Paul Myhill's Blog

Innocence Lost

"The chain on the door is to keep the rogues out. Before I put it there, they would break in to steal from us and rape us."

Janet, a thirty two year-old mother, shared this with me matter-of-factly, accepting rape as an inevitable occurrence in the Zulu shanty town we were visiting, an area that police rarely go into. The way in which the information was conveyed was as impacting to me as the information itself. Janet wasn’t crying and crumbling over the fact she has been raped repeatedly. She simply communicated it much like we would communicate going out to the mailbox to pick up our junk solicitations and bills. Just another fact of life, another routine incident.

The rogues are youth and men, often addicted to drugs, who break into the shacks, robbing victims to feed their habits or lust. To be "real men" the witch doctors tell them they must have sex every other day. To get a high, they need funds. Both can be found in poorly-protected tin shanties occupied by widows and orphans. "If they get in, we offer ourselves so that our children aren’t raped," Janet further explained.

There is no surprise that the area we were in was the AIDS and drugs capital of South Africa. Such things go hand in hand. When tied to a tradition of outright male dominance and the cultural requirement for frequent sex, you’re left with a boiling cauldron of abuse and disease. Tin shanties are simply cages that hold prey, incubators that hold diseased victims.

Janet used to have a chair sitting on the flattened dry mud she calls her front porch. After she put the chains on the rusty front door, she discovered that she had to move the chair inside also. The rogues would use it to get up onto her roof, pry back the tin sheets and drop in through the ceiling to rape her. I heard the sounds in my head: the sound of men lumbering up the side of the shack, the sound of heavy footsteps on the tin surface overhead, the sound of crowbars dragging across the thin corrugated barrier, the sound of metal against metal and nails popping, the sound of creaking sheets bending against the will of determined predators. The sound of screaming.

Janet is HIV positive, no doubt infected by one of her attackers or perhaps the husband that left her for another woman. Her 8ft. by 8ft. shack has two decorations – a teddy bear stuffed high into a corner, and the memorial program for her mother’s funeral held by a clothes peg to a metal edge of the shanty siding. A teddy bear and a funeral program. Innocence and loss. Innocence lost.

Today is World AIDS Day. According to an AP report this morning, "South Africa has an estimated 5.5 million people living with the HIV virus — the highest total of any country in the world and more than one-sixth of the global total. About 1,000 South Africans die each day of the disease and complications like tuberculosis. Even more become infected because prevention messages haven't worked."

Please remember the infected and affected world today. Mothers like Janet.

World Orphans Weekly! - Kenya Crashing

Dear Friend of the Fatherless,

Most of you know that we frequently face dangerous situations as we travel the globe to initiate and facilitate the work of World Orphans. I’ve been plopped into the middle of scenes of aggression on many occasions. Add in unstable political circumstances, potential muggings, high-risk kidnap scenarios, religious tensions, and general civil conflict, and you have a rather potent mix for unrest and violence.

It’s never bothered me. It’s simply part of the risk and call to the Church and children.

I have to admit, though, that on the heels of my trip to Rwanda, the news of the rape, mutilations and killings in Kenya – especially in places of worship - had me a bit unsettled. A country of relative stability over its four decades of independence, Kenya took me by surprise.

Kenya is a country I love and visit often. World Orphans has funded over 90 church-based homes there that rescue and care for thousands of abandoned and orphaned children. Our in-country regional representative is based there. Key mission agency partners are based there. The capital city, Nairobi, along with Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, acts as our main entry point for ministry and teams into the region.

I’m in Hawaii right now, a world away from the terrors of night and the machetes that fly by day. I sense from light and diminishing news interest, that the general population is again numb to the issues and concerns of corruption and social turmoil in Africa, just like in 1994.

I’d like you to connect further with this country I love. Below are a few entries I’ve written over the last year alone regarding Kenya. I invite you to read, learn...and pray and act as if you yourselves were suffering.

RECENT UNREST

More Violence; More Orphans – Another church filled with women and children is set ablaze

Rape as a Weapon – Young boys and girls are not immune to such hatred

Kenya Violence in Photos – one, two, three, four.

PAST INDICATIONS

Demolition – An angry Muslim mob levels a church-based children’s home on Christmas Eve

Evil in their Hearts. Hate in their Eyes – Encircled by radicals at the site of destruction

THE SLUMS – FLASHPOINTS OF UNREST

The Breeding and Killing Grounds of the Orphan – Enter their world of desperation

The Testing of Job – Your husband is dead. Your seven children have all died of AIDS. You are caring for your orphaned granddaughter. You have HIV/AIDS yourself. Where is the hope?

Starfish – A little orphan girl reminds us of the hope and task

Red Handprints – The measure of a man?

Three Infant Boys – Will they survive to my next visit?

Women and Children First – In this sad reality, women are nothing more than possessions

Mud Caskets and Mansions – Better to live in squalor with Jesus, than in luxury without Him

Discarded Children – Children of the dumps in Kibera slum

Threads: Two Boys. Two Worlds – An intimate reminder in the Mathare slum

Stronger – How do the slums of Nairobi affect a person?

OTHER RELEVANT KENYA REFLECTIONS

Corruption – A root cause of the current crisis. A daily reality in Kenya

Namesake – Marked for death, this abandoned child defied the odds

The Lion's Share – Many African rulers ‘rape’ their nations for personal and tribal gain

Until They All Have Homes,

Paul Myhill
President/CEO

World Orphans
1840 Woodmoor Dr., Suite 100
Monument, CO 80132
1-888-ORPHANS
719-487-1700
Facebook Profile

All contributions are tax deductible and eternally significant.

Rape as a Weapon

Scott and I have been communicating with Lameck, our East Africa regional representative who is based in Kenya. Lameck is not only an employee of World Orphans, but also serves with Fountain of Life, the ministry whose church-based home was leveled by a frenzied group of radical Muslims in a land-grab attack last Christmas.

He is therefore no stranger to mob violence.

Lameck shares disturbing insights regarding the current situation in Nairobi – headless torsos littered outside of the slums, churches set ablaze, gangs of machete-wielding youths moving and attacking at will...

 

...and many women and children raped in the midst of the lawlessness in the Kibera and Mathare shantytowns.

News today (below) reports that gang rape of women and children – girls and boys - is now occurring on a broad scale.

World Orphans has over 90 church-based homes for orphaned children in Kenya. Please pray for the safety and sanctity of the children, the families living with them, and the churches that sponsor and support them.

Rape, the Mob's Latest Weapon in Kenya

By Adrian Blomfield in Kisumu

Hundreds of women and children, including boys as young as five, have been gang-raped in a wave of sexual violence that has swept Kenya in the aftermath of last week's disputed presidential election.

As ethnic hatred mounts in a country teetering on the brink of catastrophe, disturbing reports are emerging that angry mobs are adding rape to their arsenal of revenge.

At a hospital for women in the Nairobi suburb of Hurlingham, doctors said that they had treated 24 women and 13 girls over the past four days.

Three boys were also admitted after being repeatedly sodomized. "Most of them have been gang-raped, one of them by 10 men," said Rahab Ngugi, the hospital's matron.

"We believe we only know about a fraction of cases because most people have no transport to get to hospitals or are still trapped because of the security situation."

The vast majority of the victims had been assaulted in their own homes and all had been targeted because of their tribe, the doctors said.

Most were members of President Mwai Kibaki's Kikuyu tribe, attacked in Nairobi's slums by other ethnic groups who support Raila Odinga, his Luo challenger.

The mobs had smashed their way into their homes, the women told doctors. Attacking everyone they found inside with machetes and clubs, the youths raped them in front of their husbands, some of whom were later killed.

Aid workers said they had received reports of similar attacks across the country, although no statistics are available.

It was not just in Nairobi's slums that sexual violence has been reported.

As opposition protesters attempted to march to a rally in the centre of the city yesterday, a British woman in the prosperous suburb of Kilimani told The Daily Telegraph that she had witnessed an apparent sexual attack on a young woman from the balcony of her home.

As mobs set fire to a nearby petrol station and police opened fire in the air, three young men took advantage of the mayhem to grab a slim woman of about 20, dressed in white jeans and a blue top, who appeared to have been inadvertently caught up in the violence.

"As they advanced on her, she started backing away," the British woman said. "She was begging them in Swahili, saying 'please, please, please' over and over again.

"They took her behind a wall and I couldn't see what happened but I could hear the screams.

"I felt so helpless. It was too dangerous to go outside. If I had a gun I would have gone and shot them, but I didn't so there was nothing I could do."

A Child Soldier's Story (Catch and Release)

WARNING: The following account is descriptive and unsettling.

Jeffrey's personal tally after four years of imposed service as a child soldier in the Lord’s Resistance Army includes six villagers hacked or beaten to death, "hundreds" of people maimed, and "many, many" Ugandan soldiers killed.

He only admits to taking two ‘wives,’ but there were probably many more village girls that were violated over the years.

Young girls were also brought back to Joseph Kony so he could pick from among them and viciously rape "two or three at a time." Jeffrey explained that, often, the older girls would escape into the bush when they attacked a village. Only the youngest remained to be immediately molested, forced upon by the fighters, or taken into captivity to continually meet the ongoing sexual demands of the troops. The most innocent, the ‘little ones,’ became those who suffered the worst abuse and defilement, perhaps while in a state of shock from seeing their parents or friends fall under the unforgiving blows of a machete.

(EVIL AGGRESSION. A poster in a third grade classroom at one of our Ugandan children's homes warns against child abduction and rape)

Many of the soldiers didn’t want to keep these young girls in bondage. Jeffrey shared that on a couple of occasions he took a girl with him to fetch water and, upon arriving at the water source, told her to run and never look back. Allowing a slave to escape meant that he would have to spend a month in solitary confinement under harsh conditions. It was a worthy sacrifice to him. He imagined his own sister having to be subject to such relentlessly cruel treatment. He hoped that, if she were in similar circumstances, somebody would do the same for her.

To be continued...

A Child Soldier's Story (Brutal Acts)

WARNING: The following account is very descriptive and unsettling.

Kony’s armies of terror bore down hard on villages in northern Uganda with a malevolence that defies understanding. The only explanation is that these men, driven by hatred against God’s creation, who raped the orphan and the widow, who forced boys to conduct horrendous acts against their own people, must be possessed by demons. Kony, himself, makes it clear that he is subject to demonic authority.

Jeffrey's hands were now visibly trembling. He described to me how, after sweeping into a village, Kony’s soldiers ripped off the clothing of all the villagers, both men and women alike. The rags were thrown into a fire to be incinerated. Some people also felt the lick of the flames.

Already in a state of fright and humiliation, the real terror began.

Pre-pubescent girls were selected as ‘wives,’ many as young as eight or ten years old. The LRA commanders told the fighters, "Anybody you want, you may have. Cut or kill the rest." The young soldiers had to molest and rape, otherwise they would be "cut" themselves. No girl was too young to be debased and spoiled. And sometimes even old women were violently raped. It was sport. It was intentional degradation of both the lowly and the revered, the young innocent and the esteemed elder.

(TRAIL OF TEARS. A young Ugandan girl gets an HIV test. Many like her have been raped repeatedly)

The horrific mutilations of these villagers are now widely reported. They have been the subject of numerous press articles and books. To hear it from the mouth of one who was forced to perpetrate such acts, though, gave me cold pause. It added a new dimension of realization and repulsion. The hands quivering before me were the same hands that lacerated these lives and dreams.

Kony’s LRA troops caused male abductees to kill parents and peers. Girls were stolen for sexual bondage. Those left alive in the village were viciously scarred for life. The marauding young soldiers had to cut off limbs, ears, lips or noses. They had to gouge out eyes. They had to castrate. In short, they had to amputate or slash something, anything. If they failed to do so, they would be carved up themselves.

Women’s breasts were cut off so that they couldn’t feed their children. Men were maimed so that they couldn’t provide for their families.

And, in an ultimate act of indignity and barbarism, women were forced to lie down, be violated, and have their genitals deeply pierced to force large padlocks through holes that clamped the whole groin region shut. These locks could only be removed by deeply cutting into the same flesh that they desecrated. They would be sadistically inserted as the seed of their rapists still defiled their bodies...and as the fruit of their wombs were killed, abducted to kill, or carted off as sex slaves.

Victims were disfigured to become unattractive to potential mates and to serve as a reminder of the terror lurking in the bush. Kony wanted to stamp out the next generation while keeping the current generation in a constant state of fear. He relished in embarrassing the Ugandan government with living reminders of its ineffectiveness, living reminders of his control and carnage.

The other living reminders?

Thousands of orphans. Thousands of abducted children who, to this day, are still serving Kony.

To be continued...

A Child Soldier's Story (Abduction & Programming)

By the time he was sixteen, he was already raping, maiming and killing as a child soldier in the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel terror group in northern Uganda headed by the maniacal Joseph Kony.

(PURE EVIL: A rare photo of Joseph Kony)

We’ll call him Jeffrey. To use his real name could bring dire consequences.

I had the opportunity to interview Jeffrey extensively this morning here in Uganda. I was told that it was the first time he has comprehensively opened up and revealed the horrors of his past life. Many like him try to repress the memories, try to not talk about the atrocities they have committed against their own tribe...own people...own nation.

(TEN YEARS ON: Jeffrey recounts his fours years of captivity as a child soldier in Joseph Kony's army.)

As a young teenager, Jeffrey was abducted from his village near Gulu. While recounting the event he explained that, typically, children like him are required to kill right away so that they have "blood and shame" on their hands. Under the threat of torture and execution, Twelve year olds, ten year-olds, eight year-olds, are forced to bludgeon or hack somebody to death before they are taken from the village and brainwashed to do the bidding of a purely evil man.

With guns pointed at his head, a child might have to kill his own father and mother with a hoe or machete, often with daddy and mommy telling him that it is ok so that their boy might live, might have a chance to escape and lead a normal life. As such, many children are the very instruments used to cause their own orphaning.

Regardless of who they are forced to murder, the children start to think of themselves as evil, damned beings...unforgiveable, unredeemable. In that state, they can be further exploited to do diabolical acts of violence and hatred.

Jeffrey’s indoctrination into a cult of fear occurred over a two-month period. He was partly held in bondage by the threat that Kony’s army would kill his family if he tried to escape. The subjugation was completed by the dread of death by dismemberment. Jeffrey conveyed to me that whenever Kony addressed his troops he would arbitrarily accuse two or more of them of wanting to escape. He then employed a machete to take them apart, "piece by piece" in front of all, starting with deep downward strikes at the collar bone and shoulders.

Jeffrey said that the reality, of course, was that everybody wanted to escape, but they knew that they would surely die if they attempted to do so.

(CHILD SOLDIER WARNING: A section from a school poster in the third-grade classroom of one of our orphan homes in Uganda) 

Jeffrey’s first task was to serve as a slave to Kony’s militia. He was subsequently sent out as a spy to sell alcohol to government soldiers stationed in various barracks in the area. He would report back and, when the moment was right, signal when to attack the soldiers in a state of drunkenness. The very men he was befriending were the men he was to betray and cause the deaths of, to rip husbands away from wives, fathers from children.

Ultimately, though, Kony would decide when to strike and when not to strike. It is said that he consulted evil spirits to determine favorable times for victory.

It wasn’t long before Jeffrey was required to carry a gun and pull the trigger himself. His particular troop of children killed about twenty Ugandan soldiers every week with an ambush scheme that submersed the government troops into a state of surprise and panic. During such attacks, Kony’s young fighters were told to use only one bullet per soldier, to slowly pick off their targets one by one. Cold, calculating and deadly accurate.

But what shocks the world most is not the death that Kony has dealt to the Ugandan army through kidnapped children, but what he has used them to do in the villages to peaceful people that have no heart for conflict.

To be continued...

Organs (part three)

Human and organ traffickers frequently know the exact time that a 16 or 17 year-old girl is turned out of an orphanage. Our Moldovan contact informed us that, on many occasions, these foul men even sit in vans that park curbside, waiting to snatch up the departing teenager.

I again tried to look at this from the viewpoint of the girl graduating the institution. She may have been a ‘lucky’ one, one that wasn’t prostituted out while in the orphanage. Perhaps her orphanage director didn’t want to ever take that risk, choosing instead to take a fee for simply alerting abusers and traffickers of her pending release.

She is unsure of herself as the doors of the state orphanage open. She is unprepared for the world outside since she never received any skills training or transitional counseling. She feels very nervous and vulnerable. At the same time, she is excited to break away from the monotony and bleakness of the institutional environment that stifled her creativity and enthusiasm for life. She musters up courage, holds her head high and walks out in wonder and amazement at her new-found freedom and opportunity.

Twenty feet and twenty seconds later, she is shoved into a van.

A few hours after that, her clothes are ripped off of her and she is being forced upon by smelly, hairy men who slap and punch her when she offers resistance.

This is the new life that was ready to pounce and prey upon her. This is her commencement.

(Image: Anti-trafficking billboard in Chisinau, Moldova)

Organs (part two)

A couple of years ago it was reported that the Turkish Mafia in Moldova entered into an unholy agreement with a director of a particular village orphanage in the country. As part of the arrangement, the mafia rented multiple rooms at a nearby hotel, presumably from a hotel owner or manager that was part of the scheme, or otherwise paid or coerced to keep silent about it.

Pubescent girls from the orphanage were taken to the hotel and frequently raped, day after day. The goal was to impregnate them. Once carrying a child, the girls were confined to a room until they gave birth. The newborns then entered into this fallen world on an extremely short fuse – they were sold for their organs.

(Image: Baby girl in Moldova)

This particular case persisted over a two year period.

Our Moldovan host pointed out that this wasn’t an isolated incident. It was a ‘general case’ that happened in numerous locations around the country over an extended period of time. Similar situations are most likely occurring today, right now.

Our host also showed us the online account of the story from the archives of a well-respected Moldovan news site. On the English version of the site, however, the article was noticeably absent, most probably a victim of the communist leadership’s censorship policies.

I was literally sick to my stomach as I thought of the several ghastly abominations that comprised the terrible sequence of actions and events involved in this wicked venture.

The criminals would have probably:

• Threatened or bribed individuals at orphanages and hotels, perhaps even beating and killing those that wouldn’t comply;

• Forcibly kidnapped scared young girls who had no idea of the ongoing horror that awaited them;

• Continually raped these girls personally for current pleasure and future profit;

• Waited for these babies – their babies – to be developed and born, in eager anticipation of them being butchered and sold; and

• Subsequently sold these babies – their babies – to come under the scalpel of a seedy, crooked physician

...All for money.

None of these steps deterred them. None was considered frightful enough to stop the progression and escalation of events. The series repeated with multiple girls, multiple times, multiple babies.

(Image: Orphaned girls, now teenagers, in a church-based transition home we visited in rural Moldova)

I also thought of this heinous exploitation from the perspective of a single mortified girl:

She is whisked away from her friends and a bunk-bed to a room of vile men and a rape-bed. There, she suffers sexual injustice time and time again. Suddenly, it all stops and she soon realizes that she is with child. She is very scared, but is thankful that the child within her now prevents the daily penetration by many loathsome creatures. As the child is born, she looks with wonder upon its beautiful face, only to see her jailors and tormenters quickly leave with it, never to be seen again. She hears the baby’s cries down the hallway and desires to reach out for it, but is restrained.

Then, a couple of months later, the daily raping begins again.

This time the end result is known...and feared.

To be continued...

"We Give Them Dreams"

The Father’s House in Kiev, Ukraine (not related to Father's House in Romania), rescues children from the streets through a multi-step process that begins with a two-and-a-half month ‘camp’ set on an island in the broad Dnieper river. The Dnieper slowly flows through Kiev towards the Black Sea and provides a unique barrier of separation between the harsh streets and the idyllic setting of the campsite.

(Image: Step One - The Father's House campsite. A place of rehabilitation.)

The camp is followed by a nine month group residential care program where children continue to learn about their value and responsibility. Afterwards, they are placed into family units in an adjoining apartment complex that is also owned by the ministry. Here, families from the church have volunteered to look after eight children each over a two year period.

(Image: One of the street boys currently at the camp)

There are six families currently in the apartment complex, helping to raise a total of 48 children that have progressed through these structured rehabilitation and development steps. After they have learned the value of family, and about a Father who loves them so much, many of these children are adopted into Christian families (often the very same families that volunteered to raise them for two years in the apartments) or placed into more permanent foster-care arrangements so that other children can eventually take their places to undergo the transformation course.

 

(Image: Step Two - The Father's House group residential home)

(Image: Step Three - Children are placed into family units in a separate apartment building on the property. Eight children are assigned to each family.)

The orphaned and abandoned children of Father’s House have many painful stories - stories of young lives of abuse and exploitation.

We were told of an eight year-old girl who ran away from home after being continually prostituted for vodka by her alcoholic mother. Nobody knows for sure when her torment began, perhaps when she was as young as six. Men would simply show up with a bottle of the liquor in order to have time with her. After receiving the alcohol, her mother would then show them into the little girl’s room. She would drink while the men freely had their way with her daughter. I can’t imagine the screams and cries that were drowned out by a drunken haze.

(Image: A young girl plays with a puppy on the playground at Father's House)

A seven year-old girl ended up in the Father’s House program after being rescued from constant physical and sexual abuse as a slave. Her impoverished parents had sold her to a gypsy family for such a purpose. When a family gets to the point of selling their own children in order to survive, especially when selling them into obviously horrible circumstances, the depth of human desperation and degeneration has reached its lowest point.

A six year old boy was taken off of the streets. He couldn’t talk and didn’t even know the name of his country. He could barely walk. He had apparently been forcibly confined to a wheelchair for years. He was not allowed to talk or get out of his prison on wheels, so that his family could use him as a prop as they begged on the streets of Kiev.

We see it time and time again – children treated as commodities in order to feed earnings or addictions.

And then there’s the story of Tatiana (not her real name). At eleven or twelve years of age, Tatiana was repeatedly tied to a metal bed and beaten severely by her alcoholic mother. During these and other beatings, her teeth were knocked out of her head. On one occasion the mother punished Tatiana by trying to cut the nose right off of her face.

During a particularly brutal episode, Tatiana’s head was forced into an oven and her hair caught on fire. The searing follicles were doused out by the pot of boiling water that was on the stovetop.

It has now taken sixteen surgeries to reconstruct Tatiana’s beautiful face. It took more work and time to reconstruct her sense of worth.

After ‘graduating’ the Father’s House program, Tatiana was adopted into a loving family and is now receiving a college education. Her nightmare turned into a dream.

(Image: A picture of Tatiana, after her reconstructive surgeries, hangs on the wall at Father's House)

"We give them dreams," said Ruslan, the Director of Father's House. "They come to us with no hope for tomorrow. They don't know if tomorrow will even come for them. They have to live and survive in the present. They don't know how to hope and dream. We give that back to them...or maybe give it to them for the first time."

Children For Rent

In L’viv, Ukraine, we were hosted by the kind folks from the regional office of New Hope International, an evangelical missions organization that is also based in Colorado Springs. New Hope’s President, Hank Paulson, and his team helped us to better understand the dire orphanage situation in this Eastern European country.

In quite a few Ukrainian state-run orphanages, orphaned girls are prostituted out before they even leave the institution. Others are sold to sex traffickers upon graduating.

Can you imagine the types of people that would sell the children under their care to be raped by local men willing to invade their purity and security? Those that are paid to care for and protect these children have become part of the exploitative system aligned against them.

 

(Image: Bogdana was rescued from a government orphanage by New Hope)

In some other government orphanages, children have been ‘borrowed’ for child pornography. Young boys and girls are forced to engage in sexual acts with adults or each other while film crews or photographers stand by to force and capture every moment. Such pornography rings have been traced to sites that are popular with pedophiles in the United States. America is very much part of the demand that drives such reprehensible acts halfway around the world. Pedophiles that view such material are as much a part of the problem as those who steel and defile the children.

In some cases, orphanage directors have been threatened by organized crime syndicates to give them children to prostitute or produce pornography with. If a director refuses, the crime lords mention the schedules and addresses of the director’s own children and state that harm will come to them unless they cooperate. They threaten other children in order to receive the orphaned children they want to abuse. Pure evil.