something positive.

This morning I took the girl I wrote about in my last post to Mosoj Yan to start the process of entering into their girls' home.  She's recovered from her sickness but is still far from healthy due to malnutrition and drugs.  She and I have been talking for over a week now about getting her into a home and off the streets, and as of last Thursday, she had decided that enough was enough and wanted out.

She's a really sweet, beautiful girl, who's only been on the streets for a couple of years.  Her mom was put in prison and her step-dad forced her out of the house at gun point when she was 12.  We found out on Saturday that her mom has been released from prison and is back in Bolivia, in the southern town of Tarija.  

She immediately wanted to get to Tarija and said she was going to steal cell phones to pay for her trip down there. I was able to talk her out of that and encourage her to stick to our plan of talking to Mosoj Yan today.  I said we should coordinate with them, help her get off drugs and get healthy, locate her mom, and then I could take her down to Tarija.

She came to church with me yesterday but left halfway through, and I was concerned that she had gone off to steal and ditch town.  But thank God, this morning she was curled up in the tunnel and still wanted to go to Mosoj Yan.  

On the way, she told me about a situation that happened last night, which may have helped reinforce her urge to get off the street.  She and another boy were hanging around some food kiosks near the bridge when a couple of guys offered them a hamburger.  They took it and walked off to the corner while the two guys stood and watched. She told me that she and the boy she was with felt really uncomfortable by the way the guys were watching them and encouraging her to eat the burger.  She said that something seemed odd about the hamburger, so they broke it open and found that the meat was a weird color and right in the middle of the burger were pills.  PILLS!  Those guys were trying to drug her, to do God only knows what to her.  I can't even begin to express how much that infuriates me...  But it did give me a good opportunity to talk with her about the dangers of living on the streets.

Thankfully, she's totally, 100% into getting help from Mosoj Yan.  So for the first month, she's going to go to their Motivation Center everyday from 8 to 6, and she'll continue to sleep at the night shelter.  I'll help facilitate all that and follow up with her at the shelter- encourage her, make sure she's not sniffing glue at night, etc.  Once they think she's ready, she can enter into their girls' home.  And from there, we can locate her mom and help them reconnect.

There is a very real battle going on for these kids' souls, and she needs a lot of prayer right now. So please be praying that this isn't just a fleeting desire and that she won't get sucked back into life on the streets.