My name is Robert Oppong Asante, and I’m married to Hannah Teye. We have two daughters, Sophia and Theresa. We’re from Ghana and we’re Catholic, so when we started receiving threats in our own town in 2023 demanding that our daughters undergo female genital mutilation —a practice so widespread among Muslims in West Africa—we had to find a solution. We refused to let our little girls go through that.
The pressure was great and growing, and on the advice of a friend we decided to flee as a family to Mauritania, the only place where we had any chance of getting there, and we settled there in February 2023.
There, we joined the evangelization team at the local Catholic Church. But in Mauritania, when a Muslim converts to Christianity, the punishment for the catechist who facilitated the conversion is imprisonment, death, or both. Despite these laws, the Catholic Church is growing in that country, which until now has been 100% Muslim. Many young people are choosing to embrace the Christian and Catholic faith.
One Sunday in March 2023, the police entered our Church and arrested all the members of the evangelism team. I was sent to prison. Knowing what would follow, and to save my life, I tried to escape, but I was shot in the leg.
I ended up in the hospital, and when I was discharged a few weeks later, they sent me back to prison for the crime of promoting Christianity. I was there for another three months, until one of the officers helped me escape.
Naturally, we had to set out again. My family and I fled Mauritania on July 10, 2024, and arrived in Spain nine days later. Here, we applied for refugee status for all four members of the family.
Nothing has been easy, not even in Spain. The first major hurdle was obtaining the necessary documentation. Two years later, we are still struggling to get the four residency permits. We hope that the new regularization process, promoted by the Catholic Church among other organizations, will finally help us.
Regarding Church life, it hasn’t been easy either. We haven’t always felt welcome in Christian communities in Spain. When we go to celebrate Mass on Sundays, for example, we’re surprised that not all Catholics are able to see refugees and foreigners as brothers and sisters.
The other major challenge for us is putting food on the table. For example, it was incredibly difficult to raise the money needed to pay the costs and fees for the legal residency process. Here I must thank the Church and the Augustinian Recollects for their help in covering so many of the four procedures.
Every day we give thanks to God for our lives as refugees, and we also give thanks for his Church, which encourages and supports us.
