Why at All? As I approached our rundown mud house in the promiscuous valley of Mvog-Ada in Yaoundé, Cameroon’s capital city, my probably 8 or 9-year old heart began to beat fast and hard. Read more...

Welcome to HURT

As a little boy growing up amid the rubble of Cameroon in Central Africa, Joe Fotso tore his famished inner-self into pieces each day, struggling to understand and conquer his fears, his tears, and his despair.

• Physically and emotionally paralyzed by the excruciating pain from live maggots—creatures of death—slowly eating up his tiny, starved, but living body, he silently asked “Why?” 

• As his mother forced him to wipe human excrement off the floor with his bare hands, he inwardly but vehemently inquired, “Why me?”, crippled by the burning sensation from merciless strokes of a tire sliver across his bleeding body. 

• Then, fighting an army of angry ants for a piece of bread lying in dust, he felt horrendous shame and humiliation, and continued to question, “Why at all?”  

HURT is a poignant, disturbing, controversial, but surely courageous and uplifting memoir of a young boy who grows up brutally abused amidst the rubble of Central Africa, desperately reaching up to love and later to forgiveness, and ultimately U-turning on a one-way expressway to distress and failure.

HURT recounts Joe’s heartbreaking battle for life and survival, and his inspiring tenacity to hold on to hope despite hopeless odds, to love after numerous betrayals, and to forgive after his inflicted fears and tears. It is also a formidable story about endurance, courage and determination, resilience, faith and unfaithfulness, in a multicultural environment—from the dark woods and huts of a tiny village, Bandjoun, in Cameroon, to the bright highways and skyscrapers of Chicago IL and New York NY.