The Study of Orphan Care Leads to Humility

Plato once said, "The study of Astronomy leads to humility." That is definitely true - just one look at pictures from the Hubble telescope makes this point clear.

Similarly, as I have found in the last few years, the study of how to bring excellence to orphan care also leads to humility. It is easy to get lost in the numbers of the orphan crisis (e.g., over 167,000,000 orphans in the world) and give up. To say that we simply cannot do anything about it. That there is no way we can figure out how to address it as a comprehensive whole. That we simply cannot understand it. That we can't get families for all of these kids. That [fill in the blank with countless other reasons not to engage].

People have said similar things about the heavens over the centuries. That we cannot even begin to understand the universe surrounding us. But other people, like Galileo, Ptolemy, Copernicus, and the inventors of the Hubble telescope, to name a few, said that it is not OK to simply accept defeat in our understanding of the heavens. Even though they accepted the fact that the universe is HUGE and that they likely would never figure it out, they said, "We can work to understand it better." There are answers to our questions. While we personally might not be able to figure all of them out, we can start working to find answers, ask more questions, discover more answers, and so on. They said that they could take baby steps to figuring out the heavens and they saw any additional knowledge, no matter how small, as a victory, all the while knowing that it was extremely unlikely that the answers to all of their questions would be solved in their lifetime. (Part of this is that I believe there simply are certain things that we as humans are not supposed to understand.)

Because these guys that didn't listen to the naysayers, we have slowly progressed over the years as they built on each other's discoveries, and today we can see stars billions of light years away through the Hubble Telescope - we are closer to an understanding of what is going on out there. If people wouldn’t have said that we can begin to figure it out, then the Hubble never would’ve happened

We need to apply that same mindset and ingenuity to the improvement of orphan care! While on the one hand we need to recognize the magnitude of the problem and face the fact that we can't solve it on our own, we also need to work to understand it better and seek God's wisdom and discernment on how to develop solutions.  We need to work together, collaborating together to understand the vastness of the crisis and the best way to develop the kids' lives to give them an opportunity to be leaders in their communities. We need to continue asking hard questions and analyzing best practices with the same commitment as we would if our own children were in an orphanage. We need to think bigger and with more excellence (e.g., family-based orphanages, top-quality schools, great medical care and nutrition, and participation in their local community), which will enable us to begin shifting the paradigm surrounding orphans from one where they are seen as a waste of resources to one where they are treated as investments. Only then will we really be making in-roads to making orphanages and orphan care better.

Or, in the alternative, we can keep wading in the current problematic paradigm seeing the orphans as second-rate humans, as a drain on society, as trash, as a waste of resources, AND we thus will keep viewing the orphan crisis as a universe that is way too big to understand, address, and work within.

So, yes, the study of orphan care leads to humility. But, fortunately for the millions of orphans around the world, it doesn't lead to futility.