Farah's Story by Gill McIlwaine
Please join me in prayer for Farah.
It was early November, 2010 and an International Students’ Bible Study group was just about to get off the ground in a St John’s home over the road from one of the students’ residences.
I was approached by a member of St Johns who was keen to introduce me to a Muslim lady, Farah (not her real name), a PhD student studying the religious development of her home country beginning from earliest times until the arrival of Islam.
Her first project was simply to look critically into the tradition that Mark wrote his gospel hiding in a cave in Cyrene. Hence her attendance at the Bible Study. She listened intently without participating and at the end of the evening I encouraged her to read the whole of Mark’s gospel. Would she be able to put it down, I wondered?
“Would she be able to put it down, I wondered?”
The following week she was there, again, but clearly rather crestfallen. Her supervisor had refused to assess her work until she improved her English. I read it over and I could see his point, but I managed to render her text into something resembling comprehensible English even though my Arabic is all but non-existent. I continued to help her to turn her faltering text into readable English for the next few assignments.
After a month or so she announced that she was moving to Manchester university where the John Rylands Library was better resourced for her research. But what about accommodation? By now her funding had dried up, the government of her country was overthrown, her family had been disgraced and worse.
To my delight, she encountered a group of Christian students, again through Friends International, who offered to feed her and invited her to move in to live in the box-room of their student house until she had completed her PhD. She continued to send her work to me for editing. These requests were always accompanied by promises to pray to Allah for us, and included requests that we pray for her.
Imagine my surprise when about five years ago, I received a phone call from her from Heathrow. She had just landed on a flight from North Africa. Would I meet her at an address in Smethwick that afternoon? It transpired that a migrant Islamic family had given a home to her husband in Smethwick. His university contract had lapsed. He was working in the basement kitchen of a Smethwick take away. She was hoping to take him to Cumbria to enjoy the glorious Lakeland scenery which she had loved so much when she had been up there for a weekend away, organised by Friends International!
On her return home, now married and able to continue her research and teaching in a university, her prolific writing in ever-improving English, has continued to arrive in my in-box.
“Contact has continued, now for 10 years, since the initial St John’s Adopt a Student request.”
Contact has continued, now for 10 years, since the initial St John’s Adopt a Student request. Often the greetings are quite formal. But just this week there has been a more than usually urgent plea for us to pray that she will be able to get a job that will enable her to leave her home country.
In her own words, ‘My country is broken; We have no food, water or medication. Please pray for me that I will be able to leave’.
Through her work, she is deeply immersed in Christian history and theology. Please pray that the Lord will enable her to meet Jesus, the Light of the World.
Gill McIlwaine