I'm not usually one to launch into visionary kinds of conversations- I'm too practical for that. When you tell me your vision, all it see are the million details to get from here to there. But time after time in life we are confronted with suffering, and suffering often demands a visionary response. In SE Asia we are often brought into contact with the myriad of suffering that is linked to poverty. And I know that poverty and its many secondary issues are all to real in the US too. But there I had to go out of my way to see it. It is much more in your face here- the prostitution, trafficking, begging, refugees and slums aren't as well hidden as they are in more developed nations.
One issue that I keep coming into contact with lately is how problems like poverty and lack of educational options are splitting apart families and sending children out on their own when they are much too young. Too many parents cannot afford to take care of their kids, sending them away to children's homes where they are fed and educated. These parents do it "by choice", even eagerly. Wouldn't you, if you knew the alternative was malnutrition and a lack of education that would continue the cycle of poverty? What kind if choice is that? Other families, among the rural poor and often among Thailand's hill tribes, send their kids to the city once they finish elementary school, their villages either not having schools or not having good schools. Some of these kids are in the city on their own. The luckier ones, if you can call them that, are in dorms and boarding houses. The parents I work with at ICS are nervous about sending their sixth graders to the middle school, about whether their child will be able to handle it. Their poorer peers are taking care of themselves. Other kids simply don't have access to education because they are migrants or refugees. Others because they are needed all night by their families to beg in the red light district so their family can eat (my friend is actually a part of an informal school which instead of charging tuition, pays a family to let their kids go to school during the day and sleep at night, replacing the income that the kids made by begging).
It's a large complex issue, one with many root causes, and not one that we were going to solve in five days. But, we did have meaningful conversation about ways we might be able to support one village from one tribe on one mountain in Thailand. We have connections there, people who know this population and can help us understand the roots of why the kids leaving so young, why the families are so broken. It's awesome when similar issues are on several hearts at once and we can see God putting things into motion across the country and region.
I don't know where God is calling me in all of it. Perhaps only to prayer and to have the conversation. Perhaps to support a future project financially. Perhaps to work in teacher training to help bring better education to the village. But it sure has been exciting to be researching and discussing the economic roots of brokenness and suffering in families and begin looking into how I might be able to come alongside in some small way.
Note: does this topic interest you? I encourage you to start by checking out World Vision International or one of the other highly successful community based child sponsorship programs. Studies have shown that child sponsorship is one of the most effective methods in helping children in poverty worldwide, especially when done with a holistic community approach like World Vision. Working at the community level allows them to address the economic issues as well as the physical, social, emotional, and spiritual.
