An extraordinary day!

On the way to work one day last month I felt God say to me that today was going to be an 'extraordinary day'.  I hoped that it might mean I'd meet Mr Right or receive a life time supply of Dairy Milk chocolate....but no it was something else!

There has been a family known to some of our staff through their church who there were particular concerns about given their vulnerability.  We’re going to call them the Hong family.

In the week leading up to this ‘extraordinary’ day there were roadworks close to the area where some of our children from our centre live…so when taking them home in our centre tuk tuk we have had to drive a different way (I don’t drive it don’t worry!)  So on that particular day the staff member driving was somebody who knew the Hong family.   

This staff member shared with me when getting back to the centre that they thought that they had seen the Hong family on the street just sitting there.  So we got on the moto and off we went.

Sure enough when we arrived we saw the Hong children and mother.  The children were so happy to see somebody they knew and wanted to be hugged for a long time.

Mother Hong was sitting there looking very low, with 3 young children and with small bags with all her worldly possessions in them.  They were close to an area known for Western paedophiles having easy access to children.

We were able to take the family back to our centre where they could eat, shower, talk and play.  I think the children thought all of their Christmas’s had come at once with the amount of toys they had to play with!

A long story short but our staff were able to make sure that the Hong family were taken to a safe place and agreement was sought that longer term work would be undertaken by the church the family is linked to. 

What I love about this story is that our staff would not have seen the Hong family if the usual route had been available and if the usual staff member was driving.  And we got to the family before anybody wanting to harm the children had appeared.  Truly an extraordinary day and proof of the care that God gives His children…thank you God!

Persistence pays off

Its been a while (6 months) since I've blogged.  But God has been reminding me about the good news stories that I need to share.  Hopefully these stories will give you a bit of a flavour of the work I'm involved in.

This post isn't about mine or my team's persistence...its about a lady we met in the slum. We'll call her Florence.

Florence has a toddler who is too young to come to our centre so they are not a family we know well.  On a few occasions when we have been visiting families in the slum, Florence asked us for help.  She wanted to leave her violent drug using partner.  

Having been warned by the police when we have tried to help a previous family where domestic abuse was a big issue, we knew we could not take her to an organisation without her partner's permission.  We knew neither her partner nor the Village Chief would give their permission to allow her to leave. So we prayed.  And she persisted in asking for our help.

Eventually Florence and her child were kicked out of their home (shack in the slum) by her partner’s family.  Florence ended up living on the street and then taken in by a ‘charity’ whose advice was that she should give her baby up for adoption and go and sex work.  I cannot even begin to imagine what sort of set up this ‘charity’ is.

Thankfully Florence had given her telephone number to our Lead Outreach worker and so when we found out we were able to call her.  As she’d left the slum/been kicked out, we didn’t have to stick to the cultural ‘rules’ of needing consent from her partner and the Village Chief.

Instead our Outreach Worker made lots of telephone calls to various agencies to see who could help.  One came to visit her at our centre but there was some red tape involved and they couldn’t make a decision for a few days. We knew that we needed to act fast in order to prevent Florence from feeling like she had no option other than to follow the ‘charity’s advice.  We continued to pray.

Suddenly at 4.15pm an agency said they’d take Florence and her baby if we could get her there by 5pm.  Thankfully Phnom Penh is not a huge city and we got her there in time.  It turned out to be a refuge where Florence and her baby would be safe and she was offered accommodation, training and support in order to rebuild her life. As we left Florence gave us a smile…it was the first one I had ever seen her give.  Smiles are definitely my favourite ‘thank you’.  And prayer works.  And persistence pays off.