Abandoned-Orphaned

World Orphans Weekly! - World Malaria Day

 

Dear Friend of the Fatherless,

Southeast Asia, West Africa, Central America. I’ve had my fair share of frustrating battles with mosquitoes in each of them...and many places in between.

Having spent 25 years in Texas, I certainly encountered a few of the pests there also.

But there’s a significant difference: In most of the developing world the high-pitched buzz of tiny wings is a harbinger of death. I’m typically juiced up on anti-malarial medication and covered in high-deet repellent while visiting dangerous zones overseas. Meanwhile, the frail child in my arms is in a deep sweat and unresponsive to the world.

Malaria kills a child every thirty seconds!

In Africa alone, three thousand children will die today!

Malaria took the daughter of one of my very best friends, a friend who now heads the children’s ministry for us here at World Orphans.

Tomorrow (Friday, April 25th) is WORLD MALARIA DAY. Could you please join millions of people in praying for the eradication of this heinous scourge that afflicts, terrorizes and kills our children and leaves so many of them as orphans?

World Orphans is actively engaged in addressing the issue. Could you please pray for us also as we provide mosquito nets, medication and other safeguards to church-based homes for children?

Together, through prayer and action, we can indeed eliminate the pain and suffering that flies at night.

Until They All Have (Safe) Homes,

Paul

President

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.

Little Girl Rising

One year ago today, my heart was absolutely, utterly, completely...broken.

To those of you who didn’t know her or the family, my repeated posts are perhaps deemed unwelcome or unrelated to the cause. But the scourge that took her from us causes thousands upon thousands of orphans each year and takes the lives of thousands upon thousands of orphaned and abandoned children. It is a merciless plague that is bleeding the developing world.

My heart is for the orphans and street children caused and abused by this plight on humanity. But a girl lost - who was like a daughter to me - well, that makes it personal.

Please pray for the Ochoa family as they take today to remember, reflect, repair, and restore.

World Orphans Weekly! - Birth and Renewal

Dear Friend of the Fatherless,

The holiday season from Christmas to New Years brings about thoughts of birth and renewal. We reflect upon the new covenant, plus look ahead to the changes and promises that the next twelve months might offer.

The time is punctuated with resolutions and hope. For many of us, that means drastic changes or commitments. For some of us, it means picking our lives and spirits up from the rubble of circumstances and tragedies that temporarily got the best of us.

In that vein, I’d like to share some reflections that I’ve had over this season.

The first set refers to the third anniversary of the South Asian Tsunami. I’d like to introduce you to one child and show you how one of our church-based homes stood ready to not only take him in, but expand to give other orphaned children hope for a new future.

The second set is more personal. It shares further on the progress of my dear friends, the Ochoa family. David and Rhonda Ochoa lost their daughter, Talitha, to cerebral malaria earlier this year while serving children’s ministries in Uganda. They now have a new baby and have moved to Colorado to join World Orphans. It’s certainly a time of new birth and new purpose for them. I think their story will serve as a good example and inspiration to you.

The third set gives you a pictorial update on the opening of the World Orphans’ Iraq office. This serves as yet another illustration of fantastic new beginnings filled with great hope and possibility. Please rejoice with us as we pioneer the work for orphans in this conflict-torn country...giving them new families, new legacies.

THREE YEARS LATER

Part One – Death on the shores; Hope across the street

Part Two – Fire and water, one boy becomes a full orphan

Part Three – A new home and a new future

PERSEVERANCE & FAITHFULNESS

Part One – A time of healing and transition

Part Two – Of Christmas delayed

Part Three – Words of wisdom born by pain

WORLD ORPHANS IN IRAQ

Spirit of 1776 – Now tangible: A new hope for Iraq’s orphans

More from Iraq – A trinity of languages to introduce The Trinity of love

From all of us here at World Orphans, we wish you a very blessed 2008, filled with new purpose and promise.

Thank you for your continued prayers and support.

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.

Perseverance & Faithfulness (part three)

Here is the rest of the Ochoa family's e-mail that I alluded to in my last post. It's certainly sums up 'perseverance and faithfulness.'

Greetings Brethren,

So many people struggle with Christmas and the Holidays, yet we have never had the experiential knowledge of this until this year.

We now know the pain and absence, and can identify with all too many.

We are honestly struggling through this season.

Christmas was our last holiday with Talitha.

We are filled with deep emotions on this very first Christmas without Talitha.

We have absolute confidence of our baby's faith and of her presence with Daddy in Heaven, yet her absence is almost defeating at times.

I share this as a little piece of our life and burden.

Love deeply the ones you have.

Teach them that Jesus is the way the truth and the life.

He is whom our joy must be in to make it through any trauma.

Please celebrate richly this Birthday Celebration of the King that ushered in the freedom to all who will receive Him.

Let Christ rule in your hearts thoroughly each moment in thoughts and motives and actions.

Walking by faith not by sight,

The Ochoas

(QUITE DIFFERENT FROM AFRICA. David Ochoa watches his daughter, Anais, sled down a hill near our home)

(ALWAYS LOVING AND TEACHING CHILDREN. Rhonda Ochoa shows my daughter, Hannah, how to build a gingerbread nativity scene)

If you wish to support the Ochoa family financially during their transition to ministry with World Orphans, please make checks payable to World Orphans, 1840 Woodmoor Dr., Suite 100, Monument, CO 80132. Write "Ochoas" in the memo line of your check. All contributions are tax-deductible and eternally significant.

Perseverance & Faithfulness (part two)

David and Rhonda Ochoa were busy with visitors and ministry activities in Uganda last Christmas. What’s more, the parcel of presents from David’s mom hadn’t been delivered from America yet. They decided to postpone their gift exchange until it would arrive. At that time, they would "re-celebrate" Christmas as a family.

According to a recent family e-mail, daughter Talitha had planned much for the Christmas celebration and had "loaded the stockings with many gifts."

The parcel from America arrived on the day Talitha died.

The stuffed stockings sat still.

On Christmas Eve, here in Colorado, those stockings finally revealed their joy and memories. Almost one year later, the family received the gifts that Talitha had carefully and lovingly made for them.

(AWAITING NEXT YEAR'S STOCKINGS. The hearth at the Ochoas' new home in Colorado is adorned with garland and a photo of Talitha)

If you wish to support the Ochoa family financially during their transition to ministry with World Orphans, please make checks payable to World Orphans, 1840 Woodmoor Dr., Suite 100, Monument, CO 80132. Write "Ochoas" in the memo line of your check. All contributions are tax-deductible and eternally significant.

Perseverance & Faithfulness

For those of you that have been following this blog for the ten months since its inception, you are aware of my family’s love of the Ochoa family, and of the great loss (this side of eternity) of Talitha Ochoa to cerebral malaria earlier this year. In fact, this blog was started as I was deeply moved by the tragedy and started writing about Talitha.

You also know that God blessed David and Rhonda Ochoa with a new baby, Josiah, last month. We praise God for again adding to their numbers and expanding their legacy yet further.

During the past couple of years, the Ochoas were serving in Uganda to train indigenous leaders in ministry to children. In their region they had over one thousand churches at their disposal, churches that hadn’t established (or didn’t know how to establish) children’s ministries.

David and Rhonda’s goal was to see the vibrant, holistic development of children in the developing world, through the training and equipping of indigenous leaders.

It still is.

To that end, I’m pleased to announce that they have now joined us at World Orphans for the continuation of this purpose. The official start date is January 1st – a new year of ministry to children, a new year of service and endless possibilities.

Rhonda described the role discovery and transition in the last Ochoa prayer newsletter as follows. I encourage you to read it as a lesson in perseverance and faithfulness. Good lessons for all of us as we face a new year ourselves...

After we returned home early this year we began to pray, "What now?" "Where now God?"

The two previous years we spent working with HESED Ministries in Jinja, Uganda, under the umbrella of Africa Inland Mission (AIM). Earlier this year we stepped away from ministry with HESED. David and I were both agreed that this horrible tragedy was not meant to stop us from Kingdom work. Both of us still had such a passion to reach children by the training of indigenous leaders, yet our souls needed deep healing and direction.

"God we belong to you. We want to follow you, even though we are scared and crushed. Show us your will. Direct our path and give us the strength to follow." This was our prayer.

We left our future in God’s capable hands, trusting that He would be faithful, and went about the immediate - the nurturing of our family.

Early summer we were invited to join some dear friends in the ministry to orphans. When time availed late summer, we planned a trip to Castle Rock, Colorado, where we could hear about the ministry and stay with Paul and Lisa Myhill for some needed fellowship. Paul enthusiastically shared with us about the ministry of World Orphans and his dreams to go deeper in their partnerships with the orphan homes. We felt as though we had known about World Orphans, for we had met up with Paul several times in Jinja during his visit to some of the children’s homes. Yet what we heard was so different than what we had understood previously.

David and I were so excited to hear of World Orphans’ partnerships with indigenous church leaders to foster care for their local orphans. Notice I said partner, not make dependencies. We have so often seen that westerners give nationals what they truly do not need - money. We do understand that nationals usually are lacking the basic needs of life, but the approach to fixing that can’t be to just hand them money if we want to see spiritual transformation occur.

The problem is much deeper than that. God is the only true answer to their needs. Besides, it is not our job to "FIX IT." That is God’s role and we do not want to be seen as the "FIX IT MAN!"

World Orphans find strong, reputable national leaders that have formed a home for orphans through their local church. They then fund them to build a children’s home/church building. The national leader is responsible to hire local men and women that can construct and complete the building. No western construction crew.

When an orphan home is in the middle of a township or village, then the community can begin to see the local church reach out in compassion for their own orphans as well as the people of their area. This is crucial in building the local church and this is the World Orphan model.

Many times we have found beautiful, faithful leaders with a passion in a given area, yet they have not been discipled to do the work of the Kingdom. World Orphans desires to come along beside the national leaders to equip them in the work at hand.

This is a dream job - to be able to gracefully equip indigenous leaders around the world to raise up godly, loved, secure children with a deep foundation in their Lord Jesus Christ.

After a great visit, we headed back to Texas. Several months later, David and I realized the great peace, actually more than peace - even excitement - that we had about this opportunity.

God had made HIS direction clear and had so graciously laid it out before us: We were ready to follow Him in joining World Orphans.

If you wish to support the Ochoas financially during their transition, please make checks payable to World Orphans, 1840 Woodmoor Dr., Monument, CO 80132. Write "Ochoas" in the memo line of your check. All contributions are tax-deductible.

Beyond Our Borders

Thousands of the young children that will die today in the developing world will perish because of malaria.

In Africa alone, malaria kills a child every 40 seconds. That’s equivalent to one child dying every 2 minutes in the United States.

Our newspapers produce full and dramatized reports for a handful of mosquito-borne West Nile deaths each year. What if they reported 720 children dying of malaria each day in America?

Wouldn’t we do something about it?

Malaria can be eradicated. The solutions already exist. The motivation and resources just need to be there. We simply need to have further passion and mobilization for those who are hurting beyond our borders.

30,000

The United Nations and World Health Organization report that 10.5 million children – all under the age of five - die each year from "easily-preventable" conditions in the developing world. Malnutrition and unclean water are common or complicating factors in most of these deaths, but pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria, measles, HIV/AIDS, pregnancy issues, and a whole host of related items, get the official credit on the death certificate.

Poverty and lack of access to decent healthcare are mitigating factors. Unavailable or unaffordable $1 vaccinations take their toll in a world where half the population - over 3 billion people - tries to survive on less than two dollars a day.

The UN/WHO annual child mortality number equates to 28,800 children dying each and every day - almost ten times the tragedy of 9/11...each and every day!

And these are just the children under the age of five!

Image if you increased that range to six years old? Seven years old? Eight years old?

Regardless, at least another 1,200 children under five (conservatively bringing the total to over 30,000 children) perish daily because of infanticide or sex-selective abortion. We can go on and on, but 30,000 is already significant enough a number.

30,000 little lives. 30,000 souls. 30,000 hopes and dreams.

30,000. Think about that number today. Pray about that number today.

Lifeblood

As I sit in Nairobi, awaiting the next leg of my journey to Kampala, Uganda, I’m reminded of just how familiar Africa has become to me. This is my eighth or ninth trip here, I lose count. And I’ll be making yet another trek, to a couple of the genocide regions, before the year is out.

I’ve crossed the continent from east to west, north to south and back again, visiting more than a dozen ailing nations of Africa in just the last few years alone.

I’ve seen sprawling urban metropolises teaming with western-attired people going into American fast food restaurants. And I’ve shared time in mud huts with sarong-cloaked tribal families who boil weeds to survive. I’ve been to progressive municipalities where development can’t keep up with the insatiable demand for new infrastructure. And I’ve been to cities that are digging themselves out of the ruins of decades of civil war, every building peppered by rain showers of bullets and terror.

(RAINSHOWERS. Bullet-pierced guardrails and signs are evidence of the strife in Liberia)

But it’s all Africa to me. Despite the amazing diversity of ecosystems, cultures, tongues and circumstances, Africa has become a recognizable whole, a cohesive gathering of nations bound by common struggles.

It is a land of shared tragedies and hardships.  Whether on the gold cost of Ghana, the game lands of Tanzania, the parched sands of Sudan, or Lake Victoria’s shores in Uganda, I’ve encountered the same deathly lances everywhere. HIV/AIDS, malaria and other scourges have broadly spread their dark wings over all these varied areas. They know no geopolitical or socioeconomic boundaries.

Man does the rest. War and ethnic conflict take barbaric forms of individual brutalism and communal slaughter. Greed and corruption take life-giving food and medicine away from struggling families.

Life is in the blood.

Blood is spilt often here. Blood is infected often here.

(A SIGHT TOO COMMON. Ugandan HIV/AIDS clinic)

From city to city and village to village, it is the same recognizable tune, a swan song for nations that are crumbling under the weight of a fallen world. Africa is hemorrhaging, bleeding from lesions that run long and deep. The profuse outflow is internal and external. There are seemingly not enough sutures to stop the present tide.

Our Savior shed his blood for such a place. Only he can bind up the wounds. And he has chosen to do so through the mechanism he established, his Church. It is the only organization, only ‘movement’ hat has the love and capacity to do so.

Mixed Feelings

I’m currently in London, en route to Uganda, via Kenya.

My primary purpose is to assist a dear friend, David Ochoa, who asked me to come and help pack up his family’s home in Jinja. You may recall that David lost his sixteen year-old daughter, Talitha, to cerebral malaria earlier this year while serving vocationally with Africa Inland Mission (AIM) to minister to children in the region. As part of the family’s continued healing process, they are now staying ‘home’ in the USA and are seeking the Lord’s will for their next steps.

David left Texas and traveled to Uganda one week ago...alone. I can’t imagine all the emotions that he has grappled with over the past seven days as he has spent times of solitude in the home in which his dear daughter laughed, wept, and prayed.

There’s a mish-mash of feelings swirling around in me now also. I’m excited about seeing one of my best friends, of being present to show him support and love. But I have a certain amount of trepidation about being in the house again, devoid of the activities of a family whose love burst from its walls. A home full of boxes instead of dreams for Africa. A cold stove instead of brown rice steaming on one of its burners. A place of stillness instead of children running around to kick balls to one other.

...An empty sofa where Talitha would snuggle with her mama to read God’s word.

I’ve been there three times before, twice after Talitha’s passing.

This time will be the hardest.