Volume 25, Number 3    December 2003

Myers and Gateley: Sisters on the journey

Laughter, tears and awed silence filled the room as two women; one a white, educated European, the other, black, born into poverty and prostitution, wove an intense and beautiful tapestry of their journeys toward each other, and toward finding their voices.

Edwina Gateley, founder of the Volunteer Missionary Movement, author and international speaker, felt called to come to Chicago and ‘learn the language’ of her institutional church. After finishing her CTU graduate degree, God told her to “put it away.”

“God got in the way. God is always the problem,” she said. “God is the eternal nuisance.”
After ‘putting it away’ for nine months, living in a trailer without water or electricity, Edwina answered her next call…to the prostitutes on Chicago’s streets.

“I told God that hookers were not my turf,” Gateley said. “They’re not my church. I could get hurt.”

And then, she started to walk the streets, looking for prostitutes.

Brenda Myers is her name. Orphaned by her 16-year old mother when she was a baby, disillusioned by dreams of becoming a California movie star, she had lived over 12 years on the streets. This meant doing drugs and prostitution and being the recipient of much abuse; including stabbings and shootings. When she found another woman staking her claim, taking on her corner, it wasn’t pretty!

“Are you a cop, a journalist, a ‘do-goody’ nun?” Brenda shouted at Edwina.

It took a while for trust to form between the two.

“I hung out with them,” recalls Gateley. “They started telling me their stories. I knew I had to do something because I came to love them as sisters.”

Thus, a dream began and Genesis House was born. It was a place of new beginnings, of hospitality and healing, a place of respite for the women of the Chicago streets.

“And then, I found my voice,” says Myers, who has been interviewed by the Chicago Tribune and Sun Times. “And my dream; our story, is being told.”

“Our journeys have brought us to stand together,” the two women said. “For hope where there is despair; a dream of peace, where there is violence; for healing where there is brokenness; of life, where there is death…a dream of sisterhood. And we have no regrets!”