Deliverence

Nono is a young man in his twenties.  He and all his brothers were all been accused of witchcraft, when he was in his teens.  Nono actually had a history of witchcraft in his family – his grandmother, his father’s mother is a witch; so he told me.  She lives live on the coast and makes her living by catching and selling fish. She uses her powers to increase her catch.

At the time, Nono lived with his father, his four brothers and one sister and his stepmother.  His mother died when he was ten and his father re-married two years later.

Nono’s father was a good man, hard working; but one day through no fault of his own, he lost his job.  He tried hard to find more work, but was unable to.  The family was destitute.  In desperation, the stepmother went to the church to pray, and to ask for advice.  The pastor woman there explained what was going on – the father loosing the job, the first wife dying, these things were connected.  Her five stepsons were all witches.  Until that problem was dealt with, the bad luck would continue.  The woman should have known better than to marry a man whose own mother was a witch.  Now she had big problems on her hand.

Fortunately, the pastor woman offered a way of dealing with witches; Deliverance.  This was the Church of Deliverance.  The price was high – $25 dollars, per witch, plus donations of salt, soap and etc.  But it was worth it to turn their lives around.

Before that, the step mother had been kind to all the boys, but now that she knew they were witches who had caused their own father to loose his job, and killed their own mother – maybe even putting her own life in danger – things changed.  From that day on she treated them harshly.

Now, Deliverance can be easy or it can be hard.  For it to work at all, the first thing that must happen is that the witch must admit to what they are. If they do not, prayers and services will not do anything � they must be convinced. But the boys were not witches, and not inclined to admit it.  If they thought it would help their father, they would have – but they noticed that even those who admitted to being witches were often still treated as if they were in the Church of Deliverance despite the prayers, the beatings, the payments.  Of course this refusal made Deliverance all the harder.  Before it could even begin they had to be convinced of what they were, and there was only one way to do that. It involved imprisonment, starvation and beatings.  From that day on, that was the diet for Nono and his brothers,

By the time the family had found the money to pay for the Deliverance, they had no money left and had no where to live.  They all had to stay in the church – sleeping there at night, and living on the street by day.  Nono, who was the eldest, ran away to make his own way in the world.  The rest of the family went with his father and stepmother to live in the church.

While they were living there, the father started to dream of his mother.  Because his mother was a known witch, the pastor woman took this of as proof that the father was a witch himself.  This seemed to be the final straw for Nono’s father � he fell sick and very quickly died.  Now, with no more money, and still cursed by unrepentant witches, the pastor woman lost patience and threw them out.  The stepmother left the children to their fate, and they were reduced to live on the streets.

This state of affairs continued for a long time, until the two youngest brothers were taken up by the Banya a Povenda.  By this time, Nono himself had been able to find a job.  He got married, and invited his two youngest brothers to live with him. Since then, they got to school, and live normal lives.

Nono hasn’t seen his two other brothers for some years now, and for all he knows, they may be dead.  No one has seen the stepmother for a long time. None of his family go to the Church of Deliverance