Sissy’s warm smile and obvious intelligence belie a lifetime of rejection and homelessness.  Her mother died when she was young, and she was sent to live with her grandmother until her father remarried. Unfortunately, he married a woman who hated Sissy.  Her father was cruel to her, calling her an “unwanted girl.” 

At 15, she got pregnant and her father threw her out of the house.  She then bounced among relatives who were abusive, and had three more pregnancies. Finally, her father sent her to the “7th World,” a very remote rural area where she was required to dig in the fields all day.   

At this point in her life, she thought of herself as a 'walking dead person.' “I had not a single coin,” she recalls. “I shared a shed with goats.”

Life began to change when a Good Samaritan allowed her to sleep in a church.   She then came to the notice of BeadforLife and was trained to make paper beads.  Now 40 years old, she stands among the bricks of the house she is building in Friendship Village. 

“I have a cow and a sewing machine, and soon my very own house.  I will never again be homeless.”