Children At Risk: God Has Put Them On My Heart!

By Al Meehan

In our 20 years of mission service in Colombia, I never got used to the sight of abandoned and intoxicated street kids, glue bottles in hand, lying on Bogotá's streets under dirty pieces of cardboard to keep warm.

Now, years later and involved in different ministries around the globe, God used Pioneers Mission to place me in Thailand in January of this year to help the ministry with security issues. Radical and violent Muslim groups are trying to form an Islam republic in southern Thailand. Pioneers' Asian conference came on the heels of these threats and the devastating tsunami that likely orphaned a thousand children in Thailand alone.

It was during this time I met a young Thai woman, Jan, who worked giving traditional Thai foot massages to many of the missionaries staying at the hotel. I learned she had been widowed and was trying to support a 4-year old daughter named Bobby, presently cared for by her aged mother 400 miles away in Seka on the Mekong River Laos border. For years economic realities had forced Jan to come to tourist locations in order to earn money for herself and her family. Simultaneously, I learned from other sources of a whole industry where young girls and boys were recruited from rural areas to come and "work" to make money to send back home to poor families. God put it on my heart to find out more about Jan's family situation and others like her.

As I walked the streets of Pattaya, the nearby tourist city, and made further inquiries it was apparent that young children, teens, boys and girls, were being used as indentured servants exploited for the purposes of work and sex. I saw many Western men walking hand-in-hand with young boys and girls and personally witnessed exchanges of money to pimps turning underage kids over to foreigners for sexual gratification. I will never again be the same as God brings to mind kids around the globe, not only of Colombia, but much of Southeast Asia where children are so much at risk. I have determined before the Lord and have already begun to personally get involved in the lives of families like Jan and Bobby to make a difference and to be the fragrance of the redeeming Christ to a land and people steeped in Buddhism and other destructive traditions.

Bobby (pictured), a rural Thai child at risk, received a book this month from the Meehans, telling her that God loves her.