the only thought my mind could form.

Jesus saved me.

There was no other explanation.

Nothing in the natural world could explain what I had just witnessed.

Kerosene burns.

That’s what it does.

That’s its entire purpose.

But it hadn’t.

I started to cry.

Not from fear anymore.

The fear was draining away, leaving me hollow and strange.

I cried from relief, from disbelief, from a kind of awe I had never experienced before.

God had intervened directly, physically, miraculously.

He had saved my life.

I don’t know how long I sat there.

Time felt meaningless.

And at some point, I heard Hassan’s mother calling from downstairs, asking what was going on.

Where was Hassan? What was that smell? I didn’t answer.

I couldn’t.

Eventually, I heard her go back into her apartment and close her door.

She was old and easily confused.

She would probably convince herself she had imagined the commotion.

I sat by that window as the night deepened outside.

The kerosene smell gradually faded a little, though it still made my eyes water.

The reality of my situation slowly came back into focus.

Hassan would return, maybe not tonight, but soon.

And he would bring others with him.

My father, my brothers, maybe other men from the mosque.

They would find another way to deal with me.

Fire hadn’t worked, but there were other methods.

I was still trapped, still in danger.

The miracle had bought me time.

But it hadn’t solved the fundamental problem.

I was an apostate in a country where that could mean death.

I needed to run.

The decision to escape was both instant and agonizing.

I had nowhere to go, no money of my own, no friends who would help me if they knew what I had done.

My family would hunt me down if they knew I was trying to escape.

But staying meant death.

Maybe not tonight.

Maybe not tomorrow, but soon.

I waited until I was sure Hassan’s mother was asleep.

Then I unlocked the bedroom door from the inside.

Hassan had left the key in the lock when he ran and crept downstairs.

The house was dark and quiet.

I moved as silently as I could, feeling my way along familiar walls.

I knew Hassan kept money hidden in his study.

Not a lot, but some.

He didn’t trust banks entirely, so he kept cash on hand.

I had seen him count at once.

It maybe a few thousand reels.

I found the study, found the small safe where he kept documents and valuables.

I knew the combination.

I had seen him open it before.

My hands were shaking so badly it took three tries, but finally it clicked open.

Inside were some papers, some gold jewelry that had belonged to his first wife and a small stack of bills.

I took the money.

I left everything else.

I wasn’t a thief, just desperate.

I went back upstairs and grabbed a few things.

a change of clothes, my identification papers, a headscarf, and from the bathroom cabinet hidden in the tampon box, Ruth’s cross.

I put it on for the first time.

The thin chain around my neck, the small cross resting against my chest, hidden under my clothes.

It felt right, like armor.

Then I crept back downstairs and out the front door.

It was after 3:00 in the morning.

The streets of Sana were mostly empty.

There were some men still awake, sitting outside, drinking tea or chewing cot, but they paid no attention to one more covered woman hurrying through the darkness.

I walked for about 20 minutes, my heart pounding, expecting at any moment to hear her son’s voice behind me or to be stopped by someone asking where I was going alone at this hour.

But no one stopped me.

I reached the house of my old friend Safia.

We had known each other since childhood.

Though we had grown apart after my marriage, Safia came from a more modern family.

Her father was a doctor.

Her mother had studied in Egypt.

They were still Muslim, but less strict, more open-minded.

I didn’t know if Safia would help me.

I didn’t know if she would even open the door, but I had nowhere else to go.

I knocked very quietly, her afraid of waking the whole household.

After a long moment, I heard footsteps.

The door opened a crack.

Safia looked out, confused and alarmed.

When she recognized me, her eyes went wide.

She pulled me inside quickly and closed the door.

What happened? What’s wrong? Why are you here? I started to cry.

I couldn’t help it.

The fear and adrenaline and relief all came flooding out through my tears.

I told her not everything.

I didn’t tell her I had become a Christian.

I just said Hassan had discovered I had doubts about Islam, that he had tried to hurt me, that I needed to leave.

Please, I begged her.

Please help me.

Safia was silent for a long moment.

studying my face, I could see her trying to decide what to do.

Then she made up her mind.

She took me upstairs to her room.

She gave me water, made me sit down, and I waited until I stopped shaking enough to talk.

Then she said her brother Rashid knew someone who helped women in difficult situations.

Women escaping abusive marriages, women in danger.

It was dangerous and expensive, but it was possible to get out of Yemen to reach Djibouti or sometimes Oman to find refuge.

Would I want that to leave Yemen? To leave my family forever? I didn’t even hesitate.

Yes.

Safia nodded.

She said she would talk to Rashid in the morning.

I should sleep, try to rest.

I was safe here for now, but I couldn’t sleep.

I lay on a mat on her floor while she went back to bed and I stared at the ceiling and thought about what I had just agreed to.

I was going to leave Yemen, leave my family, leave everything I had ever known.

I was going to become a refugee.

The word felt huge and terrifying and somehow also liberating.

I’ve a refugee, a person fleeing persecution.

That’s what I was now.

I touched the cross under my shirt and whispered a prayer of thanks.

Jesus had saved me from the fire.

Now I was trusting him to save me from everything else too.

The next 48 hours are a blur in my memory.

Rashid came in the morning and talked to me.

He was cautious, asking questions to make sure I was serious, that I understood what I was asking for.

He said the journey would be dangerous.

There were checkpoints, smugglers who couldn’t always be trusted, risks of being caught and sent back.

But he had contacts, people who had done this before.

It would cost money.

Most of what I had stolen from Hassan, plus what Safia’s family could contribute as a loan.

I agreed to everything.

We couldn’t wait.

Hassan would have discovered I was gone by now.

He would be looking for me.

My family would be looking for me.

We had to move fast.

That afternoon, Rashi took me to meet a man he knew, someone who arranged transport for people who needed to disappear.

I won’t give details about who he was or how it worked.

There are others still using that route and I won’t endanger them.

All I’ll say is that it involved several different vehicles, several different drivers who didn’t ask questions.

It involved traveling at night, hiding during the day.

It involved checkpoints where I had to pretend to be someone else, show documents that that had been forged.

It involved terror like I had never known.

the constant certainty that at any moment we would be stopped.

I would be discovered, I would be dragged back.

But we weren’t stopped.

2 days after fleeing Hassan’s house, I crossed the border into Djibouti, I almost couldn’t believe it when it happened.

We drove through a checkpoint and suddenly the signs were in French instead of Arabic.

The guards were wearing different uniforms.

The flag was different.

I was out of Yemen for the first time in my life.

I was outside my country.

I wanted to cry with relief, but I was too exhausted, too numb.

The driver took me to a refugee camp on the outskirts of Djibouti City.

It was huge, sprawling, full of people from all over the Horn of Africa, Somalia, Itria, Ethiopia, Yemen.

People fleeing war, famine, persecution, people like me.

I was registered by the UN refugee agency.

Given a tent space, given basic supplies, told to wait, processing could take weeks or months.

I was safe for now.

That first night in the camp, and I lay on a thin mat in a tent I shared with three other women from Yemen, and finally let myself feel everything I had been holding back.

I had escaped.

I had survived.

Jesus had saved me from fire.

and he had saved me again through Safia, through Rashid, through strangers who had helped me reach freedom.

I took out the cross from under my clothes and held it in my hand and cried until I had no tears left.

I had lost everything and I had gained everything.

The refugee camp was called Marcazi.

It sat in a dusty plane outside Djibouti City, a sea of white tents and improvised shelters stretching as far as I could see.

The air was hot and dry, full of blowing sand and the smell of too many people living too close together.

When I first arrived, I thought it looked like the end of the world, but it was the beginning of mine.

Those first days were disorienting.

Everything was strange.

The language, the people, the way the camp operated.

Most people spoke Somali or French, neither of which I knew well.

My Arabic helped with some of the other Yemen refugees.

But many of them were suspicious of a woman traveling alone.

Why was I here? Where was my family? Why wasn’t I with my husband? I learned quickly to keep my story vague.

I said only that I had fled an abusive marriage, that my family wouldn’t protect me.

This was true enough, and it was a story people understood.

The camp was full of women fleeing violence.

I didn’t tell anyone I was a Christian.

Not at first.

It was still too dangerous.

There were conservative Muslims in the camp, too.

And I didn’t know who could be trusted.

I was assigned to a tent with three other women.

One was from Somalia, a mother whose children had died in the famine.

One was from Iritria who had fled mandatory military conscription.

One was from Yemen like me, an older woman whose house had been destroyed in the civil war.

We didn’t speak much at first.

Everyone in the camp carried trauma and we all needed space to breathe.

But slowly over days and weeks we began to talk, to share stories, to become something like friends.

I learned how the camp worked, where to get food rations, where to find clean water, how to navigate the bureaucracy of the refugee system.

I registered with the UN.

I applied for asylum.

I was told it could take months, maybe years before I was resettled somewhere safe.

Years.

I tried not to think about that.

I tried to focus on one day at a time.

And then about two weeks after I arrived, um, something happened that changed everything.

I was in line for food distribution when I heard someone singing.

The voice was faint coming from somewhere behind the medical tent.

I couldn’t make out the words, but the melody was beautiful, haunting.

I found myself drawn toward it, almost without deciding to move.

Behind the medical tent was a small cleared area where someone had set up a few plastic chairs in a circle.

About a dozen people were sitting there, mostly Ethiopians and Eritrians, and one person was standing, leading them in song.

The language was Amharic.

I learned later, but I didn’t need to understand the words to understand what was happening.

It was a church service.

My heart started pounding.

I stood at a distance, half hidden behind a tent, just watching.

They sang several songs.

And then someone stood and read from a book.

I was close enough to see it was a Bible.

Then someone else prayed, speaking in that same musical Amharic, hands raised.

I felt tears starting to form.

I had never seen Christians worship openly before.

In Yemen, such a gathering would be impossible, dangerous.

But here in this refugee camp, in this place of suffering and loss, these people were praising Jesus.

As the service was ending, one of the women looked up and saw me standing there.

She smiled and waved, gesturing for me to come closer.

I hesitated.

Then I walked over.

She spoke to me in broken Arabic, asking if I was new to the camp.

I nodded.

She asked if I was a believer.

I didn’t know how to answer.

If I said yes, word might spread.

Someone from Yemen might find out.

Might get back to Hassan somehow.

might make it harder for me to get asylum.

But looking at her kind face at the joy in her eyes, despite everything she had probably suffered, I couldn’t lie.

I said, “Yes.

Yes, I believe in Jesus.

” Her face lit up.

She pulled me into an embrace, speaking rapidly in Amharic.

I didn’t understand the words, but I understood the meaning.

Welcome.

You’re home.

Your family.

That’s how I found my church.

It wasn’t a building.

It wasn’t an official organization.

It was just a group of about 20 believers from different countries who met three times a week behind the medical tent to worship together.

Most of them were Ethiopian Orthodox or Eratrian, Catholic.

A few were Protestant.

Their traditions were different.

Their languages were different, but their faith was the same, and they welcomed me like I had always belonged.

I started attending every service.

The songs were in languages I didn’t know, but I hummed along anyway.

The prayers were sometimes in languages I couldn’t understand, but I said, “Amen.

” And when they read from the Bible, someone would translate for me into Arabic, and I would soak up the words like someone dying of thirst.

For the first time in my life, I was worshiping Jesus openly, not hiding, not pretending, not afraid.

It was freedom like I had never imagined.

One of the women in the group, an Ethiopian named Bethl, took me under her wing.

She had been a Christian all her life, raised in the church, and she knew the Bible deeply.

She started teaching me, helping me understand things I had only read about on my own.

And she explained the trinity in a way that finally made sense to me, not as a mathematical formula, but as a relationship of love.

She taught me about the Holy Spirit, this concept I had barely understood, and how the spirit lived in believers, guided them, comforted them.

She taught me about the church, the body of Christ, and how we weren’t meant to follow Jesus alone, but in community.

I had been so isolated for so long.

This community, this family of believers, was like water in a desert.

But there was something I needed to do, something that felt important, necessary.

I needed to be baptized.

Bethl explained that baptism was a public declaration of faith.

It was symbolic, representing death to the old life and resurrection to the new.

It was how Christians had marked their commitment to Jesus for 2,000 years.

I wanted it desperately.

We made arrangements with the pastor of a local Djiboutian church, a small congregation that sometimes helped the refugees.

He agreed to baptize me and several others who had come to faith in the camp.

The baptism was scheduled for May 14th, 2023.

Almost exactly 2 months after I I had fled Yemen, almost exactly 2 months after the night Hassan tried to burn me alive.

We went to the church early in the morning.

Continue reading….
« Prev Next »