This past summer, I went to Hyderabad, India on a short-term mission trip at a children’s home (orphanage). It was a trip I had been dreaming about for a long time. It seemed like such a perfect fit—I had wanted to go to India for years, I would get to work with kids, and, as luck would have it, the ministry was in need of teachers (a path that has been hovering at the top of my “post-grad possibilities” list).
The trip was amazing. I put faces to statistics, built relationships sometimes without language, and saw firsthand the depth of joy that comes from a life of gratitude.
Since coming back to the States, I’ve been trying to figure out how to communicate the experience. While I’ve had a number of encouraging and supportive conversations about India and the orphan crisis as a whole, it can be hard in my social sphere (i.e., a twenty-something college student) to talk about orphans without someone immediately associating it with adoption and then disregarding it. However, the more I learn about orphan care, the more I see it tied to almost any other social justice issue.
For instance, a lot of my interest in India developed through a passion for women’s and girls’ rights. India has an extremely high rate of gender-discriminating abortions and a thriving sex industry, both of which are a result of the culture’s view of women, which is traditionalist sometimes to a fault. Because of the perception of girls and women as being dependent and financially burdensome, many young or infant girls are abandoned and neglected—essentially orphaned.
India is not the only country like this—the struggle for gender equality takes different forms around the world. And it is not only girls who are orphaned. Poverty in and of itself makes it difficult for parents to care for their children, as much as they would like to.
Here in the United States, orphans are no less of an issue. We have over 400,000 children in the foster care system (which, on a side note, is a well-intended but not well-functioning substitute for orphanages--but that is a discussion for a different day). Not all of those children are necessarily orphaned and waiting to be adopted, but many of them grow up in the system, with several foster parents. With the foster care system being as broken as it is, foster children often grow up to a world of homelessness, unemployment, or PTSD and other mental illnesses. Often moving from school to school, they frequently receive a poor and inconsistent education or simply lose interest in school. In some cases, criminality can be associated with a history in the foster care system.
Whether it’s across the globe or right here in front of us, abandoned and vulnerable children form part of the world around us as well as a significant part of the future. And regardless of what your specific calling or passion is, we all have a responsibility toward our brothers and sisters. Furthermore, Christians especially are called to help the vulnerable—which, throughout history, has been the widowed and fatherless. Maybe that’s through adopting children, or taking in a struggling single mother, or sponsoring the education of a child across the world. And maybe, if you’re a college student like me, you feel like you don’t have the resources to do much. And that’s okay. But the easiest first step is to learn more and find a way to serve. You don’t have to adopt a dozen children (although if you do, respect), but you can’t decide it’s not for you to care about when God repeatedly told his people to care about it, no matter what—“Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause” (Is. 1:16-17).
