CELEBRATING 40 YEARS of SERVICE CAMPAIGN

This past week, Kimberly attended the Christian Alliance for Orphans (CAFO) Summit in Nashville, Tennessee. She was a coach at an all-day Simulation Lab helping organizations around the globe transition from residential care to family-based care. 

She was also invited to speak and share on a global panel focused on family strengthening. The first question she was asked to share with the participants was, "What is your expertise in the area of family strengthening?" 

Below is her answer:

"My area of expertise is failing forward, learning from my mistakes. Having spent 40 years in Thailand, I have made more mistakes than I can count… but also learned from them!

Like many of you here, I started out working at an orphanage. Once I began to understand the Thai language, I learned that most of the kids had families and in summer about 90 % of them went home to their villages. Surely, they were safe families, right? I am a bit embarrassed to tell you, I visited the villages to recruit more kids believing that separating children from families was a good idea. I saw clearly that poverty was the real reason kids were separated from their families. And also, lack of access to education was a push factor. Education was free-- but parents couldn’t afford to buy uniforms or textbooks or spend money for transportation to and from school. 

Needless to say, I began to question everything!

Proverbs 19:2 says, Enthusiasm [desire; zeal; passion] without knowledge is not good. If you act too quickly, you might make a mistake.

I had all the passion in the world-- but very little knowledge of child development, attachment or trauma.

Fast forward to 2004 when the Asian Tsunami left 1000s of children orphaned. Our organization, Step Ahead, opened child development centers across the coastline to keep children safe during the day while parents or relatives tried to put their life back together. One day I pulled my car up to one of our centers and saw an orphanage director recruiting a young widow to place her barely two-year old child in her orphanage.

I asked the young mom, 'Do you really want to give your child away?'

With tears in her eyes and clutching her baby close, she replied, 'No, but I have no food for dinner tonight. I've lost my husband to the tsunami, my job and my home. I am living in this overcrowded displaced person's camp struggling to find a job.'

I stroked her back gently and responded, 'If we make sure you have food until you can find a job-- and, we will help you find a job, would you consider keeping your child?'

She smiled and nodded, yes.

That was the day we started our Keeping Families Together (KFT) program. It has taken us years to develop and refine it-- but, to date, our KFT Toolkit has been used in 72 countries! "