To catch everyone up. I left off at team changes at the end of Peru. After debrief in Lima, our squad took a 40 hour bus ride to Ecuador. Yep. You read that right. Almost two days on a bus. I loved it! Yep. You read that right too! I thought it was fun. I got a lot of writing and blogging done on the bus ride. It was nice.
The bus dropped us off in Quito, Ecuador, the capital, at a ministry called Inca Link. Four teams, including my new Team F.L.A.M.E., stayed there for a month. They were very hospitable. I loved it, and I loved Quito! From the moment I stepped off the bus, I was excited to be there.
The first couple of days were spent recuperating from our almost two day bus ride. So we journeyed around Quito with our free days before the start of ministry on Monday. Which is where this blog story starts. It is kind of a long one. But one I am so excited to share, so please reader bare with me.
I have had a while to process this, so the Lord has revealed a lot to me about this situation. Not only to me, but also to my teammate, Joané, from South Africa.
It all began on Sunday, May 4th. My teammates, me, Jazmin, Joané, and Schuylar, were out shopping at some markets in Quito. We ended up in an area called La Foch. Prounounced Fosh. We spent awhile here getting internet at this café called Juan Valdez café. (Great place. Awesome Chai Tea.) I was Facetiming my mom, since I had not really had the time to chat with her. Internet is pretty scarce on the world race, and even when you do come by it, it’s usually not that great. It was good internet here, so we were catching up… when all of a sudden, I was interrupted by these two little boys asking me something in Spanish.
This was my honest thought process and reaction to those boys approaching me: I’m busy and I don’t want to be disturbed, so I’ll just ignore them, pretend I can’t understand the language, and maybe they’ll leave me alone. Rude! I know. You can judge me.
They walked away.
While my mom continued talking to me, my mind remained on those boys that interrupted me. I couldn’t stop thinking about what I was learning and what I had just read in Christine Caine’s book, Undaunted. About allowing the Lord to interrupt your life. How in the story of the Good Samaritan, the three people that passed by the hurt man probably had things to do and someplace to be. But it was the third one, the good Samaritan, that allowed his life to be interrupted, to stop what he was doing and allow the Lord to work in and through him to help the poor man. I began to pray that I would allow the Lord to interrupt my life.
This moment was clearly an answer to my prayer, and I was being disobedient. I couldn’t stop thinking about those boys. It was as if the Holy Spirit kept gently nudging me about it. I wanted to be obedient, and I wanted the Lord to interrupt my life. I saw them talking to my friend Joané, so I stood up from my seat and walked over to them. Mind you, I was still facetiming my mom. We bought them some food from the café, and then I resumed my conversation with my mother thinking that was it. Well done. Give them some food and send them on their merry way.
Boy does God have a sense of humor. That was only the beginning.
Joané sat down with the two boys and tried to have a conversation despite the language barrier. I finally hung up the phone and decided to talk to the boys as well. They were asking for money, $20.
Joané and I didn’t know what to do. It didn’t feel right giving them money for some reason. Though we wanted to help, we didn’t know if that was the best way to help them. So we prayed and asked the Lord for discernment. Nothing.
Joané decided to ask them some questions to see if we could get some more information as to why the boys needed the money, etc.
The eldest boy, Antony, who was 11, told us that his mother was in the hospital. He needed $20, because that was how much the medicine cost for his mother. The older boy had tears threatening to spill over at any moment, while his younger brother, Juan, who was three, played with his food.
We kept asking Antony questions, and sometimes he would change his answer, so things weren’t making much sense. But the gist of it was that they had acquired the $20, when suddenly they were robbed by some bad girls in the streets about an hour ago. Now, they needed $20 to replace the one that was stolen. Watching Antony’s younger brother roll around on the floor, his red shirt would lift up occasionally, revealing what looked like scars of cigarette burn marks on his tummy and back.
Finally, a Lebanese woman named Salma sitting close by got my attention and pulled me aside. She told me that she sees these kids all the time crying in the streets and begging for money. If they don’t get the money, then their mother beats them.
At this point, we didn’t know what was truth, nor what to do. These were our options/thoughts.
- Give them the money. It wouldn’t really do anything though. Meaning that it solves nothing and doesn’t really help in any real way. True, it would prevent their mom from beating them that night. But who’s to say that woman was telling the truth. And who’s to say their mom wouldn’t beat them anyway. It would just repeat the next day. It doesn’t break the cycle, it only feeds it. Locals taking advantage of the tourism industry and asking foreigners, specifically, whites for money.
- Don’t give them the money. Because it only allows corruption to continue.
There were too many unknowns. So we went with the second option, and we told them about Jesus. We told them that Jesus is always with them, and if they are ever afraid then they can pray and ask the Lord to protect them. Joané and I then prayed so hard for these two precious little boys. Our hearts overflowed with love for them. We prayed protection for them from any evil thing. Then after the prayer we honestly and openly told them that we weren’t going to give them any money. They could have just walked away after that to beg for money from someone else, but they didn’t. They stayed with us for awhile. And that was when our other teammate, Schuylar, showed up to play with them too.
They didn’t leave. They stayed with us for at least 30 minutes afterward. I wonder if they felt a sense of freedom and hope if only for that short amount of time. Because believe me, they were in no rush to leave us.
Eventually they did. And we did too.
Riding home on the bus, I felt so hopeless. I was asking the Lord, how could a young 11 year old boy have to care for his family by begging for money on the streets? And why could I just not take them with me and out of that situation safe from harm? Hopeless and confused, I began to wonder if I really did do the right thing?
I remember thinking, no wonder I never really allowed the Lord to interrupt my life before, because when you do that means you open yourself up for a lot. A lot of pain. A lot of hopelessness. A lot of time. You have so many things to think about now. It’s not an easy fix. You are letting in other people’s problems, and let’s face it, nobody really wants to do that. It’s a “this is going to take a lot of work and I don’t even know where to start” kinda problem. It’s a lot. And I didn’t want to deal with all of that before. It is so much easier for our hearts to be hardened by situations and not take the time for these things. For these people. You just become numb in thinking that’s just the way the world is. But tonight I refused to believe that. Sure there are millions of street kids out begging for money. I can’t help all of them, but Juan and Anthony interrupted my heart. And I may not be able to help the whole world, but I can try to help one. Or in this case two. And I couldn’t not do anything anymore. I wanted to do something. But I didn’t know how.
That night we talked with an intern at Inca Link, Melissa, and she told us we were right not to give them any money, because yes we would just be feeding the system, when instead the cycle does need to be broken. She also told us that the area of La Foch was a very dark area where a lot of bad things happen there. Corrupt things. But she also encouraged us to pursue whatever this was that the Lord was leading us to. It was evident that our hearts were broken for Juan and Antony and we wanted to do something, as opposed to nothing.
We decided we would go looking for them again, since Salma had said she saw them all the time. We would bring them a Bible and chat with them. Buy them food and just love on them.
That was our plan. But…we never saw them again.
My team prayed that the Lord would help us to do something about Juan and Antony, and that we would see them again to build a relationship. We prayed that the Lord wouldn’t let us forget their faces, so that we wouldn’t be passive and just forget, but instead to really pursue them and do something about it.
Two nights later I had a dream. I dreamt that I was trying to purposefully get sex trafficked, so that I could find out information and work from the inside to bust the industry. It was pretty intense. (Don’t worry, I’ll go into detail. Sarcasm. It’s important. Trust me. Don’t forget I’m talking about a dream. I have very vivid dreams. Always have.)
In this dream, I find out some suspicious information from my sister about a guy named Gustavo, who looked like Clark Gable. So I investigate him. I am intentional with trying to get in his way, and eventually he bites. He starts buying me all of these fancy, expensive, and flashy clothes. He takes me to these wild parties where I continue to investigate. Finally, he takes me to the mall to buy me more clothes. We are in this store, and I ask if I could pray for him. He gets really uncomfortable. He then says, “That might not be allowed here. Let me go ask the manager.” So he leaves to go ask, and in the distance I see the store manager shake her head yes like it’s not a problem. But Gustavo walks up to me and tells me differently, that the store manager doesn’t allow people to pray here. So I suggest that I go talk to the store manager, and when I do she is completely fine with it. I start praying for Gustavo, and I can tell he is starting to get very uncomfortable. When he looks like he is about to run off, I grab him and look him right in the eye. I tell him that I know everything about him; I know exactly who he is and what he does, and that it stops now.
Then I woke up.
The next night, I dreamt that we were out ministering to the people on the streets when suddenly there was massive chaos. Caused by what, I have no idea. But my whole team got split up leaving me alone. I went looking for everyone. I first found Joané, lying down in a box, her body folded in half. I told her I would go find someone to get her help, when I ran into Allie who had been shot and was also badly hurt. A stranger told me that she had a bullet that was about to puncture her heart and that if it reached it, then she would die. So now, I was trying to find help for both Allie and Joané to save them. Then the dream gets really weird. I couldn’t even explain it. There are only just images in my mind that wouldn’t even make sense if I tried.
After these crazy dreams, I began feeling so tired and restless, dragging my feet to ministry. I told Casey about my dreams on our long walk to ministry. She replied with, “well, we need to pray about that, because I’m sure Jesus doesn’t want to keep you from sleep.” I vaguely responded with, “uh huh,” while thinking: unless He is trying to tell me something.
After ministry on Thursday, we all got on a bus in the rain to La Foch to search for the boys. When we walked into the Juan Valdez Café where we met them the other night, I noticed the Salma, the woman who had told me that the boys’ mom beats them. I almost froze in my tracks. I kept looking to make sure what I was seeing was correct. I wouldn’t forget that face though. I turned around and asked if she had seen those boys. Schuylar had taken a picture of them, and we showed it to her. She kept repeating to us that they would be here at 8 pm.
So we prayed. And waited. 8 pm. And waited. 8:30 pm. And waited. 9 pm And nothing.
Defeated.
We tried praying again, but the Lebanese men, who were there the other night with Salma, were singing really loudly in Arabic. It was distracting. So we decided to start asking more people around the area if they had seen these boys. So many people told us so many different things.
By now it was almost 10 pm. I stood in the café watching the plaza to see if I could see any sign of the boys when one of the Lebanese men offered me a cookie. I didn’t take it. (Relevant Sidenote: I use the term Lebanese, because I don’t know their name, so that is the only way I know how to identify them to make the story clear as opposed to being vague and just saying men. That might get confusing. I would use their name if I knew it, but I don’t. It is in no way to be a racial or prejudice thing.)
We were now getting ready to leave the café since it was about 10:30 and there was no sign of the boys anywhere, when I noticed that Salma was still there. She had been at that café for as long as us, if not longer. I had a strange thought/feeling that everything was all connected. Like we had pieces to a puzzle, but we couldn’t quite see the whole picture.
I just shrugged my shoulders and brushed the weird suspicion away though. Thinking it to be crazy.
We had gone back a few more times after that looking for the boys. I didn’t go every time. But each night we went back there, the same Lebanese men and Salma were always there sitting in their same seats overlooking the square of La Foch. It was very weird. We still never saw Juan and Antony.
The last night I went to Juan Valdez looking for those boys, these two older girls about fifteen approached us asking us if we could give to their organization. We just had to give out our information and write how much money we gave. The organization took in girls from the street. We started asking them questions and again their answers were unclear. They didn’t know who we could talk to in order to find out more information about it, and they couldn’t really tell us where it was located. We genuinely wanted to know though, so that maybe Adventures in Missions could connect with their ministry, but the girls weren’t very willing to give us answers. “It doesn’t make any sense,” my team leader, Casey, pointed out, “Why would an organization that houses and provides for street kids be sending the kids back out on to the streets at 10 o’clock at night to ask for money?” She was right. That was odd.
A couple nights later, Melissa, the intern at Inca Link, pulled my team aside and said that she strongly encourage that we not go back to La Foch. She apologized for encouraging us to go in the first place, but wasn’t really aware of the danger there when she said that. She had been talking with a bunch of locals to find ministries and organizations that could take in Juan and Antony, or who were doing something about all the kids begging on the streets, so that she could connect us with those ministries. But what she found instead were a lot of people telling her of the dangers of the area. Melissa then told us that a lot of the locals strongly advised us to not go back there at night (which was when we were going) and that the area of La Foch is a big trafficking area. My guess after witnessing some stuff is all three; sex, drugs, and child trafficking go on there. Ecuadorians confirmed that a lot of the times they drug the children and then send them out to beg for money.
It’s messed up. So messed up.
And we were putting ourselves in danger, and probably the kids’ lives as well.
We didn’t go back there, but knowing the information that we knew, we couldn’t just sit around. Melissa suggested we take a different approach.
So we started praying, “What now God? What do we do now?”
One night, Joané and I prayed that the Lord would reveal things to us, dreams or clues, that we missed at the beginning. And that was when I remembered those dreams about Gustavo and sex trafficking, and my teammates being in danger. I didn’t know this at the time, but I fully believe now that those dreams were warnings. God was trying to protect us, and when that didn’t work, He had to do it another way. It was clear, very clear now, that we were putting ourselves at risk unbeknownst to us at first.
Then we started looking back from the very beginning and noticing things that didn’t really phase us at first, but seemed incredibly odd looking back. Things like:
- That very first night, Salma was sitting with the Lebanese men at the exact same spot they sit every night. And she had approached me and grabbed my attention. Which I believe was because I kept asking too many questions that the boys couldn’t really answer. So to stop me from asking too many questions; she interrupted me.
- The second night we were there, Salma kept telling us to wait there until nine o clock, and that the boys would show up then. They never did. We never saw them again. But there were people that arrived at nine that night, and they were those Lebanese men.
- One last thing, Salma had told us another night that the boys were in the park about ten minutes from here crying and bleeding. I honestly believe it was a trap. None of us felt good about going since it was ten minutes away walking late at night in an unfamiliar area. So we didn’t go. Call me crazy, but I truly believe the Lord protected us at just the right time.
My friend Joané said that the awesome thing is that maybe if this was all true, and the Lord did protect us from their evil schemes, then hopefully they will know that we serve a Big God. Because they knew that we were Christians who wanted to serve Jesus. And they will know that our God is a good God who loves His children enough to protect them.
With the days to follow, it was evident that yes indeed we were not supposed to make our way back down to the La Foch area. But my heart still broke for La Foch and those boys. I was reading through Psalms, and almost all of them proclaim the hope that is the Lord. He will protect and restore His children and His kingdom, and we can put all of our trust in Him for He is our strength. Reading the psalms gave me such hope for the area of La Foch. I know that the Lord will transform that area. I began praying the Lord’s protection over it, and that He would redeem it by sending people to do something about it. I know that there is hope for those children.
“Lord, confuse the wicked, confound their words,
For I see violence and strife in the city.
Day and night they prowl about on its walls;
Malice and abuse are within it.
Destructive forces are at work in the city;
Threats and lies never leave its streets…
As for me, I call to God,
And the Lord saves me.
Evening, morning, and noon
I cry out in distress,
And he hears my voice.
He rescues me unharmed
From the battle waged against me
Even though many oppose me.
God, who is enthroned from of old,
Who does not change—
He will hear them and humble them,
Because they have no fear of God…
Cast your cares on the Lord
And he will sustain you;
He will never let
The righteous be shaken.
But you, God, will bring down the wicked
Into the pit of decay;
The bloodthirsty and deceitful
Will not live out half their days.
But as for me, I trust in You.”
~Psalm 55: 9-11; 16-19; 22-23
It took a while for me to realize all of this. It took praying and asking the Lord to reveal these things to me. Things I had completely forgotten about. But he put together all the pieces for us. It might look simple now, but that’s only because I’m telling you everything I’ve realized, and leaving out everything else that happens throughout our day that is irrelevant to this story.
We are currently in the process of filling out a case form to send in to IJM, International Justice Mission, in the hopes that they can start something there as well and bring about justice to the area of La Foch and to boys like Juan and Antony.
Who knows? But what I do know is that my hope is in the Lord.
Until the next adventure,
Teej
