The Giving Challenge: Rescue1

Dao was just 9 years old when her older brother tricked her into accompanying him into the woods. He left her there, promising her that someone else was supposed to come and get her. Once he left her alone, a group of older boys ambushed her, beating her and taking turns raping her. Dao’s brother had been paid by a sex trafficker to leave his baby sister in the woods. The beating and gang rape were the beginning of her “method of seasoning,” a period of preparation for the sex industry that abounds in Thailand. Before a child is put on the street or in a brothel, she will go through a period of captivity, starvation, confinement, beating, and gang rapes. The goal is to force the will to live and instinct to survive out of the potential slaves.

“When these children arrive at one of our homes of refuge,” says Lacy Tolar (pictured above), co-founder with her husband Daniel of Rescue1, “we see it in their eyes. Their soul is hollow. They are the walking dead.” The older boys left Dao, beaten and bleeding, and ran off. As she came to her senses, she saw a van coming toward the woods. She knew that van was coming to take her somewhere she did not want to go. Summoning all her strength, she hid, crawling away until she came to the edge of a village where someone found her and brought her to a Rescue1 home. For the first three weeks in the Home of Refuge, Dao had to sleep with the house mother, because every time she fell into a deep sleep, she had nightmares and would wake up screaming.

“We have seven homes full of boys and girls who were in similar situations,” explains Lacy. “All of these children come to us with different and varying stories, made up of different fabrics that are created with similar threads: being sold as a child bride, sold into sexual servitude, forced to work in a factory by day and as a sex slave by night. This is the world of sex trafficking.

“We have a girl in one of our homes who was birthed for the industry,” Lacy continues. “Her mother was paid $1000 to get pregnant. The trafficker paid for the child’s upkeep for four years, at which time the trafficker came back to the mother, paid her $2000, and immediately put this little girl into the industry at four years of age. By the time she was 7, however, she was discarded–because she was HIV positive. A family member brought her to our Home of Refuge.”

Rescue1 has seven Homes of Refuge, where they care for over 180 children. Because the residential homes are all over capacity, they recently launched a foster care program. Local national believers take one or two children per family to care for.

Our Giving Challenge? Our goal is to provide $1500 to support the 15 girls in the home where Dao lives for one month. This home has the most severe cases of rescue in it, and it provides for every need the girls have, from food and clothing to education and medical concerns.  In this Home of Refuge, almost all of the children have received Christ. That’s what happens in these Rescue1 homes. Children are rescued, and they are given a hope and a future. Lacy says, “One of our young girls told me recently, ‘If these homes had to close down and if I had to go back out on the street tonight, I now have a hope that no one could ever steal from me, because I have Jesus.’” Remember, if we all give something, we can reach this goal! Do you have $5 or $10 you can donate? When we put it all together, we can support these little girls for one month!

Donate Now

:: Click HERE to Donate Now to the ministry of Rescue1.

The Giving Challenge is a team effort of Faithful Provisions readers to provide for a need at a a different ministry every month. To learn more about it and see what we’ve done so far this year, go HERE.