standing up, speaking out...

Thoughts on this past week...

Posted by Amanda , Sunday, March 14, 2010 1:43 PM

Speaker: Phil Aspegren & Leslie Freeman
Topic: Family Based Care Solutions/Children with Disabilities

Amidst being sick this week, I learned some pretty interesting things. We spent half the week with Phil, who is the director of Casa Viva—the foster care agency we have been working with and the only foster care system set in place in Costa Rica. The last part of the week was spent with Leslie, one of our school leaders, who taught about children with disabilities. They were both such fascinating topics and I think ones that are really pertinent to working with children.

Phil started out both of our days by breaking down some scriptures. We talked about the first chapter in Isaiah and how our responsibility is to stop doing wrong and do right. We discussed what it meant to do right—taking care of the hungry, thirsty, sick, widows, orphans and standing up for justice. Then we looked into the story of Jonathan fighting the Philistines. There are many cool things about this story, but one of the things we pulled from it was that we need to take initiative but also be totally dependent on God. So often, we get off balance and are either totally dependent on God or we take initiative and go through with our own plans. But we need to learn to do both and to do them to our fullest capacity.

Other than that, Phil also spoke on the foster care system. Basically—if we were a child in need, where would we want to live? An institution? And orphanage? Or a loving family, with either your own biological parents, adoptive parents, or foster parents? Sometimes as Christians, especially living in the States, we think of orphanages in kind of a romantic way. We always want to support people who are setting up orphanages because it’s easy to see the benefit. We feel sorry for the poor children and want to help them. It’s much harder, however, to work to set those children up in families. But is it better? Yes. If you think about when you were younger, say your parents died…would you want to live in an orphanage or institution until you were 18? I think we would all answer no. That’s where foster care and adoption come in. They are such great options really and easily accessible.

Phil gave us a crazy statistic. There are 1,910 children in orphanages in Costa Rica. There are 3,000 evangelical churches in all of Costa Rica. If each one of those churches had one family decide to take a child in, there would be no need for the orphanages anymore and the children would be living with families. Isn’t that crazy? I think it’s also the responsibility of the church to stand up behind families that want to adopt or foster children and to support them. We are a “body,” are we not?

As Leslie was talking about children with disabilities this week, I had even more to think about. When we talk about the weakest, most vulnerable of children—this would be them. In the United States, children with disabilities are given a lot more opportunities than most anywhere. They are given the right to education and are protected by law for abuse. But in many developing countries, this is not the case. They are abused, neglected and forgotten more than any other children. They are looked down upon. This is so devastating to me.

I feel like sometimes we look on children with disabilities as too much work or hard to deal with. Instead, why are we not considering everything we can learn from them? They have so much to offer and the value of their human life is no different than ours. They have purpose and passion and excitement, but we don’t take the time to explore those things. We look down on them. Why do we do this? Disabilities might bring limitations, but they do not limit the love a person can give, the inspiration they can bring or the insight and perspective they can pass on to us. They have a challenge in front of them every day. Are we helping or hindering them? So many hard questions from this week…