OLATHE, Kan. – Thursday was a good day for Afolabi Idowu, it was the day he went home. Since 2005, Afolabi says he’s been abused by people he lived with, people he trusted.
Afolabi speaks limited English, he has a developmental delay, and he is partially deaf. He says in a fit of rage, one of the people he stayed with even broke his hearing aid.
Luckily he met Maggie Isaacson.
“He was just always out there, and nice. I’d say hi to him and stuff,” Maggie said.
Maggie says Afolabi was living near some of her friends with another family. She saw him often outside, being yelled at or mistreated.
“He was constantly working, always outside, kicked him out constantly,” she said.
One day she had enough and told him, “You don’t have to let people treat you like that. If you need something, you let one of us know,” she said.
A couple weeks later, Afolabi knocked on her friend’s door, he was scared, but Maggie kept her word.
“Somebody that needed help, felt comfortable coming to me, and I wasn’t going to not help him,” she said.
Maggie took Afolabi to the police, then to an abandoned house where she fed him for a few days. Then she says they went to the Kansas City Rescue Mission, where Afolabi was hooked up with Jewish Vocational Services who helped get his papers in order to finally go home.
Maggie couldn’t be happier to see him going back home.
“It’s a man that, he’s a grown man, he came here for a better life, and I feel like people took that from him,” he said.
A place where she knows at least he’ll be well-loved and safe.
The Kansas City Rescue Mission got Afolabi a new hearing aid. His family paid for his flight home.
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