There are mornings when Confidence Jato wakes up and remind herself that she survived.
She survived the kidnappings. She survived the beatings that left her toes crushed and later
amputated. She survived the fire that reduced her home to ashes.
But some mornings, even survival feels hollow.“You wake up one morning and realise you
are not complete,” she says, her voice carrying the weight of years lived between fear and
hope.
50-year-old Confidence once had an ordinary life in the English-speaking part of Cameroon;
managing her property, raising her three children and planning a future with her husband but
when the country’s bilingual crisis turned violent from 2016, normal life disappeared for her
family from 2018.
“When unarmed men get guns, they become powerful,” she says. In a place where power was
bought with fear, no one was safe, not even those like Confidence who tried to stay neutral.
Accused by the military of supporting separatists and by separatists of harbouring the
military, Confidence became a target. She was kidnapped twice and had to pay a ransom. The
second time she was kidnapped, the armed men beat her so severely that when she finally
made it to a hospital, doctors had no choice but to amputate two of her toes.
In 2019, her property was burned down and had no choice than to flee with her family to a
French-speaking city, where survival was a daily calculation: “How and what will we eat?
Where do we hide? How do we communicate when we cannot speak and understand
French?”
Each day she woke up to face a life that felt smaller, harder and more uncertain. When a
friend in Canada asked her how to help, Confidence had no words to explain the depth of her
loss. She simply said, “anything,” an answer spoken not from hope, but from exhaustion.
In 2023, Confidence received an invitation from her friend to move to Canada. In this new
journey, she carried little more than her wounds. It was there, at her most vulnerable, that she
met PROSDOMA who did not just offer handouts but tools for rebuilding a life.
Through PROSDOMA’s projects, Confidence was connected to a lawyer who helped her
apply for Protected Person status. She was assisted to access food banks and clothing drives,
easing the weight of basic survival.
She was enrolled in computer classes, teaching her to use a tool that once seemed out of
reach. Confidence, who had grown up where computers were considered a “luxury”, now
navigates them as a key to her future.
PROSDOMA has helped her build a resume from scratch, accredit her first degree and
understand the complicated world of taxes and documentation in a new country. Today, she
works in caregiving, with plans to get formal certification.
With hopes to reunite with her husband and three children, who still live in hiding in
Cameroon, her permanent residency application is underway thanks to support from
PROSDOMA. For her, “on the mountain top, I can shout that PROSDOMA has been of great
help to me.”
Confidence may not feel complete, but she is still standing, still building, still daring to
dream, strongly believing that sometimes, survival itself is the most powerful rebellion.
