Emmanual (name altered) was a gentle man who ended up in the Geneva jail on drug charges.
He was a modest businessman in his native Ghana. His mother was severely ill and serious medical care was extremely expensive. Friends told him he could make excellent business in his field if he went to China. So he invested all his economies on the trip. However, things did not turn out as planned and once in China he lost everything. He returned home completely broke – and desperate because he could not help his mother whose condition was rapidly deteriorating.
An acquaintance told him that he could make some easy and quick money if he accepted to deliver drugs in Geneva (there was a direct flight at the time). Very unwisely, he accepted and was caught at the customs on arrival. Off to prison – where we met.
We very rapidly came to talk about blessing. He just devoured the book ‘The Gentle Art of Blessing’ and started to bless literally everyone: the prison guards and other personnel, the lawyers involved in his case, the district attorney and the judge with whom he met and who was to preside over his trial … anyone remotely close to his situation, not to mention his fellow inmates. Emmanuel just blessed and blessed and blessed.
The normal punishment for a case such as his would have been 7-8 years in prison. He received a year and a half. No one at the prison would believe him when he returned from court. As he had already served well over a year, he only had a few months more of the prison sentence to serve.
I have not seen Emmanual since, but I believe he must still be blessing people (May 15, 2013).
