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Heart and Soul: Faith in Freedom: Faith in Freedom

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Helen Berhane

16/11/2018 GMT

Faith in Freedom

BBC World Service - Heart and Soul, Faith in Freedom, Faith in Freedom

The singer brutally tortured for her Christianity

Helen Berhane was imprisoned in Eritrea after she refused to stop singing Christian music

Helen Berhane has the type of voice that you may think could only have come from God. There was a long time though when the only people who could hear her were her captors and the fellow inmates of the shipping container that was her gaol.

In fact it was her singing that led to her being imprisoned, beaten and abused in her native Eritrea, after she refused to put a stop to her evangelising. In this first episode of Faith In Freedom, Helen tells John McCarthy about those two years of imprisonment and how she refused to denounce her faith.

Heart and Soul: Faith in Freedom

John McCarthy meets people who have had to confront their own beliefs while held captive.

Episode 1: Maryam Rostampour and Marziyeh Amirizadeh
In a new series of Faith in Freedom for Heart and Soul, John McCarthy meets people who have had to confront their own beliefs while held captive or prisoner.
In the first episode John, who was held hostage by Islamic radical groups in Lebanon, speaks to two Iranian women who risked torture in one of the world’s most notorious prisons to spread the word of the Christian Bible.

Maryam Rostampour and Marziyeh Amirizadeh were known as the ‘dirty Christians’ in Evin prison where they suffered horrendous conditions and witnessed daily abuse, but despite that they carried on sharing the Gospel within the prison.  They now live in the USA, and despite the daily horrors they witnessed, Maryam and Marziyeh see Evin as a church, somewhere they were placed by God to spread the word. But John will ask about their work now in a country where there is freedom to pray and preach. Are they still carrying out God’s work?

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