Community Testimonials
A Freed Mind
Recently, a mother asked me to enroll her foster care daughter. The student entered the foster care system because her 5 year-old brother had been starved to death from neglect. This student was 1.5–2 grade levels behind. To make matters worse, she has a degenerative disease that causes her body tissues to separate from one another. In the first weeks of school, her retinas detached, rendering her legally blind. I walked by her classroom and saw her slumped over her desk: despairing.
I brought her to my office and shared about a younger student who had been born legally blind in one eye (my daughter). I explained that, despite her disability, she trusted God’s promises for her and was overcoming it. I told her I could not imagine what she was struggling with, but God was intimately aware of her need. I prayed with her, but felt totally helpless. The next week, her demeanor changed, and, after a medical procedure restored her vision, she not only made academic progress, but made new friends as well. After two years of investment from her classroom teacher, an on-site tutor, her resource teacher, her classmates, and her foster care family, she is now only a semester below grade level in reading and continuing to grow.
Freed Hands
Our Burmese refugee students come to us with almost nothing. They arrive in the United States from refugee camps where none have received a substantial education. One of our older refugee students, a sixth grader, had been continually ridiculed for her inability to speak English and her poor academic performance by her classmates at a public school. To make matters worse, she was demeaned at home by her father who slapped her, pulled her hair and called her “stupid”. She is also Muslim. However, after only two years receiving intense support from our English as a Second Language teacher, her classroom teacher, and volunteer tutors, she increased her English speaking and reading levels. Formerly, she read on the Kindergarten level, now she reads on the second grade level. In addition, she joins with classmates and uses her new skills to help operate a quail egg micro-farm. Students sell the eggs to a local restaurant and grocer and send the proceeds to oppressed students in equatorial Africa. In other words, she is giving back to those who are in a similar situation to the one she left. Today, she talks and laughs with classmates, enthusiastically participates in focused English instruction and hears that she is made in the image of God, not a tool for the capricious schemes of Allah, created to steward the creation for the benefit of others.
A Freed Life
A year ago, I was talking with one of our partners. He was a former vice-president of a large company who had retired in his fifties and now tutored some our students and had even organized a business group to provide scholarships for them through their school career. I told them I admired his sacrificial service for our students. He told me he wished he had not waited so long because he “felt he was finally living”. When you free the heart of a child, you become more free yourself.