With grateful hearts, we celebrate a beautiful milestone in the life of our children’s home.
The young people who once found refuge there have grown into educated, skilled, and independent adults—now employed in middle-class jobs, serving the Lord, some also married to good Christian mates. Even more beautifully, several of these graduates are now serving within our school, helping to shape and inspire the next generation. Through the safety, stability, and opportunity provided by your faithful support of WIN across the past 20 years, these children were introduced to Christ, lifted out of poverty, and given the foundation to build bright futures.
This powerful story of transformation is only possible because of the compassion, prayers, and generosity of you, our faithful financial partners who walked alongside these children every step of the way. We are deeply grateful to everyone who helped make this journey one of hope, growth, and lasting impact.
As of June of this year, those still residing in the home will be graduating from college and stepping out on their own. Within the following two months, the rented facility where the home has operated will be handed back to the owners and the staff who have served the children faithfully for so many years, will be facilitated to find other employment and accommodation.
Those of you who have been sponsoring Blue Haven Home, we sincerely request that you CONTINUE!
Your sponsorship will now help a new set of children who otherwise would suffer extreme poverty: Our education centers serve children who, apart from this project, would be enslaved or trafficked. However until now, we haven’t had a dependable source of income to keep these projects going. Now, your generosity in continuing to stand with us will provide dependable education and Christian witness to many more needy children.
“The most Christlike act a person can do in this life is to give Jesus and a bright future to a child who otherwise would have no hope.” The Lord spoke this word to me 21 years ago and it caused me to stop short in surprise. “Wait a minute God,” I said “I thought the greatest thing we could do is preach the gospel.” The Lord showed me that absolutely, these children would receive Christ but they would also be rescued from the clause of traffickers and from a lifetime of exploitation. And that also, as I realized in that regulatory moment, is close to God’s heart.
However a core value of win is to never start a project unless there is a local indigenous leader who is passionate about it and committed to running it because we will not work through foreign or outside leadership. Shortly after the revelation I learned that the wife of Alok, one of our key leaders In India, had herself been rescued into a Children’s Home at an early age and now had a great calling on her life to nurture other at risk children.
And that is how Blue Haven Children’s Home began.
We are deeply grateful for the generous financial sponsors who stepped forward. Designated funds were never enough and so we are especially grateful for our general fund donors whose gifts enabled us to cover the deficit each year.
We put the word out to some of our rural pastors in the remote areas that if they came across an orphan or child in extreme risk to let us know and then Ricky decided whether the child and often whether their siblings as well got to come join the Children’s Home.
These past 20 years of nurturing these 33 kids have seen tough moments such as when Dolma who had come from an abusive environment turned out to have advanced tuberculosis. This highly contagious disease required her to be quarantined from the other children and medicated daily. At the worst stage she was hospitalized and all 20 people around her in the room died off one by one but Doma had put her faith in Christ and kept on praying and believing for life. And sure enough God healed her!
Ricky also put her own health at risk caring for her daily and several of the other kids did get tuberculosis but because we caught it early they got well quickly. The kids received Jesus early on and were constantly discipled and nurtured in their faith and that helped them not only to grow into true Christ followers but also to live their faith openly. At one time they were even leading their own outreach to younger children putting on a summer youth camp, with Alok’s and Ricky‘s guidance.
We have endless joyous memories of these incredible 20 years with the Blue Haven children. The best memories for me include seeing them line up for bear hugs when I would arrive to spend time with them, helping them begin conversational English, teaching them the first few chords on the guitar and then seeing them take off to become worship leaders. Lakshman even composed 40 worship songs and we helped him produce his album… all before he even graduated from high school!
Ricky taught them interpretive dance and I taught them pantomimes and the children’s performances during our pastors conferences were always the highlight.