Washington D.C. – The Christian Post, Sept. 14, 2026
For six and a half years, Jeff Woodke, a missionary worker with Youth with a Mission Relief and Development, slept outside in the West African desert, often with chains around his ankles.
There was no room, no bed and, for much of that time, almost no human companionship. Temperatures could climb to 120 degrees, and when the rainy season came, he slept on the ground as inches of rain fell around him. His meals rarely changed: rice or a doughlike staple with red sauce and, occasionally, dried goat meat.
For two months, his captors confined him during the day inside a box roughly four feet wide, four feet long and four feet high and would not speak to him.
“They would not even speak with me just to try and break me,” Woodke told The Christian Post. “There was a psychological dissociation, complete dissociation. I basically went nuts for a while. Lost time. Lost a lot.”
It was one of the darkest periods of a captivity that began on Oct. 14, 2016, when armed militants stormed Woodke’s home in Abalak, Niger, and kidnapped the longtime missionary worker. He would not be free again until March 2023, when he went home to his wife and grown children and two grandchildren.
