Life Long Learning

Lifelong learners are those who deliberately seek out opportunities to better understand the world around them and apply the knowledge they gain in the decisions they make. Those who pursue lifelong learning are shaped by the values, thoughtfulness, and desire to respond to what they come to understand through life’s experiences. When my family grew from four members to eight members when I was 11 years old, I began a path of life-long learning that has continued to shape the choices I make today.

“Children belong in families.” An incredible amount of my time and energy over the last decade have been focused around this one sentence. I knew my four new brothers still had living family members back home in Zambia. Yet, I was too young to understand the situations that caused their family members to determine it was best to send off their sons to a foreign nation in hopes of a better future. They were so desperate for the stability that comes from a solid education and regular meals that they trusted devious characters who actually trafficked their sons. It was a traumatizing experience for all of us, and something we still struggle with today. It wasn’t until I teamed up with Alliance for Children Everywhere that I became aware that material poverty causes families to become separated much more often than death. Families feel that material care is more important than the love and emotional security that they can provide for the children. This unsettling statistic left me antsy to learn more, find solutions, and educate others about how to turn the tide of children not growing up with their families, whether biological or adoptive.

“Children belong in families,” but why? For children to grow up to become healthy, productive adults, they need the love and nurturing of a family. During my first trip to Zambia in 2010, I spent three weeks with our Zambian staff being shown how material poverty increases the risk of children under 5 being separated from their families. Parents don’t want to watch their children starve, so they abandon them in hopes they’ll be found and cared for by someone better off. Or, these children are turned over to institutions to care for them. However, in both situations, it’s well documented that the trauma the children then undergo becomes a lifelong struggle. ACE and other organizations like it understand that the emotional bonds that come from growing up in a strong, healthy family cannot be replicated or replaced by institutionalized care. It would’ve been easy to learn all of this information during my first trip, go back home to Texas, keep teaching, and forget about problems that happen time and again in developing nations. But that wasn’t good enough for me. I had all of this knowledge, but I needed to do something with this knowledge.

“Children belong in families,” but how?

“Strengthening families should always be the first thing to do on the list. Helping families who are struggling to care for their children may involve strengthening their economic activities, cash transfers, or linking them to emotional, spiritual, or social work support”-Simon Kanyembo, ACE Social Welfare Director.

I knew ACE was involved in empowering materially impoverished families through job skills training, entrepreneurship courses, food support, and grade school education because they believe that action is an outflow of knowledge. I needed to find a way to put my knowledge into action for myself, so I continued my relationship with ACE, learning more about best practice efforts in family empowerment and also for caring for children separated from their families. I created lesson plans about human trafficking and fair trade production of goods to teach my world cultures students about these topics. I began reading the research coming out about the long-term effects of institutionalization of children and the benefits of foster care. I was asked to join the board of directors for ACE to continue the conversation and the work happening. I spent time learning from organizations such as The Better Care Network, World Without Orphans, and Faith to Action to understand the importance of collaboration between nonprofit organizations, governments, communities, and churches to keep families strong and to support both families and children who are somewhere on the continuum of care.