Today there are over 100,000 child soldiers in Southeast Asia
According to The Asian Wall Street Journal one fourth of the 300,000 child soldiers in the world live in Southeast Asia. Boys and girls as young as 6 years old, are forced into local ethnic armies, and trained as soldiers for guerrilla warfare. Their purpose: to serve and defend the drug lords of the area, at the expense of losing parents, families, homes and even their own lives.
XP Missions, working with Divine Inheritance takes orphans out of hopeless situations and cares for them. We give them shelter, food, clothing, education, spiritual care and love.
122 child soldiers are currently on our care in this drug region. Having gained the trust of the local country government, the home is prospering. The drug lords continue to push us to take more child soldiers and our capacity to build more homes is only limited by funds.
To find out more about this project please Click Here.
UPDATE from Marcus Young – May 2011
The Burma home for former child soldiers is doing well. Huge thanks for all your generosity! Our staff is strong and the project is in a corner tucked away from most of the war preparations going on in the region. We have broken ground on the mountain to build a school building now and will need about $45K more to finish the project. This school will be open to the local community and hopefully help keep even more children out of the army. The rains come soon so dirt work is best done now!
The recent 6.8 back to back earthquakes in Burma last month knocked over an electric pole coming into the property but other than that, all is fine and no children were injured. (Thanks, Jesus!) I know the Japan earthquake eclipsed this one but still thousands lost their homes and died.
The kids are adorable, it's hard to imagine them as soldiers. We've done a bit of shifting around with a couple of homes because of limited space so this location now is predominately boys. It helps with privacy when space is limited to have some segregation. Eventually we will get more girls back here as we gain more facility. We're also launching a refugee project in China for some of our older rescued children in Burma to protect them from the new push of conscriptions by the army. If war makes it to this children's home, the beachhead in China gives us a more viable escape route.
May God use these kids burning lights in darkness and may all the joy of heaven rock your world as you continue to help us rescue children God is ultra passionate about.
- Marcus Young
