Column: Information Station

September 2007

When I was a kid in Coney Island, my mother and I often walked on the boardwalk because it was free fun. One of the sights I found fascinating was the orphanage we passed.  Often the kids were hotly engaged in some kind of game on the playground. But these weren’t ordinary kids. They were orphans.

I wanted to stop and stare. What would it be like to live in an orphanage with no real family of your own?  

Orphans.  Even the word sounded sad.

Years later, I realized that although I wasn’t an orphan, I felt abandoned. So did my two girl friends next door. Their daddy had  disappeared. From what the big people said, their mama probably knew where he was, but he didn’t want to come home. Another boy I knew lived without a father most of the year because his daddy traveled with carnivals while he and his mother lived in a tenement. 

I had no idea when I was a kid on the boardwalk how many ways a child could be abandoned, or that the condition was worldwide.  Since couples in China are limited to only one child, babies--particularly girls-- are discarded every day. In cities like New York, and London, kids seemingly choose to  abandon their parents and run away. Often, though, they haven’t known real parenting and are desperate to escape constant neglect or abuse. So they survive any way they can. Kids in Siberia sleep in cardboard boxes or on warm pipes. 

The problem of abandonment never ends. In Saudi Arabia, the doctor of one seventy-nine-year-old patient in an elder care home says that no one comes to visit the man. “It’s a sad story,” he adds. Another man, who’s been in the same home for nine years, says “My children abandoned me and left me alone.”

The Coney Island orphans, the kids next door, abandoned babies in China, desperate runaways and discarded elderly make our hearts hurt. But the abandonment story that makes us hurt most is our own or the story of someone we love. My goal on this website is to offer you help and hope through the unparalleled love of God.