an orphan's life comes 'full circle' | Orphans Deserve Better

Great "Your Orphan Story" from www.orphansdeservebetter.org

 

Adoption: A Lifelong Love Story

In 1956 I was born to a 16 year old unwed mother. Given the mores of the day she was expected to quickly marry her teenage boyfriend. Sixteen months later they had another little boy. Overwhelmed by it all, my mother left us when I was 2 years old and my brother was 6 months. Soon after our father left as well. We were put into a foster home. Our foster parents brought us to their church where a young couple with no childen of their own fell in love with us and decided to adopt us both.

That selfless act of love changed my life's destiny forever. I grew up wanting to adopt someday myself as a way of giving back for what I had been blessed with. God, however had another path for me to travel. Although blessed with four children and eight grandchildren an unfulfilled passion to change the lives of abandoned and orphaned children in the way mine was changed still burned within me.

Then one day in 2005 I was approached by...Lifesong for Orphans. That meeting was another life changing event for me and the forerunner of many more to come. These past years as I have contributed to, solicited for and traveled to Ukraine, India and Zambia as an orphan advocate I have witnessed and experienced first hand both the agony and the ecstacy of the orphan experience.

I have sat with my arm around the shoulder of a little girl in Zambia whose mother had died of AIDS and whose father was about to die from it as well. I wiped her tears and tried to reassure her as she agonized over what her future held.

I have been hugged tightly by orphaned teenagers in Ukraine who were overwhelmed by the opportunity to be able to live in new transition homes built through Lifesong donations rather than be exiled into the squalor and degradation of the state run dormatories once they aged out of the orphanages.

I have been mobbed by love-starved, orphaned children in the slums of India who are reduced to tears of awe and wonder over the idea that rich, white Americans actually care enough that they exist to not only come visit them but find ways to improve their lots in life as well.

I could blog endlessly about the myriad of ways that these orphans have touched and enriched my life. As a kindred spirit to them from my life's beginning I ask only that people hear their stories and their cries before buying into any misconceptions or misrepresentations of what or who they are. To me they are truly the cups that God has asked us to pour the cool water of compassion and caring into....the least of His here below and yet primed to be the greatest in His eternal kingdom.

by Bob Hoerr (IL)