Aissatou is a six-year-old girl living in the
village of Ndowé in southern Cameroon. She lives in a shelter
who takes in orphans. She is currently enrolled in a school and
begins her first year of elementary school.

Aissatou is still too young to think about the future and
ask what she is called to do in life. And even if it
happened that she asks herself this question, this question would unfortunately remain without
an answer.  Why, because it
lacks an essential ingredient, a family in which to discover oneself,
to grow and flourish.

How is the personality of a child built, how does this
personality evolves to make this child an adult who will have reached his or her
full potential on all levels, emotional, professional and family, (3 John 1,2 : «Beloved,
I pray that you may prosper in all things and be healthy, even
as your soul prospers. »)?
By feeding our heart and soul with good ingredients; protection,
respect, love and listening; and of course do not forget physical needs
which are to eat, drink, dress and receive an education
adequate.

Innate or acquired, personality?

In fact personality is a concept that is innate and
acquired. It is the sum of the temperament, which is innate and the behaviors and
lifestyle habits, which are acquired. Every person inherits a temperament
given at birth and the latter is the cement on which his
personality, depending on his family environment, his context
culture and educational environment. Normally a person will have a
balanced personality, i.e. which allows cohesion between the
temperament and life habits and behavior, if the three spaces in
which the child is developing work together to teach the child
to know itself, to know
the limits and to be built according to the temperament that he owns.

Aissatou needs people who will teach her to
discover her strengths, weaknesses, skills and talents. She
needs to play, to take risks, to venture on trails
that she has never explored before and all these things she can only do
under the protective and encouraging gaze of an adult who surrounds her with his
love.  The absence of this loving framework,
encouraging and protective deprives Aissatou of the support that is essential to her
to have access to all these resources that God has placed in her life.

Indeed Aissatou was born with incredible gifts and talents
that God gave her from the moment of her conception. She has a destiny
to accomplish, a mission that only she can do.  Only it is necessary that she be
oriented, guided towards this destiny by people who will see this potential
and declare it, proclaim it, remind her every time she will
feel discouraged. The Bible says that God prepared works beforehand to
us to accomplish them. And to do this, we have to call on
those unsuspected treasures that every human being possesses.

The risk involved if the identity remains a mystery is
going through life with this feeling of being in the wrong place every moment; of
spend your life with this discomfort and feel like you’re missing something.
And depending on the level of lack that the child has experienced, the consequences
can be more serious and lead him to the street later as is the case
with the many young people who live on the streets of Montreal and Yaounde. The common point
that all these young people have, they have experienced non-facilitating situations in their
chilhood

So to become the extraordinary person that God
called to be, you need to discover your identity, not the one created
by your family, your environment and your educational environment, but the
one with which you were born, which God gave you from the beginning. And to
appropriate this identity, you need a loving and reassuring framework,
you need God and a community.