Nicole Rashly is one of those people who really deserved a miracle.. and she is now living one!
One night, ten years ago, Nicole had just fallen asleep when her brothers woke her up, telling her they had to get out of their house immediately. She was only 8 years old.
Her parents were married and raising the family in Congo. They were from different cultures and that angered a lot of people. That night, men barged into their home with guns. Nicole’s brothers told her that their parents were killed and that they had to run deep into the forest to stay safe.
“Me and one of my brothers kept crying,” Nicole said. “I couldn’t really walk and keep up with my brothers because I kept crying.”
Nicole and her brothers spent months in the forrest with only the clothes they had on that night. They made shoes out of leaves. They were always looking for food. One of her brothers didn’t survive.
The children arrived at Tanzania and immediately went to a refugee camp. People were amazed that they were all alone without any parents to look out for them. They spent the next four years in various refugee camps in Tanzania and during that time, they met up with their maternal grandmother. She looked out for them.
Nicole, her brothers and grandmother eventually moved to the United States and settled in Denver. None of them spoke english. Nicole especially learned quickly and adapted.
Nicole graduated from South High School in 2016. That following summer, Nicole and her grandmother met a woman who was visiting Denver from Uganda. They were looking at photographs of the woman’s friends from Uganda on Facebook. Nicole and her grandmother couldn’t believe what they saw… Nicole’s mother!
Betty is alive! Her husband did not survive that night in Congo but she survived and fled to Uganda.
Nicole and her mother first saw each other via Skype. Betty couldn’t believe how much her baby girl, her only daughter had grown.
“It is a miracle,” Nicole said. “Everything has a reason to happen. Maybe God wanted us to meet this way.”
In January, Nicole is flying to Uganda to spend two weeks with her mother. What a miraculous reunion!
“I want to sit with her and have a very long chat and tell her what happened and what I want to do,” Nicole said. “I just want to look at her, laugh and cry with her.”
The Denver-based, Global Livingston Institute is organizing the logistics for Nicole’s trip. GLI works with people in Uganda and Rwanda to find solutions to poverty and ways to lift up communities.
Betty works with orphans in Uganda… children who yearn for love and comfort… children much like her sons and daughter who were on their own for many years.
Here is another coincidence in this miraculous story: Nicole wants to one day assist orphans as an ambassador. She is currently a freshman at Community College of Denver and speaks five languages.
“Nobody in my family has ever achieved any higher education and I want to change that,” Nicole said. “I want to be the first one in my family. I want to make my mom proud because she always wanted us to have an education. She would say ‘you can chose to be whatever you want.’ In Africa, they chose what you want but she would tell us ‘you have to be what you want to be and follow your dreams.'”
Nicole is the first one to admit her dreams are coming true.
“In my mind, I always thought she was somewhere,” Nicole said. “I would tell my brothers ‘I think she is somewhere and waiting for us to come back to see her.'”
A gofundme page is raising money for Nicole’s trip in January.
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