What the heck is FCF?

FCF stands for Family Connection Foundation and is the foundation I work with in Thailand. They will also be my sending organization for this next season of my life. If you have ever wondered how the whole foundation thing works or what they do for the volunteers who work with them, then this post is for you!

What is FCF and What Do We Do?

 

The Family Connection Foundation (FCF) was formed as the ministry, outward focus of Chiang Mai Christian Fellowship in 2006 The church is not formally recognized by the Thai government, so FCF also serves as the legal platform for the church, providing a way for staff and ministry partners to work and live in Thailand.

 

It quickly became clear that there was a huge need for a foundation willing to partner and/or take on small ministry projects unable to create a foundation of their own. Missionaries often come to Thailand with a vision and passion to serve in very specific ways. Starting and operating a foundation  to obtain legal working status requires hundreds of hours of compiling (and signing) documents, hours spent at government offices, and a knowledgeable, native Thai speaker to navigate the arduous process. The process is costly and time consuming.

 

FCF’s willingness to be open to take on projects and people who want to serve in Thailand has opened the doors to 87 foreign volunteers, 40 Thai staff, 21 Thai Ministry projects, and 7 support projects. This expansion was well beyond the original vision of the foundation but FCF has adapted and is able to accommodate the growing interest of partnership and project development.

 

In 2013, FCF processed 60 work permits and more than 180 visas (one for every family member) resulting in more than 19,000 sheets of paper, that all must be printed, collated, and stamped by the visa team, and then each page hand-signed by the director. The visa team is estimated to having spent more than 700 hours at various government offices just last year, at the time there were only two staff members on the tem.

 

Our media team created dozens of videos (including the one above), prayer cards, stories, newsletters, and branding. Our finance team processed over 7,000 transactions. Our admin team processed more than 50 new volunteer applications, and spent over 100 hours consulting with other foundations, building partnerships and sharing our experiences.

 

Outwardly; we now have seven children’s homes, and are one of seven anti-trafficking foundations in all of Thailand, with two trafficking intervention and investigative projects.

 

Our Lahu Bible course has reached 2,000 people; Education Matters scholarship program now sponsors over 40 children. We have four urban outreach programs in different parts of the city, and three rural outreach and agricultural training programs.

 

While the numbers are never our goal, they demonstrate the growth and impact FCF is having on this community. We are both humbled and inspired by what these numbers represent and want to share the amazing work God is doing through this foundation, and all the of the people who volunteer and partner with us.  

The HUG Project: A New Beginning

As I get ready for my final week in Thailand before heading to the US, I am excited to share about the organization I will be working with when I return to Thailand in October: The HUG Project!

HUG is a Northern Thai word that means "love." This is a perfect word for the project because love, specifically the love of Jesus, is something that these kids have had precious little of in recent years, if not their whole lives. In English, HUG stands for Hope, Understanding and Grace. HUG wants to give kids Hope for the future, provide Understanding for their situations, and extend Grace when they return to unhealthy styles of living, sometimes repeatedly.

This is a relatively new project, having been birthed in June of 2012 by P'Boom and P'Dao, two amazing Thai people who had a vision for helping the street kids who lived near the river and in the red light district of Chiang Mai. Their first idea of helping these street kids has grown to include eight full time volunteers and expanded into the arenas of fighting human trafficking, exploitation and abuse of children.

HUG was one of the first nationally recognized anti-human trafficking organizations founded in Thailand and P'Boom was one of the first people certified as a child interviewer in cases of abuse or trafficking. She has a wealth of knowledge, connections, and partnerships and a willingness to share all of these with her staff.

Let me break down all the aspects of HUG for you to show you the scope of this project. One aspect is the Big Brother Project. This is the partnership with the police of Region 5, near the river. Policemen from this precinct volunteer their time to build relationships with the homeless boys who sleep under the bridge at night and expand their worldview by taking them on outings to places like waterfalls, the shooting range and a jungle zipline course. One policemen has become a Christian since working with HUG and can be even more of a positive influence in the boys' lives. The goal of BB is to build up the boys' confidence and self-worth and encourage them to complete their education so they can get good jobs, have a place to live and support themselves as adults.

Another aspect of BB and HUG is the Education Center. This is a twice weekly time when teachers from a GED program come to teach GED classes to boys from Big Brother and girls from other FCF organizations such as Baan San Rak and Compass 31 to help prepare them to take the test equivalent to either a 6th grade, 9th grade or 12th grade academic completion. After GED classes, HUG volunteers teach additional classes such as music, art, critical thinking and life skills. I will be helping to teach the critical thinking class. I hope to put my history working in film to good use by teaching the students how to tell stories on film, teaching them about the different aspects of preparation, production and post-production. It's a big project, but I hope we can make it work. My goal would be to have the kids work together to produce their own short film by the end of a year. I have already reached out to some industry friends and perhaps will get a team of them to come do a hands on filmmaking seminar. We'll see...

Every other week, HUG hosts sports days where the kids have the chance to spend the afternoon playing soccer, rock climbing, doing archery, or some other activity. There are also optional cell groups, aka Bible studies, for the girls and boys to take part in separately. The girls' group currently has about 15 girls, while the boys' group varies from 4-10, depending on the week.

HUG is committed to keeping families together whenever possible. If they find a child who has been trafficked or run away, they track the family down and see if it's a safe place for the child to return. If the family is not quite in a stable situation, they will meet regularly with family members to become a stronger family unit and be in a position to take care of their children better. As much as possible, HUG feels the best for a child's life is being in a safe and loving environment with their family. 

A huge part of P'Boom's work specifically is investigating allegations of abuse or trafficking and then interviewing victims to determine what the situation is and what type of intervention is necessary. If an investigation turns into court proceedings, she will help prepare children for what will happen in court. She also does a lot of counseling with the children of HUG project as well as children from ongoing investigations.

As you can see, it's an ambitious project and aiming to change the landscape of how the police interact with street kids, get kids off the streets and into safe situations and teaching all the children they come in contact with that they have worth and are valued. I am excited to be joining this team and am looking forward to being able to help them accomplish everything they aim to do.

My role when I return will initially focus on creating an information database with the story of every child we work with, even peripherally. This is a big task and the staff is currently so busy with the day to day, they haven't had the chance to get it done properly, so I can fill that void. Once that is up and running, it will take a lot less upkeep, just updating things as they come up and keeping track of progress of the kids we see regularly. I'll also be building relationships with the students through the ED Center and sports days and other activities, like the World Cup carnival we had on 4th of July.

Eventually, I'll be working with P'Boom on applying for grants to get funding for our projects. Right now, HUG operates from sporadic gifts from teams and other donors and from the support budgets of the volunteers. If we could get grants from corporations, HUG could purchase a vehicle for doing investigations in mountain villages that are difficult to get to by car, could do a wider range of activities with the kids and maybe even provide scholarships for kids who want to go on to university.

So, that's the next phase of my time in Thailand. I look forward to seeing what the fall and 2015 brings!

The Truth about "Saving the World"

July 2, 2014

Robynn Bliss writes about life as a missionary overseas: “I didn’t expect a rose garden, but neither did I expect that the disappointments and the pains would be so relentless, so incessant, so continuous.”

So, here’s the thing nobody likes to talk about: being a missionary is not all about saving the world. Just because you pack up your life to move across the planet and are planning to help people doesn’t mean your own life stops having trauma and pain and sorrow. In fact, I would argue it gets worse and more intense. And then, when missionaries have these traumatic or painful things happen to them, we don’t want to tell anyone or talk about it because we feel like we are failing at being a missionary, at doing this one thing that we have been sent to do. We compare our own sufferings to those of the people we are working with and then feel selfish for experiencing pain and suffering, because it’s nothing compared to not having running water or consistent electricity or a bed to sleep in. But the truth is, pain is pain, trauma is trauma, and discounting your own story because it’s not traumatic or painful ENOUGH is a bad practice. Our experience is our experience and just because it’s not the same trauma as someone else’s does not make it any less real.

I was talking today to several other missionaries about how we feel like we can’t be real with people because our supporters or families or friends have these images of us out there, strong and capable and “saving the world.” But, I think that is an unhealthy and ultimately, untrue, view of what we do here. Yes, of course, our work with homeless, stateless, exploited and abused people is important. It’s the reason we are all here, after all, the reason we get out of bed in the morning and fight day after day, to see change happen, to see people get citizenship, to see women escape trafficking, to see children graduate high school and break the cycle of poverty. And all that is good to share. But, I think it’s just as important to share our personal ups and downs so that people know what life is really like, that they don’t just get the rose colored glasses version of things and so they know how they can really support us.

When we come back to our home countries, it’s often very difficult for us to relate to people because no one can understand what life is like in this position unless you have lived it yourself. We are often bombarded with people telling us how much good we are doing, and asking how rewarding it all is and how we must feel so great that we are fulfilling our purpose in life. And, while all that is true, it also makes us feel like we can’t be honest about the disappointments we face when someone who has been making great progress backslides, or when someone we have trusted implicitly as a confidante betrays us. On days or weeks like that, we question what the point of it all is, just like people in “regular” jobs do.   We question ourselves, are we doing enough, working hard enough, working too hard, giving too little, giving too much, spending too much time on this area and not enough in another. And at times questioning whether God made a mistake in sending us here.

If we can’t feel free to express these natural emotions on the rollercoaster of life, we can feel very alone and lost. It’s so important for our supporters to be able to encourage us through the hard times as well as the good and to remind us that what we are feeling is normal and that we will get through it.  

Personally, the past year has been very painful. I haven’t posted much about it because I was worried about what people would think of me. I thought I had failed at everything: as a parent, as a missionary, as a person in general.

In June of last year, just when I thought things were getting on a much better level with Sophie and me, she announced she wanted to go live with Ning and Faa at their children’s home. This floored me because it felt like it came out of left field with no warning whatsoever. She couldn’t even give me a reason why. She just said she missed living with people of her culture, and I couldn’t fault her for that. Since I hadn’t technically adopted her, there really wan’t much I could to do stop her, especially since every other person who she pulled into this conversation was supporting her moving out rather than advocating for her to stay at home and work through her problems.

So, two weeks after that bombshell, she moved out of the house. It was basically the most devastating thing to ever happen to me emotionally. I had spent two years fighting to keep her alive, keep her in school, get her citizenship, adopt her, and then with no warning whatsoever, she just decided to bail. Maybe it was all too much for her, the structure, the language, the culture, the chores, especially with her background of absentee parenting. I don’t know, but all I know is that it felt like my heart was being ripped in half as this child that I loved as my daughter and thought would be a permanent part of my family decided she didn’t want to be that anymore.

Over the next few months, as I tried to repair our relationship, she pushed me further away and things got worse rather than better. Finally, about two weeks before Christmas, she said she didn’t want a family, didn’t want anyone to be responsible for her, didn’t want to be responsible to anyone, just wanted to make all her own choices and she didn’t want to live with me anymore. She instead wanted to live with the people she had stayed with while I was in the US last time. She ended by basically saying “Don’t call me, I’ll call you.” Which she didn’t for about 6 months.

Then, out of the blue in April, just before her birthday, she called to invite me to her birthday party.  It was like nothing had ever happened and everything was normal. Since then, I’ve seen her every few weeks for a movie or dinner and things have gotten better. They are not where I would want them to be, and I still worry about the fact that she is not experiencing any natural consequences of her actions, due to all the other adults in her life catering to her every whim, but I have to accept that it’s not my responsibility to make sure she learns those lessons anymore. It’s just my job to love her unconditionally, as her mom, even if that isn’t what she wants me to be anymore.

So, that is the main reason I have not written anything of substance in my blog for the past year. Fear of people knowing the truth, of judging me as a bad parent or a bad person in general. It’s one of those situations where it’s impossible to know what it’s like unless you have gone through the same thing. Everyone has an opinion, and while they all mean well, most advice I have gotten just makes me feel worse. What I really need is for people to just say: “Man, that sucks. I’m sorry.”  I am so thankful for my parents, sister and pastor who said almost exactly that and really helped me get through this year (well, my mom doesn't like the word "sucks" but she said something similar.) Despite all of the anguish and pain this situation has caused, I would still like to foster and adopt kids in the future because I think every child deserves a home and a family.