Abandoned-Orphaned

Continuum of Care (introduction)

I wrote the following entry, and a few that follow, at 4:00 AM as a storm rained down on a tin roof overlooking a courtyard in Bujumbura, Burundi last year. I’m not sure why it took me so long to post them, perhaps because they fall more into a ministry philosophy category than one of in-field reporting. Regardless, we have developed this model considerably further since I penned these initial thoughts based on our discussions. I look forward to sharing more with you on that later...

Continuum of Care (introduction)

True holistic or ‘whole’ ministry not only means providing for all the functional needs of the individual, but possessing all the potential solutions available for that individual. It entails having all the options at your disposal to meet the needs according to a ‘continuum of care.’ Where an individual’s needs and circumstances fall on that spectrum dictates the prospective approaches and solutions. For the potential orphan, it involves first trying to prevent orphaning, second, rescuing the child after orphaning.

More specifically, the rescue and care of abandoned and orphaned children should follow a progressive continuum of options that all involve the coordination and direct involvement of the local indigenous church located in the community.

PREVENTION/DELAY

Prevention involvement should primarily focus on keeping dying families or guardians alive for as long as possible, or by supporting high-risk struggling, impoverished, or single-parent families. In other words, the goal should be to avert orphaning and abandonment, or to at least significantly delay it.

Indigenous churches, as they engage their communities, conduct home care visits and provide much-needed medicines, food and other assistance for this purpose. Naturally, they also have significant additional ministry opportunities into these families as a result.

TRANSITION/RESIDENTIAL PLACEMENT

If orphaning is still imminent, the church already has a history with and familiarity of these children due to its prevention and delay involvement. Requisite trust has been built with the families and the kids. The church prepares the family for death through counsel and practical programs that help to safeguard memories, family heritage and continuity. Meanwhile, the church looks to see what extended family options currently exist or helps to convince and support otherwise uncommitted relatives to step up and take in these children. Again, this provides further inlets for the church to reach and minister to families. The church is given witnessing avenues beyond just the interest in the children.

If these first two options don’t exist or have failed, then the church turns to its own congregation – first to see if church members can raise and care for the children as their own (adoption) or as an intermediate step until another family is found (foster care). The church therefore serves as an integral community-based solution.

If the church’s capacity has already reached its upper limits, then a church-based residential care solution is needed in order to keeps kids off of the streets, herded into institutions, preyed upon by traffickers, or being exploited as domestic slaves in other community homes.

Group residential care, however, still has to be designed to provide a family environment, albeit a large one of fifteen children or so. Church families, that may have existing kids of their own, are recruited to care for these additional children in church-based homes with full funding provided for food, clothing, education and other critical needs. It’s a long-term obligation - a lifelong commitment - to what, in essence, equates to a group adoption.

In these large family settings, widows can complement the live-in care provision. Formerly disenfranchised and ostracized, many of these ladies need a home themselves and a renewed sense of purpose and belonging. They know loss and pain and are therefore uniquely qualified to counsel and comfort children who have lost their parents.

Volunteers from the church body are also on hand to provide assistance, mentoring, and skills development for the children in the group home.

RESCUE

There exist many young children already struggling on the streets and in garbage dumps and brothels. The indigenous church still goes through the necessary steps to find and support extended families for their rescue. But, absent that, these children also need to be incorporated into families within homes overseen and run by the church.

TRANSITION/REHABILITATION

Many orphan care ministries speak in terms of ‘transition’ or ‘reintegration’ concerning children that age-out of the system. For the children in World Orphans’ church-based homes, these words carry less meaning. Under our current ministry model, our children remain fully integrated in their communities and daily experience what healthy families look like. There is no big disconnection between the environment of their upbringing and the next season of life in the ‘real world,’ only the normal anxieties typically associated with making it on your own.

What’s more, these children never graduate from a home, much like we would never graduate from our own families. The families are told that their care for the children is not a 5, 10 or 15-year commitment. It’s a 65-year commitment! These kids are now part of families, families that they will still visit; families that they will celebrate life’s achievements and milestones with; families that will gather together for reunions and holidays.

There are children we serve, however, that can be deemed as in need of transition. These are children in countries that raise their orphans in state institutions, or in countries where circumstances placed them into large privately-run orphanages. They also include latter-stage children that have been on the streets or rescued from other dire circumstances. These kids need comprehensive help through well-designed intervention programs that prepare them for the next stage of life.

In many cases, these children are immediately placed at the mercy of evil forces that prey upon them as soon as they are released from institutional care. If the church doesn’t step in at that point, the kids are soon immersed into a world of drugs, prostitution, slavery, or forced military conscription. Their lives are typically harsh...and short.

To avoid this highly-vulnerable period following institutional release, World Orphans is establishing transition homes, again owned and run by indigenous churches, that take in children before malevolent parties have a chance to grab them. This residential care format provides the necessary training (including social and skills development) to allow the children to better integrate into broader society at a later date.

SELF-SUSTAINABILITY

Whether it’s a child leaving a primary or transitional home, or directly aging out of an institutional orphanage, there is a further opportunity and responsibility for an indigenous church. Much like we would help our own children with ‘next steps’ resourcing and care, so is it with children from any type of residential care program. They need assistance to take the first strides of self sufficiency. That may come in the form of additional training or higher education, but can often mean a simple micro-loan to establish them in a trade, small business, or other income-generating scenario.

Why go this extra mile?

Because it could mean the difference between stopping or perpetuating the vicious cycle of orphaning and abandonment. It’s not just the specific child (now young adult) in question, but also their future offspring. The child needs to have every chance to be successful and self supporting so that they don’t, in turn, abandon children or fall to the ills that take and destroy lives after children are born.

World Orphans Weekly! - Eunice's Story

Meet Eunice.

She is a young girl living alone with her grandmother in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya. Her grandmother is living with HIV/AIDS. There are no other relatives to help. No neighbors with the capacity to care.

Who will care for Eunice and her grandmother in a community where thousands face these same challenges?

What will happen when Eunice’s grandmother passes away?

Will Eunice become another orphan statistic?

Who will care when others will not or cannot?

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.

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.

Changing One Life at a Time (part four)

Developments and Achievements

Bob Lepine (Vice President/Chief Content Officer, FamilyLife): World Orphans exists to try to do what?

Troy Wiseman (Co-Founder/Chairman, World Orphans): World Orphans was (established) to assist in the brick-and-mortar aspect of a children's home. Orphanage sounds a little bit more institutional. That's not what we do. We knew that there were a lot of ministries and people that could pay 25 bucks a month or 30 bucks a month to take care of a child – to get him food, medicine, clothing, school. But for a local church (to hear), "You know what? We need $10,000 or $20,000 or $30,000 to build a home for 40 kids that you're never going to see," there was a big void, "Okay, we can take care of the kids, but we can't put them anywhere."

What we needed was to provide a vehicle that would facilitate the other part of the equation (the funding of infrastructure) to partner with a church.

Dennis Rainey (CEO/President, FamilyLife): You're speaking of the church there in that country?

Troy: Yes, the indigenous church. The referral might have come from a church in the States, but it (the in-country partner) has to be a church. If they already have a church building, already have the land, the cost is just the brick and the beds. It's a lot more economical.

(Image: This World Orphans children's home in Hyderabad, India (L) was built on the existing land of the church (R). Please note that we no longer put "Children's Home" on our buildings.)

And what happens is the church becomes the family for the kids.

We will (also) typically put in a widow. These kids lost their parents, right? A widow can relate to that loss much better than, let's say, a house parent who has three of their own kids that's there trying to take care of them all.

(Image: Some of the live-in widows that complement the family caregivers at one of our homes in Uganda. Many of our homes give care and a renewed sense of purpose to both orphans and widows.)

Over time, the model developed a little bit differently, but it's a church-based home, a small group environment. The church commits to taking care of the kids, educating the kids, feeding the kids, teaching them about Jesus, mentoring them spiritually.

(Image: The school room at one of the homes we funded in Costa Rica)

Dennis: And since 1993, how many of these, well, you don't want to call them orphanages, but...

Troy: Children's homes.

Dennis: ...Children's homes have you built alongside a church?

Troy: Over 500 in about 46 countries. Sometimes some other people have kicked in. We were certainly the catalyst for all 500. Sometimes we funded the whole thing, sometimes it was a portion thereof. But we certainly were the catalyst.

(Image: Family-style homes. A child's room at one of our home in Ukraine)

From: FamilyLife Today with Dennis Rainey
Broadcast date: 08/06/07
(Edited and Abridged)

To be continued...

PAUL’S COMMENTS

World Orphans has a rich history of building homes in partnership with indigenous churches. These churches are the best positioned and best able to care for the children in their communities. In general, where the problem exists, these churches exist.

Recently, World Orphans has also begun complementary programs to fund the following additional needs of church-based children’s homes:

• Start-up costs (furniture, kitchen equipment, mosquito netting, etc.)
• Ongoing care expenses (food, clothing, education, skills training, etc.)
• Self-sustainability programs (agriculture projects, water wells, livestock, etc.)
• Transition micro-finance (business loans for children that ‘graduate’ the home)
• Special projects (mosquito netting, emergencies, surgeries, etc.)
• Home care visitation (identifying and ministering to dying families before their children become orphaned)

We are excited about these new initiatives. Many of them are being done in partnership with other organizations, ministries that have great expertise in these areas. Others are simply being started through our own experience-base of dealing with the church care of orphans in dozens of countries over the past fourteen years.

To learn more, please sign up for updates, here.
You can get involved as a financial partner, here.

Orphan Drivers

Besides the obvious - war and continued conflict - the orphan drivers in Iraq are comparable to any other nation in the region. And they are closely related to the religion that holds one billion people in bondage.

Single, un-wed mothers cannot accept the ongoing shame of their condition. Similarly, their extended families won’t look after the offspring of trysts and rape. To do so would be a constant reminder of the tainting of family honor. As a result, many newborns are dumped at hospitals.

Some Muslim men take additional wives while they are well into their golden years. It is not uncommon to see 60 year-old men with 18 year-old wives. These women usually have no control over their reproductive lives and, after the death of their husband, the resulting children are often the lowest in the pecking order. The last wife also holds such a lowly position and is typically shunned by the older wives. Unable to support themselves, the young widow and her children become the collateral damage of age-imbalanced multiple-wife marriages. Many children are cast off or simply let go.

With multiple children in general, families are further strained financially in a nation undergoing great discord and change. Job losses and other hardships bring poverty-driven abandonment. Extended families do pick up a great deal of the slack, but others simply can’t cope. Families, faced with having to decide which children will live or die, choose instead to leave children to the streets or government institutions.

(Images: Women of Iraq)

Miriam's Malady

Miriam is an alcoholic. She is a young single mother who loves her eight year-old girl, Galina, and her four year-old niece, Raia. They both reside with her. She lives in a poor village in Moldova and works in the fields where she slaves for ten hours a day for three straight days just to earn two pounds of wheat flour – barely enough to survive.

On our visit, Miriam is presented with a small grocery bag with dried beans, rice, cooking oil and a few other staples. It’s about what my family eats in a single meal.

It will last her and the two kids for a full month.

The Moldovan government wants to take Galina and Raia away from Miriam. They are trying to get the children placed into state orphanages. The ministry we are working with on this day believes that Miriam can be helped and rehabilitated. They believe that she is receptive to the Gospel. They desire to not only see her come into the Kingdom, but to prevent two more children from becoming statistics, from entering a institution where they could be used and abused.

Along with the bag of food, Miriam is given a Bible that she warmly receives and cradles in her arms. It is evident to us immediately that she will treasure it.

Miriam started off as a squatter in a home that had been abandoned by its former inhabitants, a man and his family in the village, after a fire swept through the building and made it structurally unsound. Upon learning that Miriam and the children were living in a building that he didn’t even want anymore, he started making demands. The rental price? – wine and sex.

Miriam, unable to provide a roof over their heads otherwise, and hardly able to feed the two children under her care, has to give this man wine and sex upon demand in order to stay in the property that he willingly deserted.

To keep the act away from his wife and family this man, no doubt, imposes himself upon Miriam in the home she lives in. The children would either be sent out or, in the dead of winter, presumably be within earshot as they normally sleep in a chair beside Miriam’s bed. Miriam has to suffer the shame and humiliation in close proximity to the children she is trying to keep alive, trying to prevent from introduction into a state orphanage.

Such is the face of evil that drives men to take advantage of the widow and orphan.

"Woe to those who…rob the poor of my people of their rights, so that widows may be their spoil and that they may plunder the orphans." (Isaiah 10:1a-2b, NASB)

"Do not take advantage of a widow or an orphan. If you do and they cry out to me, I will certainly hear their cry."  (Exodus 22:22-23, NIV)

The Mega-issue (part four)

We have talked about two chain reactions, two cycles.

The first is how the rescue of orphaned and abandoned children (the mega-issue) affects so many other problems and concerns – poverty, HIV/AIDS, prostitution, child exploitation and other interrelated matters. To save children is to proactively attack and diminish all these societal plagues and afflictions. As children are liberated from the vicious cycle, parts of the cycle unravel, producing a geometric impact that reaches through generations. It’s not just about the current statistical decline of these troubles; it’s about the rescued children’s children, grand-children, great-grand children and beyond, who are now freed from the cause and effect spiral of despair. The changes project forward exponentially...because of children’s removal from the cycle.

The second regards an expanding numerical impact also. As the Church is the vehicle and purpose of rescue, children learn about their value in God’s eyes. They learn what the Bible has to say about teaching others, helping others, changing others. The children are removed from the problem but also become part of the solution as they teach against abuse, addiction and exploitation. They become an army of change agents for their communities, nation and world. The changes project forward exponentially...because of more workers attacking the cycle.

We have also talked about the spiritual element inherent in the church being the means of rescue and how this also has additional and multiplicative ramifications for eternity. People are attracted to the church because of the church’s love for the children. And the children above not only go into the world teaching about the issues of the temporal world, but they go teaching about the gift of eternity. These children become an army in another sense – an army of missionaries, spreading the greater truth of love and transformation. The changes project forward eternally...because of the spread of the message of new life.

It is this last thought that I’d like to now briefly expand upon.

Many parts of the developing world have evangelical Christian populations of less than 5%. In most of those same regions the composition of born-again believers is 2% and under. These are the same areas where significant orphaned and abandoned children struggle to survive.

In a sense, those red areas of blemish described in the previous section The Mega-issue (part three) also represent areas where Biblical Christianity is less than 5% established. As the white crosses of hope serve to shrink those red sections, the percentage of believers increases accordingly. Those believers, in turn, can expand the Kingdom exponentially as they take on the task of outreach and evangelism.

In short, orphans represent a unique opportunity for the recruitment and training of workers for the harvest fields of eternity. What a huge opportunity that really is...tens of millions of children ready to be raised by the Church family; tens of millions of children that have been orphaned and abandoned out of Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and animistic families; tens of millions of children that will be ‘sent out’ as missionaries to those same communities.

God works in all things. The tragedy of our time is also the greatest prospect of our time.

Do you want to know what the evangelical Christian response should be to radical Islamic schools that take in children, indoctrinate them, and send them out as terrorists, as armies of hatred and destruction?

Answer: Support indigenous churches all over the world to take in the orphaned children of Muslim communities, train them up in the knowledge of the Lord, and send them out as missionaries, as armies of love and reconciliation!

The mega-issue is now. The mega-opportunity is now.

The Mega-issue (part three)

All of society’s woes are related to one thing...sin. This is the point of commonality.

The world and everything in it was originally created as flawless, unspoiled...perfect. The world we live in today is not that world. It has been gravely corrupted as a consequence of a devastating choice. Everything we now see as imperfect, evil and tragic can be traced back to that specific moment that shattered the timeline forward. Murder followed. Disease followed. Abuses of children followed. Orphans followed.

The first Adam brought death and disease. The second Adam, Christ, brought life and healing.

Christ established His Body, the Church. The Spirit uses the Church to regenerate, restore and reconcile. The Church is God’s principal instrument to tackle the core commonality. Only the Church can truly address the mega-issue and everything it touches and represents.

God has positioned His Church around the world for such a time as this...

Orphaned and abandoned children flood the region previously known as the Third World. The burden knows no boundaries or borders. The whole area is awash with the weeping of desperate children that don’t ask for much...just simple safety, security, and sustenance...and the knowledge that somebody loves them. Much of that same area is populated by the Church, local indigenous bodies of believers that understand the call and strength of James 1:27 and over forty other passages of Scripture related to orphans; that understand the heart of God for the lost children who are abandoned and polluted by this cruel and wicked world.

Visualize a map of the developing world produced on a letter-sized piece of paper. Imagine that all the areas where significant orphan populations exist are represented by blood-red dots. In India, Africa and Southeast Asia, these red dots converge to form huge swatches and blotches across large urban areas. Whole regions are bathed in crimson.

Now think of a second map copied onto a similarly-sized transparency sheet. It is faint and translucent accept for opaque white crosses printed all over it, each symbolizing where specific indigenous churches are established. In those same large city agglomerations above, the white crosses join hands to form a white field, a safety net of rescue, a mesh of hope.

Now imagine placing the transparency sheet on top of the red-stained sheet. The blood and cries of the children are covered by the crosses. The regions of red blemishes are punctuated by little white points of intersection and hope. Most areas where orphans live and die are populated by native churches that are strategically placed to rescue them, temporally and eternally.

The numbers of people represented by these white crosses aren’t necessarily large; the sizes of the crosses aren’t very big in some areas; the spacing between crosses is quite far apart in others. But they are spread out over the same geography where the mega-issue continually and persistently rears its ugly head. There is a presence. There are partners for the task.

Indigenous churches are uniquely positioned to care for the children of their communities. Most have the heart and are responding in obedience and love with limited resources; they just need a boost to more broadly and effectively engage the task.

As these churches do engage the task, they expand. Rescued children accept the promises of Christ and commit to love and serve Him. Surrounding communities, warmed by the affection of the church towards their children, are attracted to the church and find love and forgiveness there. The children, themselves, go out amongst neighbors and peers who witness their transformation and want a part of it. The churches grow.

Imagine those white crosses increasing in size and numbers as they start to take in the 150 million orphans in their vicinities. Imagine them absorbing the scarlet stains like sponges, swelling and multiplying as a result; the purity and hope of Christ covering the abuses and corruptions of man. Churches develop and extend. The Kingdom advances.

The Mega-issue (part two)

Extreme poverty, the devaluation of women, illiteracy, disease, sexual exploitation, slavery, child labor, drug abuse, pedophilia, addiction, child soldiers, violent extremism – they are all results and components (sub-issues) of the mega-issue of orphaned and abandoned children.

They interlace and provide momentum to a truly wicked cycle of calamitous reach and proportions.

Any particular sub-issue has hugely damaging consequences. AIDS, for example, causes millions upon millions of orphans as children’s parents are afflicted and felled. These orphaned children are then menaced and victimized by despicable individuals who are contaminated with HIV/AIDS themselves. Some of these people believe the wretched lie that, by sleeping with a young virgin, they can be cured of AIDS. Others, who are known to be infected and are stigmatized by their communities, hunt vulnerable children as the only option to act out their sexual desires. In addition, orphaned children, unable to find shelter and feed themselves, will reluctantly or forcibly enter into lives of prostitution or serial ‘sugar daddy’ relationships. There, they find food, but they also find something else...HIV/AIDS. The vicious cycle continues.

Any particular sub-issue feeds that same sub-issue. Prostitutes die of AIDS and leave orphans who sell their bodies for food. Poverty breeds the desperate act of abandonment, creating a whole class of children who are, themselves, deeply impoverished. Drugs take lives and produce orphans who end up using and selling addictive substances. Child soldiers are forced to decimate villages, generating orphaned children who are then stolen into warfare. Female children are discarded, reinforcing their society’s belief that they are worthless, and devaluing the status of girls and women yet further. The vicious cycle continues.

Any particular sub-issue also feeds the other sub-issues. Poverty causes girls to be traded into prostitution. Drugs kill and leave orphans that become enslaved in child labor schemes. AIDS ravishes communities, triggering orphan populations that eventually find solace in drugs. Poverty-stricken orphans are recruited into radical Islamic schools, fostering future terrorism activities. Young drug users spread HIV/AIDS through tainted needles. Child prostitutes allow pedophiles to discover and explore their behavior, spawning more pedophiliac activity. The combinations and permutations are countless and endless. They are all interrelated. The vicious cycle continues...and spirals outward.

The question then becomes, "What is the easiest point in which to insert oneself into the cycle in order to break the cycle?"

There really are two choices. You can either try to change things at the societal level by implementing broad outreaches for each issue (i.e. HIV/AIDS prevention programs, child labor laws and enforcement, anti-prostitution measures, financial aid packages, etc.)...or you can simply break a common link in the chain and severely attack the umbrella issues accordingly and jointly. A very strategic point of commonality is the mega-issue of orphaned and abandoned children.

As orphans are rescued, all those dreadful demons are dealt massive blows. As children are taken off of the streets, prostitution is diminished, pedophiliac opportunities are minimized, drug dealing and usage are reduced, recruiting grounds for child soldiers and extremists are decreased, child trafficking pools are restricted, AIDS infection is lessened, and on and on. It’s a highly-strategic ‘multiple birds with one stone’ scenario.

The issues do need to be tackled at the societal level also. There is always a need for general awareness programs and measures. But where the ‘rubber meets the road,’ there are very few involvement opportunities that have the punch, power, and potential like the rescue and care of orphans.

There is, of course, another element to this: mobilization and geometric impact. As children are rescued and restored, trained up to honor life and love others, they will go into their communities to teach against prostitution, child labor, drugs, slavery and the other issues. The children are taken out of the statistics and the cause/effect cycle, but are also part of the greater solution as they become advocates and act as compassionate examples to transform lives.

Yes, we have still limited the discussion to temporal terms here. Next, we will converse about local indigenous churches as the practical and spiritual tools of rescue. This is the most exciting part...seeing orphaned and abandoned children comforted, sheltered and educated...by believers who touch eternity as they touch the temporal; by churches that are willing to break the cycle of abuse and exploitation; by pastors who are fully engaged in the mega-issue.