Work Begins on Special Needs Home

On Wednesday we received the first pictures from Rancho Santa Fe as they broke ground for the new special needs house we're building there. The orphanage was running out of space and would have been forced to limit their admission of special needs orphans. The World Orphan Fund is covering 100% of the cost. When finished the home will be home to up to 16 children.

Rancho Santa Fe, located in La Venta, Honduras, is part of Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos International (NPH), literally meaning Our little brothers and sisters. It’s an organization that has provided a home for thousands of orphans and abandoned children since 1954. Currently there are nine NPH homes throughout Latin America. Rancho Santa Fe was started in 1986 and cares for nearly 600 children.

Happy Birthday Liz Presley

My favorite movie of all time is the classic Frank Capra movie It's a Wonderful Life. I watch it every year at Christmastime. In it, a distressed George Bailey wishes he had never been born. With some heavenly intervention, he temporarily gets his wish, and is shown all the lives he has touched and the contributions he has made to his community. He also gets to see how things would have turned out differently had he not been there. But can someone get that kind of hindsight in real life?

I ended up at an orphanage in Honduras following a series of seemingly unrelated, yet connected, events that led me to a Team Effort youth mission camp in North Carolina in June of 2010.

I was there chaperoning for a church mission trip when I met one of Team Effort's amazing youth leaders, 20 year old Liz Presley from Gainesville, Georgia.

Liz Presley

On the first day of the mission trip, Liz and I had talked for maybe 20 minutes about how we both wanted to help orphans in our very different lives. I had felt a strong to help orphans for three years. The problem is I had no idea how or where.

During the week Liz felt she had been called to put together a mission team to an orphanage her Church visited every year in Honduras. So on the fourth day she sat down across from me at a lunch break and said "I think I'm supposed to ask you to go with me to Honduras." I replied "I think I'm supposed to say yes."

I'd be lying if I said I found some inspired way to explain this idea to my wife, co-workers and friends on the 15 hour drive home to Wisconsin. Well you see, I met a 20 year old girl and I'm going with her and a few other people I've never met to volunteer at an orphanage in Honduras. They thought I'd lost my mind. That was June.

Liz called on September 5th. I remember the day because it was primary day in Wisconsin and I was at Scott Walker's campaign headquarters in Milwaukee. She sounded despondent.

I really thought this was supposed to happen, but I'm going to have to cancel the trip. I thought it was supposed to happen too, and I asked if her church still going to the Orphanage in January and did she think they'd let me join their team? Yes and yes. She gave me their phone number and an hour later a stranger from Wisconsin was added to a mission team from Gainesville Georgia. Apparently I was the one who was supposed to go.

Six months later I was on a bus in Tegucigalpa embarking on a rocky four hour trip to Orphanage Emmanuel with daughter Keeley and a 17 member mission team we had only just met in Atlanta that morning.

We spent two weeks with the amazing children at Orphanage Emmanuel in Honduras. Many had been abused. Others had witnessed horrible things. You wonder, how they can love at all? But to look at them you'd never know. They smile and laugh and play. When you hold them in your arms they tell you they love you. And they mean it. You know what you have to do. Everything you possibly can.

From that point forward I knew I finally had found the path I'd been searching for. Within a week I had filed the paperwork for the World Orphan Fund with the IRS and we were on our way.

Since then we've been to Honduras 5 times and Guatemala and Kenya once and visited nearly 2,000 children at 7 orphanages. Our formula is simple. Figure out where a game changing project or program is needed and convince people to help us pay for the solution.

Last year we paid half the cost of building a toddler house at Emmanuel in Guaimaca. This year we funded a new well there. We're breaking ground for a new special needs house at an Rancho Santa Fe so the orphanage can continue accepting and caring for special needs orphans. We send funds every month cover half the cost of feeding 27 orphans and are repairing a well so they can have clean water at El Refugio orphanage in Naco. We're funding a new 3rd Grade Teacher at Hogar Suyapa in El Progresso. And we're helping help keep a school for 80 children open at Hogar Renacer in Confradia.

And if Liz Presley had never been born? If she had never joined Team Effort. If she'd never asked someone she had just met to go to Honduras?

There would be no World Orphan Fund.

$22,500 in funding never would have gone to build a toddler house at Emmanuel.

We wouldn't be building a special needs house at Rancho Santa Fe, and they would soon would be forced to turn children away.

There would be children in Naco without a source of clean water and not enough to eat.

We wouldn't be funding a new third grade teacher in El Progresso.

And we wouldn't be helping to keep a school open in Confradia for 80 children.

Sounds like the same Frank Capra Story to me. Happy 23rd Birthday Liz. You've already changed the world.

Visit our website at www.theworldorphanfund.org and our Facebook page at facebook.com/worldorphanfund.

Iraqi Orphan Leaves Judges in Tears

While surfing the net looking for inspiration for a video we're working on for the World Orphan Fund I came across this story about Iraqi Orphan Emmanuel Kelly. The video below aired in September 2011 on X Factor Australia.

It's a heartbreaking yet in the end inspiring story of the effects of war and the power of love.  Kelly was a victim of chemical warfare in Iraq and was adopted by an Australian mother. How perfect that he performed John Lennon's Imagine. Good on ya mate.

Orphanage Profile - Hogar Suyapa

Founded in 2004 in El Progresso, Honduras, Hogar Suyapa is a permanent home for 41 children who often have been removed from their families for reason of abuse, neglect, or the criminal activity of their parents. Most of children who arrive are under the age of 4.  They accept some children slightly older if they come with younger siblings or have special circumstances.  For example the oldest girl is 16. 

 She arrived at the age of 13, dying of diabetes. No other center would take her.  Both of her parents had died of AIDS.  With proper medical care she is now a healthy, beautiful young woman, has her disease under control, and should have a good long life.

Children are often received at the Hogar on a temporary basis.  Police will remove children from a potentially dangerous situatino, and there is no facility in town for them to stay while the authorities investigate what is going on in the home.  Stays for these children can last for one or two nights to as long as a month. Even those staying for just a couple nights leave with new clean clothes, shoes, a toy and a feeling of being rested for just a while.  As these children come out of such chaos, just giving them a bath, getting rid of lice and parasites, and giving them a few days of good food can make a huge difference in their lives. 

The stories of the children are both heart wrenching and inspiring. Meeting them, you would not suspect the tragic circumstances that brought them to the Hogar.

At two weeks old, Maria Guadelupe arrived at Hogar Suyapa with dried glue around her mouth and face.  The policeman who carried her in was well known at the orphanage as a very tough and strong character who dealt with criminals on a daily basis. But as he entered the Hogar, tears were streaming down his face. 

Director Ana Aleman couldn’t imagine what had moved him until to her horror she saw the dried glue.  You see, drug addicts sniff glue in order to stop hunger pains or to get high.  The mother had evidently forced the little baby to sniff glue in lieu of feeding her.

Glue causes severe brain damage as it basically kills brain cells. When the child was taken to the neurologist, they were told that the damage was severe and to not expect the child to either walk or talk.

For the first year of her life, Maria Guadelupe was a quiet and withdrawn baby.  She would not smile nor look directly at anyone. She basically just lay in her crib.  Staff continually stimulated and talked to her but with little success.

The orphanage staff refused to give up. Two nannies were assigned to be with the child 24 hours a day. They were told to rock the child, sing to her, tickle her, and do everything they could think of to get her attention.  After two months of intensive contact, the child finally began to respond.  Today, at age 5, Lupita is a friendly little girl.  She smiles and laughs, talks and sings, and has a great empathy for the younger children, loving to help feed them and play with them.  All the nannies adore her and she knows that she is safe within her Hogar family. 

  

 The Hogar has an on-site primary school, Escuela Santa Maria de Suyapa, which teaches through the second grade. In 2013 the school will expand to the third grade. In the fourth grade, children move into the public school system.  The goal is to give the children some years of intensive schooling within a secure environment.  After the traumas that many of them have endured the orphanage feels it’s critical to keep their early life under observation and control.  By the fourth grade they are more emotionally prepared to deal with the ¨real world.”

The World Orphan Fund is raising funds to pay for the new third grade teacher. The cost is $6,000 per year. If you would like to donate to this project, visit our donation page and select "Hogar Suyapa" from the program designation menu.

Who was Janusz Korczak?

“The lives of great men are like legends-difficult but beautiful,” Janusz Korczak once wrote, and it was true of his. 

Janusz Korczak

Most Americans have never heard of Korczak, a Polish-Jewish children’s writer and educator, who is as well known in Europe as Anne Frank.

Like her, he died in the Holocaust and left behind a diary. Unlike her, he had a chance to escape that fate, a chance he chose not to take. 

His legend began on August 6, 1942 during the early stages of the Nazi liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, though his dedication to destitute children was legendary long before the war.

He was to die as Henryk Goldszmit, the name he was born with. But it was by his pseudonym that he would be remembered.  As Janusz Korczak he introduced progressive orphanages  into Poland, founded the first national children’s newspaper, trained teachers in what we now call moral education, and worked in juvenile courts defending children’s rights. His books How to Love a Child and The Child’s Right to Respect gave parents and teachers new insights into child psychology.

Dining Hall at Korczak's Orphanage

Generations of young people had grown up on his books, especially the classic King Matt the First, which tells of the adventures and tribulations of a boy king who aspires to bring reforms to his subjects.  It was as beloved in Poland as Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland were in the English-speaking world.

When the Germans ordered his famous orphanage evacuated, Korczak was forced to gather together the one-hundred-ninety-two children in his care. He led them with quiet dignity on that final march through the ghetto streets to the train that would take them to “resettlement in the East,” the Nazi euphemism for the death camp Treblinka.

At the end, Korczak, who had directed a Catholic as well as a Jewish orphanage before the war, had refused all offers of help for his own safety from his Gentile colleagues and friends. “You do not leave a sick child in the night, and you do not leave children at a time like this,” he said. 

According to a popular legend, when the group of orphans finally reached the Umschlagplatz (deportation point to the death camps), an SS officer recognized Korczak as the author of one of his favorite children's books and offered to help him escape. Korczak once again refused. 

He boarded the trains with his children and was never heard from again.

Polish government officials recently unveiled a memorial plaque in Warsaw in honor of the Warsaw Ghetto hero on the 70th Anniversary of his death.

7 Year Olds Find More Than Shelter

Hogar Suyapa does a whole lot more than care for orphans. They regularly take in children on a temporary basis as well. I received this note from the Hogar this morning:

We just had two 7 year olds with us for just one night.  Both arrived without shoes and so filthy, dressed in torn rags.  They had been living in the sugar cane fields with their family...part of the political protests going on over ownership of the land.  The police had raided the area and rounded up more than 20 children.  Within half an hour, we had them bathed, new clothes, shoes and ready to join our kids for dinner.  They slept in the therapy room on clean beds, no doubt for the first time in a long time.  

The next morning they were happily participating in the arts and crafts activity and the young girl, came to show me the work she had done.  The boy, was very proud of his drawing and told me he LOVED his new shoes.  I asked them if they went to school and they both said no, never.  Happy and beautiful children.  They were sad when it came time for them to leave but they were also glad to return to their family.  The Judge has told the parents that she wants to see proof that the children are going to school but, as is the case so often in Honduras, it is unlikely there will be any follow-up on this case.  There are just too many children in need and not enough resources available to the Judge to supervise the families.  I know, however, that their one night of peace in the Hogar is something they will remember.

Hogar Suyapa will be adding the third grade to their K-2 school next year. The World Orphan Fund is raising the $6,000 USD necessary to hire the new teacher.  It's our privilege to help those on the front lines. If you'd like to help, visit our website www.theworldorphanfund.org.

World Orphan Fund Website Launched!

The World Orphan Fund website is now up and running! It's still a work in progress, but we think you'll be pleased with the progress.

Now you can learn more our more about our life changing projects and orphanages we help. And in the coming months we'll add features like a social networking system where you can become directly involved by volunteering at orphanages, connect with others and set up your own fundraising page.

Check us out and let us know what you think. We welcome your input. You can contact us directly by sending an email to rj@theworldorphanfund.org.