STILLWATER, Okla. — Up until two years ago, Emmanuel Crawford spent 16-hour days bailing water from fishing canoes.
His life changed nearly the same time a quilt was made that included his name and a stitched scripture that read, “I am bringing you to a new home, and I am giving you a new name of distinction.”
Six-year-old Emmanuel was enslaved in the northern Ghana fishing industry. A victim of human trafficking, he was the 22nd child rescued by Pam Cope, author and rescue worker.
Audrey Crawford, Emmanuel’s mother, had five children but always wanted to adopt a child as well.
Crawford, a dentist in Grove, knew Cope.
“I found out this little boy needed a home,” she said. “It had just been in my heart my whole life.”
She visited Emmanuel last January for the first time.
“Sure enough, we fell in love,” she said.
After nine months of tedious work and three more visits to Ghana, she was able to bring Emmanuel home.
“It gave us time to prepare our hearts,” she said.
Two years after his rescue, Emmanuel plays with a soccer ball outside Oklahoma State University’s library Thursday next to Stacey Young, the woman who made him the quilt right before he was adopted.
“I like football, but I don’t like getting tackled and I don’t like getting pushed, either,” Emmanuel said of the new sport.
Crawford said she always knew there was a woman out there who had made the quilt for Emmanuel, but the two did not meet until a conference in Dallas last month.
They ran into each other again Thursday, this time at OSU’s International Justice Mission’s Fair Trade Market, which was an event to raise awareness on human slavery and trafficking. It featured booths with vendors that engage and promote fair trade.
Young was selling necklaces and bracelets made from beads she bought in Ghana, while Crawford was visiting a niece who helped organize the event.
All profits made from Young’s necklaces go toward Cope’s Touch a Life Foundation’s program in Ghana — money used to help rescue exploited children and pay for their education.
Young, who lives in Dallas, worked with the foundation since January 2009 when Cope began attending the same church as she. Cope showed the church a video of what she does.
“That was it,” Young said.
“That is going to change our whole life,” she recalled telling her husband that day.
They got to know each other, and Crawford began volunteering one day a week. Then, in November, she stitched 80 quilts, which she took to Ghana for the rescued children. On that trip she was part of a three-day rescue mission in which two children were saved from a fishing village. The rescued children now live in a Christian orphanage.
“They have life,” she said. “It’s the difference between life and death in every way.”
Child rescued from slavery in Ghana's fishing industry » Local News » Stillwater NewsPress
Source: Stillwater NewsPress
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