The photographs on the walls of Forgotten Children Ministries in Chattanooga form a collective picture of unimaginable poverty.
In one, a boy whose thin frame can barely be seen under his clothes lies in the middle of a city sidewalk, sleeping. In another, two male children are sucking air out of a baby food jar filled with glue in an effort to numb their hunger. And in a third, Forgotten Children’s chairman and CEO Stan Nowell kneels beside a boy wrapped in a blue blanket and lying in startling filth under a massive concrete bridge.
The collage tells part of the story of the tens of thousands of children who live on the streets of Honduras, a country in which 74 percent of the population lives below the poverty level, and 54 percent lives in extreme poverty. Nowell fills in the blanks.
“Some of the kids live on the streets because their parents can’t afford to send them to school, so they send them out to beg. Many of them are tired of getting beaten for not bringing home enough money, so they stay on the streets,” Nowell says.
One can imagine what happens to children who end up homeless in a city where food and clean water are scarce, shop owners beat kids who come near their stores, and brutal gangs prowl the streets, recruiting new members from among the countless adolescents who have nowhere to go.
Nowell doesn’t have to imagine where the children end up, as he’s devoted years of his life to missionary work in Honduras. He started out with Baptist Medical and Dental Missions International, which delivers crucial health care to poor people in the country.
While in Chattanooga on furlough in 1998, he saw footage of the devastation Hurricane Mitch caused in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital city, and was moved to strike out on
his own.
“My wife and I were glued to the television. Ted Koppel came on and interviewed two young girls whose surrogate brother had taken his life because he’d lost his entire family. Then he showed people putting children in garbage bags, tossing them into the back of a pickup truck and burying them in a mass grave,” Nowell says.
Nowell had been praying for direction for several months, but felt as though he had not received an answer about where to take his ministry. Unable to sleep, Nowell says he got out of bed and asked God to speak to him through his Word. When he opened his Bible, he read Isaiah 4:6, which says, “There will be a shelter to give shade from the heat by day and protection from the storm and rain.”
In that moment, the seeds that would become Forgotten Children sprouted in Nowell’s broken heart.
Nowell worked for several years to get the ministry up and running. His goal was to offer a program that housed and fed children, taught them “how to have a relationship with God,” and educated them.
“When it was time for a young man to leave the ministry, we wanted to be able to take him to Toyota and say, ‘Here’s a young man, here’s his diploma, and here’s his certificate as an auto mechanic. He’s honest and trustworthy; he’s got a good work ethic; and he speaks English. Would you hire him?’ We wanted to give them hope and a future,” Nowell says.
Nowell arrived in Honduras with enough money to lease and renovate a small homestead called Grace Farm. Then he and his Honduran director hit the streets of Tegucigalpa. They gave the kids they encountered tortillas, and told them about the farm. Fourteen boys piled into the first bus that traveled from the city to the farm.
“They came off the streets dirty, stinking and barefoot. They’d been beaten, shot at, and put in jail. They were hooked on glue, their parents had committed suicide, and every authority figure in their life had abused them. When they got off the bus, the first thing they wanted to do was go swimming in the water tank that irrigated the farm,” Nowell says.
Getting the boys off glue was easy. All it took was a good meal. Getting them to stand in line to eat was a lot more difficult.
“They’d blow up at us whenever we asked them to do something. But if you don’t have order, you have chaos, so we had structure and discipline from the beginning. The ones who didn’t want to stay were free to go back to the streets,” Nowell says.
Many of the kids did return to their former way of life, but a few stayed, and today, the ministry has grown beyond Nowell’s wildest dreams.In
addition to Grace Farm, For-gotten Children also consists of a government-accredited school, a shelter for boys, a shelter for girls, transitional housing, apartments for missionary teams, and a church.
A staff of 37 Hondurans runs the ministry, while Nowell and three others man the offices in Chattanooga and make frequent trips to the country.
Today, Forgotten Children is caring for 62 boys, two of whom were a part of the original 14 who went to Grace Farm, and are now in college. The ministry is also caring for eight girls.
To fund its operations, Forgotten Children relies on child sponsorships and donations, which have gone down in the current economy. But Nowell says God placed the ministry in Honduras, and will meet its needs.
Some of the pictures that line the walls of Forgotten Children are painful to see. But mixed together with those photographs are images that tell the end of the story: children playing soccer, kids sitting beside Nowell as he plays an acoustic guitar, drama teams performing for the youngsters, missionaries raising a building, and faces that were once buried in a jar of glue beaming with joy as they look at the camera.
The kids are clean, well-fed, and wearing brightly colored clothing. These pictures show children who no longer call the streets home, but have hope and a future. They show children who are no longer forgotten.
To learn more about Forgotten Children, visit www.forgottenchildrenministries.org or call 423-892-4979.