Mariah Gossett
Appearances
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
Erin, Mariah, and I sat down to walk through the timeline of Sophie's adoptions of C and M. As important as trying to figure out what is there, what is present, the information that Sophie does share in the memoir, I also found it difficult and confusing when I was going back to try to put together a timeline to see all the things that she left out.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
She does talk about facing resistance. She talks about actually being called a Satanist by people in Zambia. And in that, she doesn't really extrapolate on the reasons that they might have come to that conclusion. Right. But I recall one of the passages where she writes, I think it's in her journal or it's a conversation that she's having with Jesus.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
And she said, maybe it's just because they don't understand me and they don't understand my call to be here. And they don't understand the work that that Jesus has sent me to do in this place that they just can't imagine or envision why I would leave here. my comfortable place in America to come here.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
And so it's very much a me against the world, me and Jesus against the world kind of mentality that I think she brings into this. It's like, well, I don't have to explain it or I don't have to give too many details because this is the assignment that I got from Jesus. back to establishing a timeline.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
So in the course of my research from her memoir, her blog that we discovered, it's called Crowns of Beauty, and we were able to pull the archives from her blog up, even high school yearbooks and news articles from the college that she went to. I used all of these things to try to come up with some kind of timeline. And
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
The best conclusion that I could come to based on the dates that she cited in her books is that there were actually two trips that Sophie took to Zambia prior to committing to leave college early and move there. So the first one is... She talks about in her memoir, going in the summer of 2008 to Kafui, Zambia, after she completed her freshman year of college.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
That's when she went on this month-long mission trip. Then the following year, as early as April 2009, she's actually back in Zambia, at least for a few months now. doing an orphan ministry internship. And it's here where her memoir actually begins. And it's on this trip that she decides that she hears this call that she's being led to move to Zambia and be a missionary.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
And so the game plan is to go back home, announce this to her parents and family, kind of wrap things up, and then move back to Zambia. And so based on the timeline that I could, you know, decipher and research, and also I know Mariah as well, as we were pulling different things together, it's by December 2009, she's back in Zambia working for a nonprofit organization.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
By November 2011, she's posting this letter on her friend's blog. In it, she writes that she's currently serving under an organization called GEMS, which works with vulnerable women and girls here. And she says, though my position allows some outreach with orphans, I plan to spend the next few years here in Zambia. And she talks about her process of adopting.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
So that's all that we really know from how she describes it. from her friend's blog and what she's doing. Her memoir is a little or a lot more obscure about the work that she's doing. She talks about living in a three-room house with another missionary. That house was a service center for women and children that tracks with serving vulnerable women and children.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
But then she also talks about teaching English and going to the compounds to evangelize and visit homes. cooking and cleaning and singing and dancing and going to prayer meetings. But she doesn't really get into kind of the brass tacks of what she's actually doing on a day-to-day with this organization.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
And certainly nothing alluding to the fact that she's kind of helping to construct this day school.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
And I think at this point, one might be questioning, okay, so how does she get involved with orphans and orphanages? And it's during the time that I believe that she was working at GEMS that she writes in her memoir, she feels led to go to a crisis orphanage that she had only been to once before. So that's all we get from how she started visiting orphanages.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
And so much of her memoir focuses on the sick children that she met either primarily in the orphanage but also in the community. But because her story starts to shift so much, again, talking about these orphanage settings and even how she met her first daughter.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
And so, I don't know, just something feels unsettling and certainly left out to just say, yes, one day I felt led to go to a crisis orphanage out of all the different ways places that you could have gone to explore in Zambia if you wanted to give back in a different way. That's kind of all that we get.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
This is also an important time to talk about the fact of, I think Sophie paints herself as kind of this in isolation. I think she mentions fellowship with other missionaries was rare. I was unsure how to cultivate cross-cultural friendships. And so she kind of positions herself as like, no, yeah, there were other missionaries there, but I was really just by myself always.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
or like really just ingrained in Zambian culture, even as I'm doing these prayer meetings and these Bible studies. But the one thing that's not mentioned in her memoir that was very interesting though, and we found it from a random presentation online, but there are photos of her father visiting her in Zambia.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
There are photos of her father cooking with local Zambian women and also photos of him, Sophie, and her oldest daughter, Em. And so none of this, right, my family visiting me, none of this is mentioned in the memoir. And I think when you are so far from home, like having pieces from home is just so important. Yeah, it was just a very interesting omission.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
So for her first, the first organization that she was at, so GEMS, which we've talked about at length. So she does in that and that friend's blog, the letter that she posts, she says, this is my address and where I'm at. You can send the money to the kind of North American GEMS HQ location. They'll route it to me. And she specifically says that she needs eight thousand dollars for a car.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
and $3,000 for Em's schooling for a year. Now, from what I do know is for a lot of these organizations is you can actually send funding to missionaries to support them. The ticket items are just interesting. I certainly understand education. And from the pictures that we saw, it did look like Em went to a very, very good school.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
It looks much like the preschools and early schools that you would see here in the U.S., The $8,000 for a car is just a little suspicious for me because I also think, you know, this is back in... 2011, right? And so even a used car, that's a lot.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
And so I think even if you wanted to kind of blend in a little bit so as not to draw attention to yourself in a country where Sophie says that she is being so blatantly harassed is maybe you don't go for high end. And $8,000, it just seems like a higher end ticket item to me personally.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
So in her blog post, Sophie mentions that in September 2012, she shares that she's going to be leaving GEMS and she has a new job at Special Hope Network. And in that, she actually tells people, okay, starting on this date, you can send me money to this organization and they'll go on and send it to me.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
So again, they looked on their website and even today they have, you can go online and make a gift, but then you can also designate it for specific missionaries. And from what I understand, too, is that a lot of times you can, you know, home church, you can kind of send money to support missionaries.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
But it is interesting that in these days when, you know, she was in Zambia, fundraising was second nature to her. And it's certainly something that we do see throughout the entirety of this case as more and more fundraisers start to emerge.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
It's important to note that Sophie began the adoption process prior to Zambia joining the Hague Convention, which puts into place kind of stricter standards around inter-country adoptions. But prior to the Hague Convention, here are just a few things that needed to be in place and requirements. So the first is that the child has to be fostered for three months.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
The second is that the adopting parent has to be 25 years old and at least 21 years old older than the child. Another criteria is demonstrating adequate finances. So think if you're a missionary, right? That could be a little hard. Finally, there has to be an acceptable home study.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
So the other thing that was really interesting to note from the guidelines are that and it says prospective adoptive parents should be aware that not all children in orphanages or children's homes are adoptable.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
In many countries, birth parents place their children temporarily in an orphanage or children's home due to financial or other hardship, intending that the child returns home when it becomes possible. In such cases, the birth parents have rarely relinquished their parental rights or consented to their children's adoption.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
And I make note of this because in the memoir, Sophie talks about needing to wait for paperwork and there was twin girls that she thought that she was going to be able to adopt, but lo and behold, they didn't have the file and the file got lost. And Sophie goes into kind of this tailspin of questioning the Zambian social workers and administrators, the veracity of their claim.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
And also pondered at some point if they, you know, if the file was really lost or if they just were trying to bribe her for more money. So from what it sounds like is in this case, it could have been that, yeah, there wasn't paperwork to actually determine whether or not their true orphan status. It could have been a situation where the parents had put the child in a children's home temporarily.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
in the hopes of taking them back. So I just think it's important, especially when we think of orphanages, we think of 100% total abandonment. But in this case, really, I think it points to the fact that it's more of what we understand perhaps as a foster care system.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
But she gives a very interesting summary of how it happened. But she said, this case was an incredibly unique situation due to my age and to the Zambian situation. adoption laws requiring a prospective adoptive parent to be 25 years old and 21 years older than the child being adopted.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
After eight unfavorable court hearings and an agonizing battle of four years, with an absolute determination to uphold proper ethics while fighting for the best interests of my daughter, on May 7th, 2015, the law was legally bypassed. Ella's adoption was finalized. Yeah. Yeah, just like just illegally and ethically.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep02: Spiritual Warfare
I was like, that's just an interesting way to summarize it.