It’s midnight…just a little after, and in a dark room, filled with shadows, a single lantern casts light on the face of a newborn baby. He is just one of an estimated 255 born that very minute worldwide…and just one of an estimated 265,000 that will be born in the 24 hours that follow the hour of his birth.

There are sounds in the tiny room…tired breath sounds and sobbing from the young mother who has just completed her suffering to bring this child into the world. The soft voice of an elderly woman who gently encourages the baby to cry…which he finally does. His faltering wail fills the air and his tiny lips tremble, fists closed tightly, little eyes closed and nearly invisible beneath a furious brow.

The elderly woman carefully cleans the inside of the baby’s mouth with a finger and inspects him from head to toe. Ten fingers and ten toes…pink and wrinkled. Two eyes and a nose with flaring nostrils…all appears to be as it should. She leans forward and gently places the tiny new life on his mother’s chest and smiles just a little….a smile for the new life…precious and innocent, but a little smile only, because she knows his life will be hard…very hard indeed. She knows that the young woman lying there with her newborn son on her chest has no way of caring for the child…the father is gone, gone forever and this community holds no line of men, young or old, who are eager to provide for the two. She has known this young lady since she was brought into this world…much the same as this new one…by a mother with nothing.

She helped to raise this young lady, although they were related in no way. She did her best to provide for her, to teach her, even after her mother left when she was only 4 years old…just walked away one day and never returned. She had little to give the child beyond just what it took to survive…food, but barely enough…a tiny bed in the corner of her tiny hut…and a portion of her love and pity, left overs of a caring woman who was only capable of caring so much.

There had been no education for her. The school was six miles away and although it was free, it was not really free. Without the proper clothing, books and supplies, they would only send her home anyway and these were not things she was able to provide for the girl.

The girl has been helpful and willing to contribute when she was younger. She fetched water and helped to clean what could be cleaned. She played with other children in the neighborhood when she wasn’t doing chores. Some would leave for school each morning, but she and a few others who had no means, remained to linger there throughout the day.

When she turned twelve, things began to change. She had become more sullen…quiet…and had resisted doing the chores she had become accustomed to do. Some days she would sit for hours under a tree, staring off in the distance at the horizon…as if she wondered what was beyond it and if that what was better than what she had here. The old woman supposed she might be looking at it and wondering if her mother was out there somewhere…just beyond the hills…she supposed she wondered the same about her father who had been gone even before she was born. Sometimes tears filled her eyes when she considered the fate of the young girl, because she had seen this before…many times, far too many times.

It was when the young girl turned 15 that the real trouble began…for her, for her aging caretaker and for those around her. Her sullen behavior had evolved into something far more harmful. She had taken to spending time with an older boy with a story much the same as her own…a bully and a thief. Together they were causing trouble throughout the area…and even in her caretakers home, where she had stolen some beads and traded them for cigarettes from a man down the road. Then one day she just left. She sent a young boy to tell the old woman that she wouldn’t be coming back. She and her boyfriend were going to look for their parents and for a different life…but to thank her and tell her not to worry.

The old woman had just patted the little boy on the head and sent him on his way. She went back into her little home and took a knife and put a mark on a pole in the corner. Each day for the next 122 days, she would carve that mark, but on the 123rd she stopped…the day that her ward had returned.

She just showed up, late one evening and stood there in the doorway. From her angle the old woman could see the girls profile and the light behind her cast a shadow on the wall that told the whole story. She was pregnant…a few months perhaps.

Now she lies on a thin mattress holding her own child against her moist skin and sobs…difficult to know whether the sobs are relief that the pain is over, sobs of joy for the new little life she holds against her…or sobs of realization that the moment is at best bittersweet. Two young lives have intersected on an endless circle, a path travelled by millions like them, perpetuating orphanhood, perpetuating a population of uneducated children who become uneducated adults, living in extreme poverty, living through means often less than moral, less than lawful. And then giving life to children of their own and far more often than not…abandoning them in the same way they were abandoned.

This is the circle…the cycle, that we are working so hard to break with the thousands of orphan children that we care for. It is in breaking that cycle that we will prevent, through the generations, millions of children from becoming orphans…becoming children without parental care. But…let’s re-write the story I just told…from her childhood…let’s intervene…and put you in the story.

One day our young orphan was sitting outside under the tree, staring off at the horizon…sadness and loneliness in her eyes. She had just finished her daily routine of watching children from the neighborhood head off to school. And like every other day, she was filled with mixed emotions and questions…jealousy of the children…and wonder of what it must be like to know how to read and write.

A woman she has seen before, but does not know is passing on a nearby road.

She glances over at the young girl, then looks away and continues down the road for a few dusty steps before she stops and just stands there as if she suddenly ran into an invisible barrier of some kind. She looks back over her shoulder at the girl, nods and turns and approaches her, stepping over an exposed root and kneeling down in front of her. The girl is shy. She looks down at the ground…then up…just moving her eyes and looking through long lashes at the face above her.

The woman introduces herself as a neighbor from just up the hill and asks the girl her name. She replies in a quiet voice and says that she lives “there”, pointing to the elderly woman’s shack. The nice lady nods and asks her why she doesn’t go to school and says that she sees her there often under the tree. The young girl does her best to explain…no mother, no father…no money for books and uniforms…no school. There is no judgment in her face, just a knowing smile…lips closed and a gentle squeeze on the young girls shoulder as she rises up and walks to the shack and vanishes into the shadows of the interior.

Just two days later, following some simple paperwork and a promise of visitation for the elderly caregiver, our young orphan is living in an Orphan’s Lifeline Children’s Home. There she will receive love and care…an education, mentoring and nurturing…help to understand why she was abandoned and so much more. She will graduate and go on to college…tech school or a skilled job. She will be lifted up out of poverty and the ignorance of the uneducated…two things that go hand in hand. She will marry and have children of her own and she will not abandon them. Her children will do the same…and theirs…for a new cycle has begun, a new circle, strong and good.

This is a home that YOU give to monthly…it is you that are changing not only her life, but the lives of generations to come…and the influence they will have on the tens of thousands of people they will meet. All of it, simply because you cared…simply because…you acted on your compassion…simply because…love stepped in