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.

Would You Press the Button? (part five)

Competition. It’s the American way, right?

Position pitted against position. People pitted against people. Nation pitted against nation.

Liberals versus conservatives. Right versus left. Protestants versus Catholics. Bloods versus Crips. Yankees versus Red Sox. Coke versus Pepsi. America versus China. It goes on and on and on. We’re bombarded by it from every angle.

It rears its head in all circles – individual, group, community, ethnic, and national. It’s endemic in every type of venture and activity – corporate, social, and athletic. It infects every part of being – physical, mental, emotional, psychological, and spiritual.

Almost everything is turned into a battle for supremacy, a winner/loser scenario. Every traffic light becomes a herald of the race. Every minor disagreement becomes a last stand.

Some contests are healthy. A little rivalry or struggle helps to temper and test us, sometimes entertain us. Without experience with challenge, we are inept in the greater battles.

But we often forget that each victory gained has a necessary opposite outcome: persons who summarily experience failure and the ramifications of defeat.

It’s evident even in the seemingly mundane. When one advertising agency wins a major account from another, people are fired. People lose their homes. Marriages fail.

Yes, everything has its consequences. The pursuit of personal or corporate triumph means that the button is pushed continually.

And as we unfairly use snap decisions and opinions to polarize things, put people and positions into "us versus them" settings, we use such grounds to rationalize such competition. After all, it’s just "the Chinese" or "the liberals" we are competing against, right? By generalizing and sub-humanizing, we feel better about pushing the button.

"Gotta stop those darn Indians and Southeast Asians from taking our jobs and profits!"

As we protect American jobs from going overseas, an unemployed Thai worker makes the excruciating decision to sell his eldest daughter into the sex trade. To not do so would mean that his other three daughters would perish from starvation.

As we place high tariffs on agricultural products from India, a farmer outside of New Delhi cannot meet his obligations to his finance company. Broken and out of options, he and his whole family drink poison.

As we stigmatize those who don’t "buy American," we lessen the ability for the laborer in China to feed his family on $2 per day. He abandons his child at the local orphanage.

We’re one of the richest nations on the planet. We compete to get the newer car and bigger home while people living in cardboard boxes die. We have surplus in excessive abundance. We don’t need to win every economic global battle.

Folks, it’s not supposed to be this way. Don’t buy into the lie. Jesus taught against such thinking.

We have to embrace a more global philanthropic perspective, a more neighborly perspective.

After all, the whole world is simply that...a collection of neighbors.

"The entire law is summed up in a single command: Love your neighbor as yourself." (Galatians 5:14)

To be continued...

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...

A Game of Thirds

After we rumbled down the dirt road and past the wooden houses on stilts at the shoreline, we came to an opening, a dock of sorts. There, we walked over deeply-cracked mud and boarded a longboat that would take us to the other side of the slow-moving Mekong.

Barges with homes built upon them were anchored close to the shore; just a few feet away from Cambodian soil, but a whole culture apart. Different language and customs. Common problems.

The motor’s rhythm was labored and irregular, but it was enough to propel us by this first cluster of refugees and illegal immigrants and across the dirty expanse to the opposite bank. There, we docked at a floating church that was running a school for children, many of them orphaned or abandoned.

Current estimates of the Vietnamese community in Cambodia range from 100,000 to over 2 million. Citizens of neither Cambodia nor Vietnam, many live on the lakes and rivers in flotillas, waterborne villages huddled together for protection and community.

We boarded the church where thirty or so children were diligently studying at rows of desks as part of a program funded by our hosts. The gentle rocking of the mobile vessel spoke of the villagers’ precarious position, caught in a land of prejudice, discrimination and persecution, but unwelcome back in the socialist land of their heritage lest they spark a counter-revolution.

To be Vietnamese in Cambodia, especially as one engaged in subsistence life on the lake or river, is to be a ‘yuon,’ a person regarded by most Cambodians as ‘lower than scum.’ Widely resented, these poor fishermen are frequent targets of political power plays and hate crimes. Various purges and sporadic attacks have brought death to them and their families, including the massacre of children in a floating video game parlor. Viewed as intruders, stealers of fish, and polluters of waterways, they are unwelcome guests in a culture where many seek to eradicate or expel them.

Lack of citizenship privileges, restricted access to basic education, social exclusion, illiteracy, limited trade skill opportunities, strong obligations to paying family debt, and extreme poverty all work together to attract the wolves. It’s no wonder that the children of these displaced Vietnamese communities are constantly preyed upon by traffickers.

The net result is a horrible game of thirds...

Over one-third of the 60,000 to 100,000 full and part-time prostitutes in Cambodia are under 18 and most are Vietnamese girls, many stolen or hoaxed into sexual slavery. The impoverished Vietnamese boat people are so desperate for income that one third of the families have willingly sold a child to sex traffickers in order to survive. Another one third has seriously considered doing so.

I scanned the children in rows before me and looked at every third child.

How many of them might be sold?

If not for this church-based education program, how many of them would already be in brothels by now?

The Great Divide

After twelve years of civil war (officially ending last year but with some rebel holdouts), combined with severe drought and disease, Burundi’s deteriorating civil and social infrastructures are leaving hundreds of thousands of orphans without hope in a country of great division.

Burundi has a population of just 7.5 million, yet there are 620,000 orphans. Almost 10% of the population is orphaned! Over half of the population (53%) are children and therefore can’t be considered part of the rescue and care mechanism for these children. What’s more, that means that 18% of the country’s children are orphans!

Can you imagine if almost 1 in 5 children in the US were orphans?

If your child is in a kindergarten or Sunday school class of 25 children, what if 5 of her classmates were parentless?

In Burundi, that wouldn’t be the case, though. Instead of being in school, many of these children are victims of the streets or are exploited as domestic slaves, forced to serve in combat or as young ‘wives’ for soldiers, trafficked to richer nations to become the sexual property of others, or shuffled into the growing industry of child sex tourism.

Deep ethnic schisms further spur this activity. People that normally wouldn’t use or deal in the flesh of children, rationalize that the child of the enemy is less-than-human, a ‘cockroach’ to be abused, bought, sold and disposed of. The children become the smallest victims of the ethnic discrimination and severe poverty that define their world.

And they receive their death sentences from AIDS.

The very poor security situation in Burundi also assists the travesties. Violations against children occur with impunity. Sometimes, those entrusted to care for the children are the perpetuators themselves. They don’t fear ramifications and start to view the children as personal property to be used for their own devices.

Although there are pre-existing laws against child prostitution in Burundi, there are no laws on the books against trafficking in persons. Weak laws and weak enforcement bodies mean that hundreds of thousands of orphans are literally sitting ducks in a country full of people itching to find resources for personal pleasure and gain...especially at the expense of the rival ethnic group.

Welcome to Burundi

The elevator lobby at the Accor Hotel in Bujumbura is lined with a series of framed posters denouncing child sex tourism.

Likewise, a laminated brochure entitled, "Together, Fighting Against Child Sex Tourism" is prominently displayed on the desk in our room.

Welcome to Burundi.

The text of the brochure, produced in both English and French, is as follows:

Sexual tourism involving children is unacceptable. It is a crime punished by law.

A Worldwide Curse

The number of sexually exploited children is estimated to be between 2 and 3 million.

Child sex tourism has increased considerably over the past 20 years. It is a worldwide problem often made worse by organized trafficking networks.

Tourism development in a poor country almost inevitably entails an increase in child prostitution.

A child never chooses to be sexually exploited. If this happens, it is because he or she is forced to, often by a pimp or by extremely precarious and difficult situations.

Who Are the Abusers?

They are not necessarily pedophiles or organized criminals.

Very often, they are travelers who do not have a sexual preference for children, but who exploit children as a result of being anonymous and behaving differently whilst on travel.

Abusers sometimes use cultural or economic arguments to ease their guilt.

No argument can justify reducing a child to a common commodity or a sexual object.

Our Commitment

Sexual exploitation seriously endangers a child’s physical, psychological, and social development and sometimes even his or her life. Faced with the scale of this problem and its consequences, it is essential that the tourism industry becomes involved in this fight.

As a major actor in the tourism industry, Accor is committed to helping fight child sex tourism.

Accor’s main actions consist in implementing programs to train staff and to raise awareness among customers and partners in its host countries.

When Phary Met Sally (part three)

What different courses these stories could have taken if only priorities were right, if only simple obedience and obligations were honored.

It just so happens that defeating the materialism of the Church of the west, is part of the solution to the resourcing needs of the Church of the east. And increasing our awareness and involvement in the east, is part of defeating our materialism in the west. It’s a wonderful synergy.

In short, the stories change through a redistribution of financial and relationship capital.

Let’s revisit Phary and Sally...

Six months ago Sally’s mom decided that enough was enough. She wasn’t content to let the world raise her child anymore. While traveling to a company conference in Southeast Asia, she came upon the vast numbers of children on the streets and realized that her own child, Sally, was effectively growing up parentless also. She also recognized that, compared to those children in the gutters, Sally was spoiled beyond measure.

Sally’s mom came home and pledged that things would be different. She sat down and had a heart-to-heart with her husband. They prayed together and strongly felt God telling them to rearrange their lives - to build into their child, to build into the world. Sally’s mom asked for a different job in the company, one that required less travel, even though it meant the path to ‘the top’ would be hindered. And Sally’s Dad set boundaries also, not coming home late and not being overly preoccupied with work while at home.

Sally’s mom conducted some research and learned that there were many churches in Southeast Asia trying to save the region’s street orphans. The family started supporting a small poor church in Cambodia that was rescuing orphaned and abandoned kids from the rag-picking fields. The church needed infrastructure and ongoing funding to build and maintain family homes for the children on its grounds.

Sally’s parents involved her in the process. She helped to choose the Cambodian church and did a school paper on the orphans of Cambodia. She sacrificed her own allowance for three months to help buy shoes for the children. She started writing letters to the kids.

Seven days ago, Phary lost her father. She went to the church next to the rag-picking field near her former home. After doing some research to confirm that Phary had indeed lost both her parents, the church took her in and welcomed her into one of three homes that were built on its property. She was matched with a family in one of the homes. The family welcomed her, started to consol her, embraced her as their own. This particular home was funded in its entirety by a Christian family living in North Dallas. Phary had become one of children sponsored by Sally’s family.

A few months ago, Sally’s mom surprised the whole family by saying that she’d cashed in a chunk of her frequent flier miles and booked tickets for the whole family to visit the Cambodian church and home they were supporting.

Their plane arrived yesterday.

As Sally entered the church grounds, a young girl came up to her and grabbed her hand.

"My name is Phary. What’s yours?"

She showed Sally her room. She introduced Sally to her new family.

Little did Sally’s parents know, but as they invested into an at risk child in the developing world, they were actually investing into their own child in the USA, their own at risk child.

When Phary Met Sally (part two)

Sally

Sally is a fourteen year-old girl living in North Dallas. Her mother is at the top of her career, praised and honored amongst her colleagues, pulling in a great salary and all the perks that go with it. She travels much, leaving Sally’s care to nannies and after-school programs.

Sally’s father is distant, working long hours himself and rarely at home before nightfall. Even when he’s at home, he’s too consumed by the demands of the next work day to really pay much attention to Sally. He is ‘successful’ though, earning a good income himself and able to provide the family with many additional luxuries.

Sally’s parents are believers. Both accepted Christ years ago as part of a campus ministry at their university. They still both have a heart for God, but the daily grind and weight of accomplishment have simply gotten in the way. They try to compensate Sally with all the rewards the culture has to offer, lavishing her with new gadgets, dresses, jewelry, parties and other frills. She has her own credit card and she knows how to use it.

Sally finds her own way through life and is socialized and influenced by her private-school friends, movies, magazines and the Internet.

Affluence and materialism have replaced affection and attention. Secularism and post-modernism have replaced Godly teaching and example.

Sally is...

...a child at risk.

To be continued...

Part one, "Phary," available here.

When Phary Met Sally (part one)

Children At Risk

The human and social services profession refers to vulnerable children as ‘children at risk’ or ‘at risk children.’ These labels pretty much say it all. These include orphaned and abandoned children, children on the streets. These are children whose circumstances are so dire, so hopeless, that they are imminently at risk of many failures, abuses and exploitations. Ultimately, they are at risk of losing everything - their ‘innocence’ and their very souls.

Orphaning, abandonment and risk come in many forms, though...

Phary

Phary is a fourteen year-old girl in Cambodia. Her name means ‘beautiful flower’ and she certainly inherited her mother’s striking looks. However, her mother was sadly lost many years ago to a drug overdose. And her father was killed just last week in a street fight with a rival gang leader. Since then, her slum abode has been occupied by another family. Her belongings were confiscated. She has nothing.

For the past seven days, Phary has been wandering the streets, begging for food. She has been sleeping in a ditch next to a poor church, huddling under the discarded scraps from the rag-pickers.

The church would take her in, but they are already overwhelmed with dozens of children that sleep on the dirt floor of its sanctuary, not to mention the daily knocks at the door by additional children seeking shelter and safety. They simply don’t have the room, nor the rice, to be able to take in even one more child.

It’s a Friday night. As Phary desperately looks for sustenance, a man approaches her and gruffly utters, "Let me look at you."

After appraising her health and frame, he says, "Come with me and I will give you food and a job."

Phary is taken to the other side of the city and is led down a dark alley, where they enter through a bar door flanked by scantily-clad ‘hostesses.’

Phary is...

...a child at risk.

To be continued...