Changing the world, one child at a time

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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

I’ve often thought about how simple it could be: If every person capable of giving love would take one needy child into his or her home, we could change the face of the world.

Of course, that’s not really so simple. Opening your heart and home is a lifetime commitment, yet it’s an incredible act that can lift our human race.

That’s not more evident than in the Aurora home of Neuqua Valley High School teacher Casey Solgos and his wife Erika, who adopted, not one, but two children — 6-year-old Sitota from Ethiopia three years ago; then in December, 9-year-old Therese from Burkina Faso — rescuing these little girls from a life that would have, no doubt, been cut short by poverty and disease.

Yet even now, they feel the need to open their home — and hearts — again. More than anything, Erika said, she and Casey want to return to the orphanage in the tiny village of Yako to get Ferdinand, Therese’s best friend she had to leave behind. The little boy, now 11, was sobbing uncontrollably when they left, Erika said, because he wanted so badly to belong to a family.

The Solgos family will not be eligible to adopt again for a year. And they aren’t even sure it will be possible because of rules about bedroom space and other restrictions. Still, they can’t help but think about this sweet child who was abandoned by his mother around age 4, then adopted out but returned six months later because the new father had decided he could not keep the child after there had been a “sighting” of the natural mother in the village. It’s about the culture of honor in this country in West Africa, Erika told me, which is hard for people here to understand.

Listening to this beautiful, compassionate mother speak from her heart is an Easter blessing. The Solgos family are living a Christ-like life, not only passing along their faith in the risen Lord, but the message he preached when He walked this earth.

The director of the orphanage, Ruth Cox, is another Christ-like woman who has devoted her life to helping the most desperate. “The need is great,” she said, then told me about her latest charges, twin boys, only weeks old, whose mother had thrown them down a dry well before their cries were heard by children passing by.

They are lucky. Because they are so young, the newborns have a good chance of being adopted. It’s the orphans like Ferdinand, she said, especially older boys, whose hope for a normal life grow dimmer with each passing year.

If your heart was moved in any way by the Solgos family story, I urge you to find out more about Therese’s orphanage at www.sheltering-wings.org.

Of course, you don’t have to travel to Africa and adopt an orphan to make a difference. There are children in need all around us. Sometimes all we have to do is open our eyes to see them.

And after we do, we need to act.

No one ever claimed changing the world was easy. That’s why they call new life a miracle.