Meet Deborah

Deborah’s journey from mountaintop to darkest valley and back again!

Deborah was seven years old when her family immigrated to America from Belize. In the years that followed, she achieved one major accomplishment after another: the first in her family to graduate high school, then college, then the first to obtain a master’s degree, and the first to own her own business. 

But then, everything flipped. Deborah’s marriage to her business partner was falling apart. Not wanting to exacerbate the issues, Deborah ultimately chose to leave everything behind… their business, their properties, their vehicles, and their bank accounts. In her words, “All I wanted was my daughter, so I literally left with just the clothes on my back.”

Unfortunately, things went from bad to worse. Deborah was threatened, stalked, and feared for her life after her ex-husband confronted her at gunpoint, refusing to allow their daughter to go with her. Deborah temporarily went to a domestic violence shelter out of state before returning to Baltimore to fight for custody of her daughter. To her dismay, she discovered that she’d been accused of abandonment and her parental rights were revoked.

Deborah was crushed. She took refuge at a domestic violence shelter in Baltimore, but the depression she began to experience was overwhelming. She began drinking heavily each night, hoping she wouldn’t wake up the next morning. When Deborah confided this to her counselor at the shelter, she immediately recognized Deborah’s urgent need for the help she would find at Helping Up Mission (HUM). 

“It was scary,” Deborah recalls about her arrival at HUM. “I’ve always been very independent. I was used to providing services and assistance to others, I wasn’t used to receiving services.” 

On the hardest days, when depression began to creep in and she longed to see her daughter grow up, Deborah’s participation in the work program at HUM helped her focus. She didn’t know much about the Bible or God before her world came crashing down around her, but Deborah now says, “What I learned at HUM is that the Word of God is truly a blueprint that we can rely on. It’s dependable and it doesn’t fail.” 

Thanks to the generosity of friends like you, Deborah has hope for the future, and is confident in the camaraderie she’s experienced at HUM. She explains, “The leaders here are caring, and they also see your potential and hold you to that standard. I like that balance.”

Now she says, “I’m relentless about learning the Word of God. I’m relentless about learning who God is, but I’m also relentless about who God says that I am – and trying to live out that version of myself.”

Thank you for your continued commitment to helping transform and restore lives like Deborah’s here in Greater Baltimore! 

“The leaders here are caring, and they also see your potential and hold you to that standard.”