"I Grew Up a City Girl Who Was Afraid of Blood. Then I Held a Baby While She Died in My Arms..."

I was a city girl through and through. When I was fifteen, someone invited me to a meeting and told me about Jesus for the first time. It changed everything. I'd been carrying around resentment and anger I didn't even know I had. That day, I started to experience a change in priorities.

A few years later, I was invited to be a translator at an orphanage, and I saw something I'd never seen before. Kids who didn't have the right to a better life. Not because no one loved them. Because no one had shown up yet. I went back every year after that. First alone, then with other people.

One trip, I was walking through the city and saw a crowd gathered around a small box under a tree. Inside was a newborn baby girl. Healthy. Beautiful. Red cheeks. I picked her up and carried her straight to the orphanage.

Three days later, I went back to check on her. She was lying face down on a metal crib, and I couldn't find her by sight, only by the name tag on her wrist. I lifted her and saw blood on her face. I was terrified of blood. I'd never done anything like this in my life. But I heard something in me say, "Let's clean her." So I did. I carried her outside, sang to her even though I can't sing, and told her Jesus loved her.

She smiled at me.

A few minutes later, a nurse walked by and told me to put her down. She had just passed away in my arms.

I didn't know what to feel. And then I heard something else. This baby is forever in my arms. Thank you for letting her experience this, the tangible touch.

I knelt right there and knew I had something to do with these kids for the rest of my life.

Gift of Joy started with $1,000 and a flood.

After years of visiting, I felt God stirring something bigger in me, and I started a nonprofit called Gift of Joy. I had no funding, just a door that I saw open.

The first thing that happened was a flood. I had a thousand dollars, and I went straight into the disaster zone, past the point CNN couldn't even reach. I saw thousands of tents sitting next to the dam. Many families lost their homes, and children lost their parents and their futures. From there, we took 70 children under our wing. These children were resilient; they didn't stop growing, learning, and pushing themselves when life was tough.

What a gift. Their lives may have been wrecked, but they have been a Joy. Seeing them overcome the impossible.

From 70 kids to thousands.

At the time, only one percent of high school graduates in that region went on to university. All seventy of our kids got in to university. Every one. Today, many of them are doctors, scientists, and attorneys. Some of them joined our leadership school and have now become leaders in charge of the daily work.

We grew to forty staff. One of our best mentors personally visited a hundred kids every single month. We had stacks of handwritten letters coming in from villages all the time. We never wanted to run this like an organization with a building and a program. We wanted it to be like one big family.

We've watched provision show up when there was nothing. One year we needed a hundred thousand dollars for the kids' school fees, and we had none of it. We gathered the older kids and prayed. The next day, the money was in the bank. I can't explain that. I've stopped trying to.

I married a man who believed in this as much as I did. J.R. and I built a family together, and we have four children. One of them, Jaymin, has special needs. In my experience, that's something people quietly ask you to explain, sometimes even to apologize for. I never saw it that way. I knew from the moment I held him that I was meant to be his voice, the same way I'd learned to be a voice for every child I met overseas. Mothering him taught me things about advocacy no program ever could.

Where we are now.

It's been over thirty years since that first trip. We've helped more than a thousand kids since 1992. But this was never about being known. It's about protecting the vulnerable and building a safe community around them. That means linking arms with the people already doing this work on the ground and giving kids what they actually need: a family, an education, and someone who believes they're already the best of the best, not someone waiting to be rescued.

What if children are waiting for you to meet, so their lives will be different?

What if your investment to help one will raise one victim to become a victor, so someone else's story can become a testimony for more?

That's still true today. Eighty seven kids are still waiting for that person to be you.

Rescue Kids International is a nonprofit that prevents child trafficking among refugee families fleeing the war in Burma, operating primarily in Thailand since 1992.