By JOSEPHINE IGBINOVIA & RABIAT ILYASU

She is a woman with a heart of gold. Most admirable about Mrs.Regina Ezenwa, the Chief Executive Officer/Director of Rozec Pharmacy, is the quiet dedication with which she caters for widows and vulnerable youths and children through the Roses Ministry, a faith-based organisation she pioneered in 2007 as a response to the call of God to “Feed my People!”.

Hence, for widows, it was indeed another day of joy and hope when the Roses Ministry brought them together again last month in Lagos to counsel them spiritually and physically, ensuring they all went home with bags of rice, clothing, food items and drugs for those with health challenges. Vista Woman engaged Mrs.Ezenwa, Coordinator of the Roses Ministry, in a chat at the event.

Her words:

The Roses Ministry is a ministry set out to show God’s love to the hurting and vulnerable- widows, youths that seem to lack direction, commercial sex workers, prison inmates, people in hospitals, and more. We started in 2007 and since then it has been awesome.

Since we started our yearly end-of-year Widows’ Day as part of our activities three years ago, some beneficiaries have come back to us in January to say that the food items and bags of rice we gave to them lasted from December through January.

Mrs. Regina Ezenwa

But that’s not to say that we abandon these women from year to year and assist them only at the end of the year.  We have a vocational department where some of them who are willing, are trained in vocational skills. We even had to set up a charity shop where we make clothing, household items, etcetera, available to them at cheaper rates.

We had about 45 widows in our first Widows’ Day. Last year, we had over 200 widows, and this year, we have over 300 of them. Last year, while carrying out medical diagnosis on the women, we discovered that even though many of them were hypertensive and also knew about it, they could not afford to buy their drugs. Hence, at our Widows’ Day last month, we decided to give them the necessary drugs free of charge after diagnosis. We gave them drugs which they can easily use.

Quite a number of these women have been blessed by God with various testimonies since we started in 2007; physically, spiritually and mentally. One of the widows, as at when she came to this ministry, could not walk without somebody holding her hands. But now, she walks on her own!

Formerly, her two children were also very troublesome! Now we’ve trained one of them in soap making. He now makes and sells soaps to support his mum and his sibling! As a matter of fact, the sibling is now one of our drummer boys in the fellowship.

He says he wants to go to the university, and we are willing to sponsor him! He even took the 2011 JAMB. We have about four of such on our list now who are waiting to gain admission. Many of our widows have also given their lives to God, pledging to follow him for the rest of their lives and not going to break any woman’s home simply because of the desire to remarry.

In as much as we advise young widows to remarry, we forbid them from getting married to other women’s husbands.  Like I said earlier, we’ve decided to test them for hypertension from time to time because we’ve noticed that there a lot of hypertensive cases in our society today.

Worst of all is that hypertension has no symptom. Some of the women we tested today were 200! We even had some who were 211 and never knew. We however cannot blame them because we are not ignorant of the fact that we live in an environment where there are no social services.

These widows already have a lot of problems to contend with in their homes! We may want to blame the families of these widows as well for neglecting them, but the truth is that many of them had husbands who were the main breadwinners in their extended families! I mean, all the man’s brothers and sisters were perhaps depending on him! Hence their widows had no one in the family to rely on.

The solution to this problem is the right social security for this country. At least we have a ministry that has social welfare attached to it! I think it is time they did something. As individuals too, we all must learn to deny ourselves some things so that the less fortunate among us can have something. We at Roses Ministry have personal challenges too to settle as humans, but we understand we have a responsibility on these lives.

We need more people to partner with us to enable us touch more lives. We need to be able to set up more of these women in small scale businesses which they will use to sustain their families. It won’t be a bad idea if it is once every four-month that we are able to give them basic foods like rice, garri and oil. At least we will be sure that they won’t have to worry about these anymore. They will then have to bother about their children’s education, books, school uniforms, etc.

We even do provide school uniforms for some of their children. We all have to contribute our quota! We all cannot set up NGOs but we can key into the visions of already existing ones to make the job easier! Yes, government needs to set up organized social services, but society too needs to be more passionate towards the less fortunate. We have to be grateful over all God has done for us and our families by touching other lives.

I’m not an ordained minister, but the Bible talks about we all being ‘Priests’. I’m a Pharmacist who runs a community pharmacy. It’s just that one cannot run away from the call of God for so long. Hence I had to answer the call. And I thank God for the helpers he sent me; the various women who have been members of the fellowship. They give sacrificially of themselves, their time and their resources free of charge.’