Mariah Gossett
speaker
292 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 19 Jun
Mariah Gossett’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And certainly nothing alluding to the fact that she's kind of helping to construct this day school.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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