A few weeks ago, I met a young woman named Susanna.  Susanna is 27 years old and lives in the slum near our preschool.  She was living with her four children, ages 6 to 12, in a plywood shack just big enough to cover their only bed. 

She shared her story: she was raped by her stepfather (the father of her oldest son Pedro) and ran away to another city with her mother, who took care of Susanna’s growing brood of kids while she lived in a brothel and worked as a prostitute. When her mother died three years ago, Susanna hooked up with a man who lived in the shack she now lives in. He had just moved in and taken it over after the previous owner was murdered by neighborhood drug thugs. The previous owner had been building a house behind the shack, but only the walls were up.

Unfortunately, Susanna’s boyfriend also got in trouble with traffickers and had to flee for his life, and has not been heard from in over a year. If he sets foot back in the neighborhood he will be killed. Meanwhile, the stalled construction behind her plywood shack was being used as a neighborhood trash heap, and occassionaly as the family bathroom (the family obviously has no bathroom in the hovel covering their bed, so uses buckets).

Concerned for  Susanna's precious children, I challenged a member of  a visiting work team from Princeton, who knew some carpentry, to come out and put a roof on the house. For $350, Steve, on his credit card, bought the wood and roofing, and alongside our maintenance team had the roof up by the end of the next day. We then took up a collection of about $800 to pay for local masons to put in a cement floor, toilet fixture, and sink, in addition to windows and a front door.  We were able to hook up a sewage pipe to a neighbors system.

Finally, several members of the Princeton team (including three kids ages 9 to 15) spent an afternoon cleaning out all that garbage in and around the house, and we got a truck of dirt to fill in the grassy swamp in front of the house which her outside tank drainpipe emptied into. 

On that Sunday night, I translated for Steve (the same Steve who put the roof on the house) who had an invitation to preach at a church in the slum that Hope partnered with.  We had invited Susanna, and she and her family went, all scrubbed up. Steve preached about the the woman at the well, who (first) was born in the wrong circumstances on the wrong side of town, and (second) had made bad decisions all her life, and was looked down on for having had five husbands. But none of that mattered to Jesus, who was waiting to forgive and embrace her.

After the sermon I sat next to Susanna, and during a solo, she started to cry. Turning to me, she whispered "I am that women at the well."   At the end of the sermon, the pastor issued an alter call, and weeping Susanna came forward and asked Christ to become master of her life.  

The next day, we went to talk to her more about her decision. She says she wants to give up "the life" and get a job. Our Ricardo who works with the Hope graduates met with her (many of our graduates are now Susanna's age,  27) and he offered to try to find her a job the following week. Susanna has some training as a cook, and we will try to place her at restaurant in town.

However, although Susanna gave her life to Christ, she informed us she would still need to work as a prostitute until the following Saturday, because she had a contract with the brothel and received a cash advance of about U$140 which she was to pay off by turning tricks at night.  It seemed weird to me to have her accept Christ, but agree that she will not actually live a new life until a week later.  So I asked for some help from another group who had been visiting and met Susanna.  We were able to come up with the money to pay the debt, and Susanna was free!  She paid off her debt and walked away, a free woman.  

Susanna always has a smile on her face when I see her now.  She and her children are living in the new home and look froward to knocking the plywood shack down soon.  

Just as He did thousands of years ago, Jesus did it again: He met a woman at the well and offered her grace, hope, and salvation.  And this is only the beginning of her story!