When I completed my secondary school education in 1995 in Zambia's northern province, I had lost all direction in life. I drank beer a lot and smoked dagga (marijuana). I was also stealing from my relatives to support my habits. I could not live with my relatives anymore because of my behavior. Both of my parents had passed away two years earlier, and being the firstborn in a family with two children, a boy and a girl, life had just seemed tough and rough.

I got married in 1996, and my wife gave birth to a son. A year later, I decided to move from my hometown of Mpika to Lusaka, Zambia's capital, to search for a college to attend or for a job. I stayed with a friend because an aunt (my mother's cousin) would not have me live with her family. Later that year, my aunt asked me to start taking care of the plot of land she had acquired in Kabanana, a town just outside Lusaka. It was at this point that I came to my senses and started searching for spiritual truth and comfort. I think it was because of all the suffering I had experienced.

It was also at this time that I found myself in the Lusaka Central Prison, one of four men charged with murder, a crime I did not commit. It was while I was in prison, however, that I came across Christian Science.

A Christian Scientist, who regularly visited the prison, gave me a copy of Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy. This book changed the way I thought about everything, and that mental change gave me a new sense of direction. By reading Science and Health, I learned to know God as my Father-Mother, and I came to know myself as a child of God, created in the likeness of God. I also grasped what unconditional love is, and how to express it in everything I do. But the most significant thing I learned was the importance of gratitude.

While in prison awaiting trial, I put into practice the ideas I was finding in Science and Health. I began viewing others as children of God, no matter what church they went to or who they were in society. I began to share with others the healing methods of the master Christian, Jesus. I had found the truth that I was searching for through Mary Baker Eddy's rediscovery of those healing methods.

As I studied and prayed in prison, I felt a deep desire to follow Jesus' example, and His command to "heal the sick" (Matt. 10:8). Soon I was healed of recurring malaria symptoms, headaches, and a rash, just by reading Science and Health.

I was in prison for two years, and during that time one of my friends, who had been charged in the same murder case, passed on. I also learned that my wife had divorced me and married another man. But I had already come to understand that God never created men and women to live in bondage. By this time I was serving as the First Reader for the Christian Science services that were held in the prison.

I was acquitted of all charges in May 2002. God answered my prayers. To share what I had found in prison with my friends, relatives, neighbors, and the world at large, I formed a Bible study group in Kabanana. We met daily in the evening at neighbors' homes. Later on we started studying Science and Health along with the Bible. People got fired up with the book, so we have begun to worship together.

I find constant encouragement in these words: "Hold perpetually this thought,—that it is the spiritual idea, the Holy Ghost and Christ, which enables you to demonstrate, with scientific certainty, the rule of healing, based upon its divine Principle, Love, underlying, overlying, and encompassing all true being" (Science and Health, p. 496). The divine truth that Mary Baker Eddy discovered is real.

Francis Bwalya
Kabanana, Zambia