A Success Story

For children growing up in poverty, in orphanages and in similar situations life is hard and success in life is a remote thing. If you go to the shantytowns in the outskirts of Lima you find story upon story of misfortune, abuse, drugs, gang crime, etc. When we first arrived in Lima and were not yet familiar with life in all its harshness in these shantytowns it was a shock to see, first of all the amount of children running around all over the place. Secondly, the numerous young, as in very young, teenage mothers. Encountering a girl at only about sixteen already having two children definitely was an eye opener.

This girl is not a mother, but imagine if she was...

We were in an area where probably 10.000 families lived in small shed like cabins, some of them too small to park a car. There was no running water, no sanitation, electricity had been established less than a year earlier. Not a place you would want to live, that's for sure. Yet, for the people living here, this was their home, these were their conditions. It seemed that the second part of the old statement ”The rich become richer and the poor have more babies.” was a fact of life here. There were children all over the place and thousands of them. What one might first expect to be older siblings taking care of the younger ones often turned out to be the mothers.

Not a prescription for success in life, if you ask me. It seemed that an evil circle would keep these people in a hard grip of early pregnancy, no education, underemployment and continuous poverty. A malignant cancer to hope and progress.

In another suburb not far from there an orphanage houses around 750 children. Yes, that number is correct! At the moment they are fostering 45 newborn babies that have been left in cardboard boxes at the entrance over night. The mothers, most likely all of them teenagers too young to bring up a child have found this their only way out, lest the baby be malnourished, maltreated, or die.

No success in sight.

Never say never, though. One of the girls we met when we first visited the girls home in La Victoria in Lima, is a success coming out of a disaster. Born in a dysfunctional home that has long since been split up with a mother who is mentally unstable, without a job and not interested in working and a father who has since remarried and established his new core family, hers was a case headed in the wrong direction. Nevertheless, this girl managed to get an education and also succeeded in landing full time employment. Getting to this point did not come easy. Only recently did we find out that she only ate one meal a day all through her student time. Paying rent and studies consumed almost all she earned. It took a lot of consistency and endurance on her part to make it through and obtain her education. In addition, she is also caring for her brother and sisters who have likewise grown up in children's homes.

Some girls growing up in the same home as our success story girl

Growing up in a home where she was cared for, learned about faith in God and learned to trust Jesus gave her the necessary strength to stick it out and complete her studies. How did we get to know? She worked with us for a while to earn extra money so she could complete her payments to the school and receive her certificate. That allowed us to become part of her life, her fights, her difficulties and her joys. We have kept that contact and she has a place she can come to whenever she needs comfort, encouragement, advice, or simply wants to share her most recent victory. The three of us have grown care so much for each other that she calls us her mom and dad. That is what we have become to her by simply being there for her. Our home has in a way become hers, it has become a haven that she knows is only a phone call away.

I dare say that by God's providence we got to Peru in time for the three of us to meet in the girls home, for her to see and understand that we were seriously interested in helping with the needs they had in that home and to gain confidence enough in us to share her life story and to trust us.

For us this has been a tremendous experience as well. It has shown us an extra dimension of the needs of kids growing up in foster homes. They don't just need a roof over their heads and food in their mouths. They need somebody to love them and truly care for their well being, somebody they can call late at night or come visit with their heartaches and headaches at any hour of the day, no matter how early or how late that might be. Or a place to come to, have a meal, throw themselves down in the sofa and just feel at home and be able to share the latest success in life. A place that could have been their own home, people that could have been their own parents as it were.

Her life story could so easily have become one of the many hopeless stories of the shantytowns, But thanks to God's providence it didn't. It became a success story.

Torben & Yurika