Women Who Inspire: Stacy Omorefe, A Heart For Ghana’s Children

This week Christian Women Living Magazine would like to take you to Ghana, South Africa and share with you a ministry that truly has a heart for God’s children. Meet Stacy Omorefe, a woman who inspires us to go to those places to rescue those in need. Thank you Stacy for allowing us to share your life and ministry with our readers.

Cyndi Kay Green: Who is Stacy Omorefe and who is she and what is her testimony?
Stacy Omorefe: I grew up in a small rural community in South Dakota.

Before moving to the community in South Dakota, my family lived in Broken Arrow, OK. My parents attended a Bible College there, and they had many friends who shared their faith. I was very close to Jesus from a young age, and while we were in Oklahoma, I felt that God was calling me to become a missionary to Ghana, West Africa. This was something that stuck in my heart throughout my youth.

Once we moved to SD, all of our old friendships were gone, and I didn’t connect with people in the same ways. I never felt like I fit. I felt awkward and strange, and when I would tell people that I felt that God wanted me to be a missionary, I would get weird looks. After a while, I stopped telling people what I felt God and wanted me to do.

In high school, I wanted too badly to fit in. I began partying and caring too much about what the boys thought of me. By the time I graduated from high school, I experimented with things I shouldn’t have been. I moved out of my parent’s home, a rebellious teenager, and began exploring what the world had to offer. My life was on a completely different track than where God had called me to when I was six years old and so full of faith in Him.

It took me one year in the world to know that my soul was dying. I had no peace, joy, or vision for the future, and I felt lonely and hopeless. I believe that the Holy Spirit began to remind me in those moments that there was a greater purpose for my life. God had called me to be a missionary to Ghana, and that He had not taken that calling back because of the path I had chosen. God was there waiting for me to call upon Him.

In 1998 I started attending a Bible College, and God brought my heart back to Him, and He poured His love out on me. I was healed from so much of the trauma and pain I experienced while I was living as a prodigal. I thought I would be a lifer at this college because I had had so many encounters with God’s love there. God had other plans, and six months later, I moved to New Mexico, where I helped a pastoral team with a church plant. I was entirely out of my comfort zone, but it was a hands-on training ground for me.

Six months after arriving in New Mexico, I felt God speak to my heart that it was time to plan towards going to Ghana. I was so excited about this invitation. I began fundraising and planning while I had no idea where I was going in Ghana or under what ministry I would be serving. I just knew that I was going. I applied to serve with a mission group out of Missouri, but they denied me because I couldn’t speak French. Ghana is not a French-speaking country, so I knew that meant that God had other plans for me. My pastor asked me to check into Youth With A Mission. I was accepted into their program just a few months before their next program starting in January 2000.

I was so excited that God was taking me on this journey. I arrived in Ghana, knowing nothing about the people, the culture, the food…I was trusting that God would lead and direct me. He did just that. While I was studying at YWAM, I met my husband, Johnbull.

We had known each other for a short four weeks and knew that God was binding us together for a lifetime. Seventeen long months later, we were married on a Tuesday in a small church in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Nothing about our beginning was conventional, but we did find the American dream. We both found meaningful work; he worked for Naatje’s Concrete, and I ran an at-home daycare. We owned our home, served on the ministry team at our church, and welcomed two beautiful boys into the world. We enjoyed our life and the security of our daily routine, but we always had a dream of returning to Ghana together.

In 2006, the American dream that we were living in began to shift. Johnbull, a Nigerian from Benin City, knew that his father back home had been sick for several years. In October 2006, his father passed away. In Nigeria, it is common for families to keep their deceased loved ones in the mortuary for several months while planning their funeral. So, John’s family waited to bury his father while we began to make travel plans for the end of the year.

During the months leading up to the funeral and our return to Africa, we felt God’s leading to begin the ministry that we had been dreaming about over the past five years, City of Refuge Ministries (CORM). While we were headed for Nigeria, we knew that CORM was meant to be located in Ghana, the country that first brought our lives together. We began to dream together all the possibilities of what a ministry in Ghana would look like. Though we were headed for Nigeria, we added Ghana to our list of destinations. We collected donations of children’s clothes, baby items, and over-the-counter medicines for our trip, and we made plans to reconnect with old friends and classmates in Ghana. All the while, we wondered if this meant we would be moving to Ghana. What about the American dream? What about our two little boys under the age of three? What about my family that we would be leaving behind?

Our trip to Nigeria for Johnbull’s father’s funeral was successful. The third day of the three-day event was a beautiful church service held in the family’s front yard and led by Johnbull. His father had been a fetish priest and worshiped idols instead of Jesus. That morning, several family members and visitors made commitments to lay down their idols and follow Jesus. This Sunday service marked the beginning of something new for our Nigerian family.

From there, we traveled to Ghana, where we visited hospitals and children’s homes. We gave money to help families living on the street and helped pay school fees for needy children. We felt alive while we were sharing and helping where we could, but we returned to South Dakota without a clear vision of what God was calling us to do. All we could do was wait in anticipation for God to reveal the next piece of the puzzle.

Little did we know that the next piece of the puzzle would change our lives forever. A few weeks after returning from Ghana, a friend told us about an article written in the New York Times about an evil injustice happening in Ghana. On Ghana’s Lake Volta, the world’s largest man-made lake, children were trafficked into slavery, working endless hours in fishing boats. We hadn’t previously heard about child slavery, and with the news that it was happening in our beloved Ghana, we began to learn more about the injustice of human trafficking, reading article after article, one horrific story after the next. We were learning, for the first time, that many people around the globe were considered disposable. Among these “disposable people” were thousands of children living as slaves on Ghana’s Lake Volta.

We discovered that the lake had previously been forested land that had been flooded. There were thousands of trees under the water prone to catching and then snaring the fishing nets. Fishermen brought young boys to work for them because of their tiny, nimble fingers that could untangle the nets from the underwater branches. They brought young boys because they knew they could work long and hard hours on minimal food and with few expectations. They brought young boys to work for them, and there, these young boys lost their identity, their dreams, and their voice.

The more we learned about the issue of child slavery, the more we knew God was leading us to go to Lake Volta to discover the truth for ourselves. A few months later, we traveled back to Ghana for our first trip to Lake Volta. It took us seventeen hours of long, arduous travel on dusty, rough, red roads in an old Nissan double cab truck before we reached the northern shores of Lake Volta. We made our way to the banks of the lake, where a canoe sat on the shore. There were two young boys and a young man who appeared to have severe learning disabilities mending the fishing nets that lined the canoe. Our Ghanaian friend spoke Twi to the boys, asking their names. The boys shared their names with hollow eyes. It seemed as if they were physically present, but they had no idea who they were. When asked how they ended up at the lake, all they could tell us was they had been given to the fisherman by their mother. They were told they would be given an education, but they were now fishing and had never been to school. I saw my boys’ faces and wondered how we were privileged not to find ourselves in this situation. Their mother believed she was doing the right thing for her children.

The brothers had not seen their mother since she gave them to the fisherman several years earlier. They couldn’t remember where their mother’s village was or even their last name. Our hearts broke for these boys. Their distended stomachs, hollow eyes, red hair from malnutrition, and stolen identities captured our hearts in a way that we could not contain or fully express. Right there on the banks of Lake Volta, we heard God speak so clearly to our hearts. “Be a voice for the voiceless. Rescue my children from this bondage. Introduce them to me. I will restore their identities. They will no longer be slaves but children of God.” We could not rescue those brothers, but we did participate in the freedom of three other children.

Since that first trip to the lake, we have been a part of serving over one hundred children who have been rescued from slavery on the lake or other vulnerable situations.

In January 2010, we relocated our family to Ghana from South Dakota and began building the CORM Children’s Village. Our campus had over twenty acres of land, children’s homes, a house for single mothers, staff housing, an administration building, a primary and junior high school, sports fields cafeteria, and a church and prayer house.

Over the past 11 years, we have witnessed God change lives, families, and communities through our obedience and faith in Him. Today our ministry, City of Refuge Ministries, is the home to almost one hundred children who have found refuge. At the CORM Children’s Village, we provide restorative care for children who have experienced trauma. We do this through education, counseling, medical care, mentorship, and discipleship.

CKG: Tell our readers about your ministry.
SO: City of Refuge Ministries is located on 20 acres of land about sixty minutes from Accra, the capital city. We are a small organization with a big vision. Our primary focus is on the issue of child slavery on Ghana’s Lake Volta. We work with children who have been rescued from slavery to help provide holistic restoration to them. Many of the children who have been rescued live with us until they complete university; others are reunified with their families.
Our CORM Community Impact Team works within the villages that are most vulnerable to selling their children into child slavery and the communities that receive children into slavery. Our goal is to see the eradication of slavery in our lifetime and villages that will surrender entirely to the will of God in their lives. We do this through Community Health Evangelism, building trust and lasting relationships.

CKG: What has had the biggest impact on your relationship with Jesus?
SO: When I began to fully grasp the love of Jesus for me. His deep love for me. His deep love for the children that we serve. Knowing that He knows our names and our hearts, and He wants us to know Him more and more. His invitation to surrender everything to Him. Nothing we do could exist without Him. He keeps showing up!

CKG: What is the most beautiful display of God’s Grace that you have seen?
SO: We have lived in Ghana for 11years. Our ministry continues to grow, which means we continue to add hungry stomachs to our CORM family. Every month God shows up and provides exactly what we need. We have never had to skip a meal or even worry about not having enough. He is so gracious to us!

CKG: What inspires you to press forward?
SO: Their future. Our kids are having so much to give this world, and we want to make sure they are fully equipped for the call of God in their lives.

CKG: Can you recall a time when you knew that God was the only way you had a provision through a certain situation?
SO: 2020 was a challenging year for several of our supporters, and they had to stop their monthly support. This gave us a significant deficit in our monthly budget. God continues to provide for all of our needs. Our faith is entirely on Him.

CKG: Who do you see as your mentor?
SO: I have never met her in person, but I admire Heidi Baker from Iris Ministries, and I have learned so much from watching her and her husband, Rolland, from afar.

CKG: What are some of the biggest challenges facing international ministries in today’s world?
SO: I feel like missionaries go on the mission field without an adequate understanding of the culture they are entering or their role as a missionary. Often, they want to fix the problems and throw finances at the situation instead of partnering with the locals to encourage them and build them up to deal with the issues that are a burden to them.

CKG: Where do you go to just be quiet in the presence of God?
SO: I love to go on walks to be alone with God.

CKG: What has life been like in Ghana?
SO: We have raised our children here, and I have said more than once that I am so glad we are raising our children here. We don’t always have electricity or running water, but we live in a community where we are dependent on one another. Life is slow here.

CKG: If you could spend the day anywhere in the world with any person, where, who and why?
SO: I would love to have a chat with Jesus. To look into His eyes and hear the tone of His voice.

CKG: What is the easiest part about your day?
SO: The easiest part of my day is just before I sleep when I am winding down from the day.

SO: Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share!
CKG: Stacy, Thank you so much for allowing me the opportunity to share CORM with our readers!