Kids Are Heroes: The Al Mansyuriah Orphanage

Posted by Gabe on November 19, 2011 under Kids are Heroes | Be the First to Comment

Sometimes it takes a personal experience to motivate someone to do something. In this case, something personal has indeed confronted us and we want to do something about it.

As you would guess our main focus has become the Kids Are Heroes movement which has also been our passion for the last four years. We often get asked to support other causes. It’s not that we turn a blind eye — we simply cannot solve all the world’s problems and if we support too many other causes then ours will indeed suffer. So to be fair we politely recuse ourselves from all of these types of requests so that we can remain focused on the task at hand.

Something has touched our lives however, that makes us want to make an exception in this particular case. We were not asked to support this cause in this way, and that is another reason why we want to do it. Let me explain.

A few months ago, two of our heroes from Indonesia, Farah Amalia and Fara Muntu, asked us if MaryMargaret would like to become involved in a pen-pal program with orphans from their country. MaryMargaret happily agreed. How it works, is that Fara and Farah recruited youth volunteers from around the world to be involved in this program. The children from the orphanage would select their pen-pal from that group and write their letters.  Fara and Fara would translate them all into English and disperse them to their pen-pals. Now when the pen-pals wrote back, the two heroes would translate them and deliver them to the children.

I thought that this was a wonderful exercise on so many levels. MaryMargaret got several letters and she corresponded back to all of her kids. If that wasn’t enough Fara and Farah made a wonderful scrapbook of all the letters for all the pen-pals. I printed it out for MaryMargaret and my wife Michelle to see. When Michelle arrived home she saw this packet I had left for her and started reading it. The tears started flowing immediately. She said to me, “I know what I want for Christmas: to send a package to these kids!” After having read all the letters I couldn’t have agreed more.

So this is what we are going to do. So why are we telling you this? We have no interest in applauding ourselves in public. We could easily just do it and shut up about it. The reason I thought it should be shared is because of the efforts put in by our heroes in Indonesia. This is just such an innovative idea that makes a world of difference to these kids. I also wanted to share MaryMargaret’s portion of the scrapbook with our readers so you can be touched by that as well. I did get permission to do that.  Here is the link to MaryMargaret’s correspondence with the orphans.

The Al Mansyuriah orphanage in Tangerang Selatan, Indonesia has 70 children aged 7-17. The common themes in their letters are wanting to improve conditions in their own country and making their parents proud of them. Despite being orphans it doesn’t necessarily mean that their parents have died. Many of the parents gave up the children so the kids could have better lives — so that they didn’t have to live in squalor and could get an education. The letters also prove to me that kids are indeed heroes no matter where they live or what conditions they live under. All of these children have the desire to help others and their country.

So if you have taken the time to read the letters and are inspired enough to want to help us with our efforts, we offer a Donate button below. Please bear in mind that this will be done with our own money and NOT Kids Are Heroes’ as we are unable to send monies overseas as a non-profit. So in interest of transparency your donation would not be tax deductible and it will go into my personal Paypal account. But also rest assured that less the PayPal fees ALL the funds collected from this effort will go towards these orphans. We plan to send them notebooks, pencils and other school supplies, and maybe even some clothing. And if we get no donations whatsoever, we will still send them something (hopefully by Christmas), so please only donate if you are moved as much as we are. If you would rather send material things, email us here. Thank you.

Please note: We have learned that the most expensive part of this operation will be shipping charges. If any company would like to sponsor those charges, we will give them an equal value of “bricks” on the Kids Are Heroes Corporate Wall.