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.