Paul Myhill's Blog

Gifts of Hope in South and East Asia

BURMA: Child soldier rehabilitation fund

The use of children as soldiers is rampant throughout Burma (Myanmar) as both rebel and government forces make use of them. Our network partner is working closely with local churches to rehabilitate rescued child soldiers. While not easy, they are doing a remarkable job. We would like to raise $11,000 to support this precious and much needed ministry.

Giving Options

Enter the following code on your check or online memo: BUR-Rehabilitation

BANGLADESH: Backpacks for former orphans

At the World Orphans project in Bangladesh, our partner church is providing a home for 17 former orphans where they receive the love of a family, food, clothing and medical care. The church pays for the children's education fees, but they need backpacks for the kids to carry their books to the local school. You can meet this need by giving $130 (or $7.65 for one child.)

Giving Options

Enter the following code on your check or online memo: BANG-504-Backpacks

CHINA: School fees and supplies for abandoned children

Education is a privilege for most children, especially in China where it is highly valued. At the World Orphans project there, 55 children are living in apartments with house moms from local churches. The churches value providing education for these children who attend primary through high school. Would you like to help us meet this need? To provide quality education for these children, it costs $7,683 per year (or $139.70 per child.)

Giving Options

Enter the following code on your check or online memo: CHI-523-Education

CHINA: Clothing for abandoned children

Children grow out of their clothing rather quickly and although hand-me-downs are much appreciated, oftentimes they are not enough to fully clothe the next child. At our project in China, our partner churches need $6,785 to provide all the clothing needs for the children for a year (or $123.36 per child.)

Giving Options

Enter the following code on your check or online memo: CHI-523-Clothes

Making a Difference on the Mekong

PROJECT PROFILE:

Cambodia is notorious for child prostitution and sex trafficking. Once a great kingdom, Cambodia was devastated by the bloody rule of the Khmer Rouge who killed an estimated 1.5 million of its citizens. Left behind were thousands of orphans. These children became easy prey for traffickers who sold them internationally or kept them imprisoned in the brothels of Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, setting in motion a vicious cycle that has been perpetuated to this day. It is estimated that as many as one third of sex workers in Cambodia are children.

Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Vietnamese live on the waterways of Cambodia. Many had fled to Cambodia after the fall of Saigon. Others have been there for generations. Impoverished and ostracized, this Vietnamese population is very vulnerable and their children are especially at risk. Poverty, combined with a thriving child sex industry in Cambodia, has resulted in over seventy percent of Cambodia's Vietnamese girls being sold into slavery.

These are the children that Pastor Thach and his wife serve. This dear couple runs the Rau Muong (water spinach) school perched above the Mekong River near Phnom Penh. The education (and therefore opportunity) received by the children there may be the only thing standing in the way of a life of sexual servitude. Pastor Thach and his wife also provide residential care for four former orphaned and abandoned children who had nowhere else to go except the brothels. World Orphans desires to provide Pastor Thach's church with just $176 per month to help care for these precious children as the initial step towards a greater involvement.

CAMBODIA COUNTRY PROFILE:

Number of Single Orphans* (one parent lost): 660,000

Number of Double Orphans* (both parents lost): 55,000

*not including abandoned, sold or trafficked children

Population: 14,494,293

Average Income: $300 per person

NETWORK PARTNER:

CONTRIBUTIONS:

To give to this project please view our giving options (link below) and write "Lunkon Themi" in the online memo field or on the memo line of your check:

Giving Options

 

 

Preventing Child Prostitution in Thailand

Over the next few days, I'd like to share a few of our current project profiles with you. Here's one that is making a difference in Thailand to prevent children from being stolen into forced prostitution . . .

PROJECT PROFILE:

With rampant poverty, thriving drug trade, and a growing demand for child prostitutes, Thailand struggles with human trafficking. And with 1,300,000 children that have lost at least one parent, many kids are vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Although the situation would appear hopeless with so many at-risk children and so few resources, there is indeed hope. Many churches stand ready to help. Prachinburi Church is one such church making a difference. The church and Pastor Chalermchai Chaisombat have been running a Compassion International project for many years along with providing food and clothing to orphaned children in their community. But the need is so great that they have done more – rescuing several children to live in a home next to their church. World Orphans has been asked by the church and local Compassion International representatives to provide help in this area.

The home, located on church property, provides shelter, food, medical care, counseling, and most importantly – the love of a family – for fifteen children. World Orphans' goal is to provide the church with $1,300 per month to help care for these precious children.

THAILAND COUNTRY PROFILE:

Number of Single Orphans* (one parent lost): 1,300,000

Number of Double Orphans* (both parents lost): 58,000

*not including abandoned, sold or trafficked children

Population: 65,905,410

Average Income: $2,740 per person

NETWORK PARTNER:

CONTRIBUTIONS:

To give to this project please view our giving options (link below) and write "Prach" in the online memo field or on the memo line of your check:

Giving Options

Child Soldier (Longing for Death)

The year I was numbered eight years old, they began to teach me to be tough, to hate, to have a heart to kill my enemies. This was easy. My only family was the army and I hated them too. I couldn't run away, though. There was nowhere to hide. A few years before, many of my friends ran away. I thought I heard the guns barking in the distance but I don't know. Only a few returned out of many ten's of fingers of children that fled.

I began to train with weapons when my instructors decided I was near my tenth year. This was good because I spent less times quarrying rock and my back and legs did not ache as much. Because so many of my friends died, there is a void in my heart.

Some of my friends would go to bed with the older soldiers at night. They escaped the sound of the rope in the morning and, afterwards, there was money in their pockets to buy small things. It frightened me, though, because many of them wept in the days that followed. Some became very sick and if we are sick in that place we most likely die. There is no help and no hope for the sick there. The dark spirits are very powerful.

What is death like? Do I wander around like a ghost or can I just forget that I am alive and sleep a very deep sleep? These are the questions I asked myself sometimes, but most days were too difficult for the lips of my thoughts to speak to me.

View part one of this story here
View part two of this story here

To be continued...

Child Soldier (The Rhythm of the Rope)

My first morning I still remember. I woke that day to the rhythm of the rope upon my body. The song of the rope I know well now. It woke us very early every morning, before the great light had risen in the sky. It struck the flesh of all who were not rising from sleep quickly enough. Most of us did not wake unless we had to. Our bodies ached fearfully and in sleep we could forget. The rope that bit our flesh seldom causes us to bleed but there are times, oh yes, there are times.

We would gather to attention in the courtyard. There we stood and drilled. Every day was the same.

The rope was our companion as we marched out to the fields to work. All of us had to labor in the fields. We also worked in rock quarries, we built roads, we carried the burdens of the soldiers, sometimes many days by foot. If we had ridden on a truck to work, we would be like pigs going to market. And who would want to do that? They would be going to market to be slaughtered. Yes, we learned that we were animals. The difference is we speak and other beasts are dumb.

After a stretch of work in the morning, we would get a break. We were given food in dirty, cracked bowls: rice with some vegetable broth. It gurgled painfully into the knot that lived and twisted in my stomach. I think it was an angry spirit that came to steal what little food I got. At night I was given maybe half a bowl of the same food...if I was fortunate. If we tried to take more, the rope slithered across our shoulders.

The rope's only comfort is that it is familiar.

View part one of this story here.

To be continued...

Child Soldier (Abandoned to the Army)

The story that follows is a compilation that was crafted using the real lives and circumstances of children rescued by our partner who visited us last week. The individual story details are merged together in order to protect the identities and lives of the children involved, but the compilation is an accurate representation of real world scenarios involving non-combatant child soldiers in Southeast Asia:

Abandoned to the Army

When I was six my parents gave me to the army. Early in the morning my father pulled me out of sleep. It was still dark. He packed me on his back down the mountain trail from the village. His long black hair tickled my nose all the way. After we came to the main road I had to walk. We walked most of the day. I had no water and my throat was chalky dry because it was the time of no rain. We walked between the rocks in the red powder of the earth as the red sun beat upon my head.

Finally we came to a cluster of houses. At the side of the road was a tin roofed lean-to. Men with guns sat in the shade of the slanted roof and also some stood in the shadow of a great tree that spread its frog-like limb’s over the road. They looked mean and I was scared but my father walked over to them. He left me near the base of the tree and went to talk with some of the men near a truck. I played with a dung beetle in the dirt.

Father turned away from the men and began walking down the road. He never even looked at me. I thought he had forgotten me. I cried out, "Papa," but he did not turn back. I began to run after him but one of the men in green caught me by the arm and cuffed me. "You stay here," he slurred at me. I was shocked. I tried to lunge away but he struck me again.

That evening they threw me on the supplies that awkwardly filled the truck and told me to hold on or die. We drove all night till my arms ached and my skin stung sore from the dust and wind. In the morning we arrived at a town and drove up to a cement and metal fence. This was to be my prison. I did not know what a prison was. I did not even know what an army was. But now I know because I have lived in this place of no escape. I later found out my parents had offered me for nothing, I was not even worth a few coins!

Some of my friends came here because they were orphans. Some of them were conscripted. Others were abandoned. I was one of the most unfortunate –so I thought. My parents disowned me. I don’t know why. Maybe, as I learn more about my world, I will figure it out. I think there was not enough food and my mother’s stomach was taut with a coming child. Another still nursed at her breast. My two brothers, both older than me, worked hard on the farm. They could help father better than I could –I heard them say it.

To be continued...

My Tears Will Speak for Me

Last week, the founder of one of our partner organizations was in town for a visit. He and his family came over for dinner and shared their hearts concerning their ministry’s rescue of child soldiers in Southeast Asia, especially in the wake of the cyclone that caused so many more vulnerable orphans in the region. Southeast Asia boasts approximately 100,000 child soldiers, with the majority being sold, stolen or tricked into conscription in Burma.

Here is one of the stories that they share, from a young girl who managed to escape the clutches of a militaristic regime:

"Please excuse my tears...they must fall because there are many things I cannot say. My tears must speak for me.

My parents were drug traffickers, but they were addicts, too. I think some of you have seen what drugs can do. They make you a slave to their hunger, and eventually a thief and a beggar...that is what happened to my father. Last I knew, he was begging on the streets. I have been a thief, too, but I am not begging yet.

Having no good place to go as a teenager, I was recruited into the army when I was 15 years old. There were about 200 of us. We lived on a tall hill with gray walls that stretched high over our heads. The barracks were very close to the capital city and a long way from home. There were soldiers that stood guard along those walls. The guards were not there to protect us. They were there to keep us in.

Every day we built guns. At 5:00 AM every day, we did our morning run. By 8:00 AM, we were constructing guns. My job was to clean them. We were a munitions factory. But we were also soldiers. Some of us were very young, very small, even 3 years old. Others had lived there so long that they were over 30 years old. Many of us were girls. "Obey!" our bosses said. We had many bosses. Obedience: that was the motto. If we tried to escape, well, the guards would shoot.

Everybody rotated through guard duty at different intervals through the night. Every night the drill signal sounded and we had to hustle out of bed, rush into our uniform and be in parade formation within 30 seconds. How easy is that? Those who were late were beaten. We hit them too, because if they got there in time, we didn’t have to drill that next day. But that happened about as often as a chicken goes a day without pecking the dust for food. Almost every night we were drilled, so we slept lightly. Sometimes we had to run to a village in the dark of night with guns or crawl through trenches in the mud and rain...everybody 13 and older that is. The littlest kids were our gophers. They ran errands for everybody during the day.

Everybody was under tight security. We were not even allowed to smile or the stick would come down on us. Of course, you learned quickly not to smile. Some felt the stick for other things. I watched people beaten for escaping to make love in the field. I watched others beaten till they bled and died in front of my eyes.

One day I ran away. I was scared, but I did not die. Now I can’t go back to my people. I am so troubled because of the things I have seen and done. 

I can speak no words that shield me from the pain...so I will not speak. My many tears will speak for me."

Hope Restored

On Easter Sunday, we celebrate the new life and hope that is within us. Jesus’ victory becomes ours and, as we interact with the world around us, we are to be carriers, displayers and tellers of the promise that is found only in Him.

I find it very fitting, then, to receive this e-mail today from an orphan caregiver in Thailand concerning children lost – now found – and the process of seeing hope restored; restored through a faithful servant who understands the amazing power of love.

............................................................................................

Dear Paul...

Wow. I just read through a good bit of your blog..."happened" upon it. Wow.

It really touched my heart, my heart that is so bent towards orphans and those abandoned. I work in Thailand at an orphanage for kids with HIV; 70 kids. Most are healthy as they are on the ARV drugs, and you would never guess that they were HIV by looking at them...well, most of them. Some are symptomatic, but all are able to attend school.

It's what you can't see that breaks my heart. The look in their eyes, the odd behavior, the restlessness. The knowledge that they were sent away, pushed away, given away just because they are HIV. This is what they really have to live with every day. And as they are living longer and getting older, it gets harder and harder. They are able to voice themselves with more clarity and express their emotions with more fire. And as a caregiver, it is hard to know how to deal with some things and I am never able to separate the fact that these kids are hurting deep into their soul. They weren't wanted.

I do many things at the orphanage, but the thing I see myself doing most is just loving the kids. Taking them into my arms and giving them mom love, even when they smell so badly of infection or are covered with scabs. I feel like I have to fill in the gaps, to make up for something lacking, to pour out and out and out. My husband and I are even in the process of adopting an HIV positive orphan boy. His name is Bu and he is 5. He is lovely and I can't wait until he lives with us.

On our campus, we also have housing for "abandoned women"....wives and sisters and mothers who have been rejected by their families and left at the hospital, never to be picked up again. Last Sunday, one woman died, leaving behind her 8 year old son for us to care for, for us to mother in her stead. Somehow, it ended up being me that brought the boy, Boonyarit, back to see his dead mother, her body all shrouded and tied up. As we sat next to her, laying on a mat on the floor, I untied her face. She had just turned 31. But she looked 90. And she weighed about 50 lbs. But Boonyarit and I sat there and talked about her and what she was like and how she loved him and how he made her so happy.

I am no grief counselor or any kind of professional, but I am a mommy. And I thought about this, "if that were me and Boon was one of my boys, what would I want said about me?" So we talked about how she is singing with the angels and dancing with Jesus, because she loved Him. We talked about how glad she was that Boon was with us at the Agape Home now. And then I said, "let's kiss her one more time." So we both did and I tied the white sheet around her face again. He waved bye-bye, Paul. And he smiled at her, his eyes as sparkling as his mom's ever were. And I bit my lip and took a deep breath and I said bye-bye, too. We walked out and the men came in to put her in her coffin, which was just there inside the room.

Things die and things are left behind. Dreams die. Mommies die. Hope dies. The will to live dies....but this is not the end of the story. Dreams can come alive again, I can be a mommy. Hope can be restored. And the desire to live life to the fullest can spark again.

God cares about lost things. And He cares about children who have been lost...lost in a political system, lost in the shuffle, lost to someone's memory.

Thank you, Paul, for being a finder.

Ellen C.

Would You Press the Button? (part three)

We press that button in other ways also.

As we dwell within our entertainment-oriented, pleasure-seeking, self-indulgent domain, we ignore the plight of the world’s masses. As we give time and attention to the things that bring us materialistic or experiential satisfaction, we become apathetic to the mega-issues of our day.

We spend evenings absorbed by NBC, HBO and PPV, while people die in Darfur and the Congo. We fill our schedules with all manner of pleasurable activities and leisure occasions, while children are being raped for profit in Cambodia. We watch hundreds of hours of sporting events each year, while an emaciated worker is held in continual debt bondage to a brick kiln in India.

Where is our sense of outrage?

It has been numbed and replaced by the selfish pursuits of all that our culture has to offer.

Entertainment and material that "moth and rust will destroy" have been prioritized over giving time, attention and resources to our neighbors around the world.

Each time we tune into the next pointless TV show, instead of volunteering at a non-profit ministry, we are pushing the button.

Each time we splurge on trivialities and frivolities, instead of giving those funds to save a life in the developing world, we are pushing the button. We are choosing our pleasure over somebody else’s existence or well-being.

The 2006 American Time Use Survey, conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor, revealed that:

On an "average day" in 2006, persons in the US, age 15 and over, slept about 8.6 hours, spent 5.1 hours doing leisure and sports activities, worked for 3.8 hours, and spent 1.8 hours doing household activities. The remaining 4.7 hours were spent doing a variety of other activities, including eating and drinking, attending school, and shopping. Watching TV was the leisure activity that occupied the most time, accounting for about half of leisure time, on average, for both men and women.

Obviously, an "average day" factors in weekends and the reality that some activities are only done by a subset of the population. It is therefore designed to represent "adult society as a whole." Given that clarification, doesn’t it appear that our society can give more time and attention to the problems of the world, if only by replacing a few hours of TV per week?

We obviously devote a lot of our schedule to shopping. We live in a country that spends over $3 Billion on fine fragrances at department stores each year (not including Internet purchases and regular perfumes); a country that disperses over $250 million annually on just mascara alone; a country that will pay $15 billion this year for pet food, four times the amount spent on baby food. We dish out further billions on pet toys and accessories.

Time we invest in watching reruns and purchasing fancy fragrances could be used to save lives. Money we spend on pampering pets could be used to rescue the street child that nurses off of a stray dog in Bombay.

We’ve got it all wrong.

We keep pressing the button.

To be continued...

Would You Press the Button? (part two)

I see the button as an allegory, a metaphor of sorts.

The fact of the matter is that we press that button every day.

As we go about our daily lives of comfort and excess, without consideration of how our choices and actions might impact others, we adversely affect ‘strangers’ the world over.

When we buy a new bathroom rug because the last one is apparently out of style, we keep an eight year-old boy, Rajan, chained to a loom in Nepal.

When we pick up a latte from our favorite barista, we fuel a conglomerate that forces Juan, a poor Costa Rican coffee grower, to sell at prices far below what would allow him to afford that same cup of coffee for himself.

When we buy the latest fancy T-Shirt with gold embossing at XYZ Casuals, we rob Ajay from ever leaving the cotton plantation that holds him and his sisters in perpetual bondage in South India.

When we go on an exotic spa vacation to Southeast Asia, we entrap Isra, a fifteen year-old Thai girl from the impoverished hill tribes, in a world of daily violation and exploitation.

When we visit that adult Website that our teachers warned us about, we enable pornographers to imprison a scared teenage girl, Imana, in a Burundian hotel room for three days, robbing her of her innocence and privacy.

When we choose to adopt a child from a country with a less-than-reputable child-placement program, we cause Esmeralda to reluctantly give up her new baby girl in Latin America.

When we select that rare hardwood for our kitchen cabinets because it nicely matches the existing wallpaper and is much grander than the neighbor’s remodel, we help to eradicate the ecosystem that sustains Daniel and his family in Brazil.

When we choose to get an organ transplant in Eastern Europe because the wait is too long in the United States, we cause the abduction of Serge, a street child in Moldova, and the subsequent harvesting of his kidneys.

Whether it’s the big and profound (organ transplants, Internet pornography, and international adoptions), or the seemingly trite and trivial (cups of coffee, T-shirts, kitchen cabinets, vacations, and bathroom rugs), we constantly enslave, maim and kill our neighbors around the planet.

What’s unsettling is that the facts are out there and are readily available. They can be researched with relative ease. But we simply don’t have the time and inclination to do so.

We’re just much too busy...and comfortable.

We keep pressing the button.

To be continued...