A story as cold as where it came from; Florence Pukuaa, pregnant and alone in a country she barely knew, telling the world what had happened to her because she had nowhere else to turn. The story she told was not just about Canada. It began sixteen years earlier, in a modest home in Kumasi, Ghana and it has not yet ended. A horror story somewhat to be told, but of course it is June 4th today and there is no worse day to share horror stories in Ghana.
“I Was Just a Minor”
Florence was fourteen years old in 2008 when her father, a man newly out of work and desperate, made a decision that would alter the entire course of her life. He arranged for her to be given out for marriage when she was still a child and there is no softer word for it to a man named Bernard Senkyere.
On August 1st of that year, surrounded by family elders who treated the occasion as a celebration, Florence was formally handed over to Bernard in a kind of ship-off that marked the beginning of her new grueling life as a young wife.
“My parents and some of the elders in my family forced me and performed an engagement between me and a man named Bernard Senkyere,” she narrated in her own words. “I was just a minor in the year 2008.”
She would not sleep in her own home again since that fateful day and she has still not seen the end of it by any stretch.
A House That Was Never a Home
Bernard’s house in Accra became Florence’s prison. Within months of moving in, the abuse began; physical, sexual, verbal. She endured it quietly at first, the way young girls are taught to endure things, believing perhaps that someone would come for her.
No one came.
When she reported the abuse to her parents, her father threatened the worst would happen to her if she left. When Bernard’s own son a young man her own age raped her, she reported it too. Her parents did nothing. Bernard beat her for making what he called a false allegation. His son beat her for speaking at all.
In November 2014, six years into her ordeal, Florence finally walked into a police station in the hope of some reprieve. She sat down across from officers of the law and tried to explain what was being done to her. The moment she mentioned that Bernard was her partner, the police lost interest. They told her to go home and settle her domestic matters privately. She walked back out into the street with nowhere to go.
The Long Walk Out
It took Florence until 2017 to find a way out and even then, escape came not through rescue but through quiet, desperate courage. That year, she completed her midwifery training. Instead of returning to Bernard’s house, she slipped away to the home of a man named Richmond Boateng, whom she had been speaking to in secret. She did not tell her parents where she was going. She called them only to say she could no longer live with Bernard.
Her father threatened her again.
But this time, Florence did not go back.
She and Richmond built something together. They had a daughter, Glory Nhyiraba Boateng, in October 2018. Florence secured a position as a registered staff midwife at Goaso Municipal Hospital in September 2020. In May 2021, they welcomed a son, Richmond Boateng Junior. Richmond, for his part, paid Bernard the sum of money that had been spent on Florence during their years together, a transactional settlement that formally closed that chapter, as though her suffering had a price tag and had now been settled.
For a time, things were better. Richmond even helped her father start a business. There were plans for Florence to further her education abroad. Days before she was to travel to Canada, Richmond formally took the big step to try and tie her down in a traditional marriage ceremony.
Florence arrived in Canada full of hope.
Pregnant And Alone
Canada undid everything.
Shortly after Florence arrived, she connected with a man named Samuel, a friend, she says, who helped her find accommodation after Richmond, hearing a male voice on the other end of a phone call, accused her of infidelity and cut off all communication. Richmond stopped answering her calls. Her parents, caught in the middle, could not reach him either. Florence was stranded in a foreign country, without a support system, without financial backing, and without the man she had planned her future around.
In her loneliness, her relationship with Samuel became intimate. She became pregnant.
When she told Samuel about the pregnancy, he disappeared. A man who’s full name she did not even know. He had never taken her to his home. Within weeks of their knowing each other, he was gone and she was left carrying a child in a country where she knew almost no one.
“I became very afraid when I found out that I am pregnant,” she narrated, “because Samuel did not come back to me again.”
Every Door Closed
What followed was a reckoning that stripped Florence of every remaining foothold she had.
She told her parents about the pregnancy. The elders of both families convened. Their verdict, delivered with the full weight of communal authority, was that Florence was not a good partner. Richmond’s family rejected her apology outright. Richmond himself said she had broken his heart and would not speak to her.
Her own father, the same man who had given her away as a child, whose poverty had set this entire story in motion, turned on her again. He and the elders told her she was not fit to live as a human being. She had disgraced the entire family.
He went further. He threatened the life of the child she was carrying.
Florence was pregnant, alone in Canada, broke, estranged from the man she loved, rejected by her family, and unable to return home without facing danger. The country she had fled to offer her temporary shelter. The country she came from had closed its door.
“Everyone in the family has rejected me,” she stated, “and I am afraid to go back to my country with my unborn child. Now my life is threatened when I go back to my country Ghana.”
What Florence Represents
Florence’s story is extraordinary in its detail and devastating in its accumulation. But it is not, sadly, unique in its architecture.
Across Africa, girls are still being removed from their families and placed in the care of men who did not choose them and who will not protect them. When those girls are abused, they are told to be quiet. When they run, they are dragged back. When they finally escape and build new lives and dare to dream of something more of education, of Canada, of a future the world finds new ways to break them down.
Florence arrived in Canada carrying every scar from that world. She found no immediate rescue there either. What she found instead was cold weather, a man who vanished, a pregnancy she did not plan, and a family back home that had decided her shame was greater than their love.