My Faith or My Family

This wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Normally this scornful atheist doesn't touch "Christian" genre books, but when you're doing an around the world challenge and trying to find a book for Burkina Faso, there isn't a lot of choice.

And certainly there's a lot of "God lead me to..." and "Thanks to the power of the Lord I..." and "Because of Jesus this happened..." but there is also a great deal of information about what it's like to grow up in Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries in the world.

Wikipedia says Burkina Faso's per capita income at present is $564, and during the nineties it may have been worse. The conditions described in the book are truly terrible. Both of the author's parents died when he was a child, of some show more mysterious disease. I wonder if this is a veiled reference to AIDS, or if perhaps he really doesn't know what they died of. Even in what were considered prosperous families, almost no one was properly nourished and everyone faced the possibility of outright starvation. In the cities the crime rate was incredible, the police were corrupt and you could never feel safe.

Jean-Paul Tiendrebeogo was born and raised in rural Burkina Faso during the eighties and nineties. He was an intelligent and thoughtful young man, but he had no prospects: he was an orphan without resources whose abusive stepfather quite literally tried to kill him (as in, like, murder, with an ax) on several occasions. So he fled to the nation's capital of Ouagadougou. There he got involved with a Christian group who provided for his basic needs so could go to school.

An American couple in the group who was volunteering in Burkina Faso met Jean-Paul and fell in love with him. Eventually they sort of unofficially adopted him. I think they would have really adopted him if it wasn't for the fact that he was over 18 by that time. So, because of the Lord (or because of sheer dumb luck), Jean-Paul was saved from a poor, nasty, brutish and short life and an inevitable early death (from AIDS or malnutrition or violence or that nasty infection in his leg that he could never get treated or a myriad of other causes). He moved to America in 2000 when he was about 19, graduated from Bluffton College in Ohio (I know quite a few people who went there), went on to get a master's degree in something, and lived happily ever after.

I wonder if he ever felt like helping his step-siblings come to the US or have a substantially better life in Africa. I'd be torn between family obligations and "well, they all treated me like crap, why should I help them?" But I suppose a good Christian would help. show less