Sometimes it is the small, desperately important wins that fuel Sue van Schreven’s fight on behalf of the world’s orphans.
Such as the street children kidnapped from the slums of Kolkata, but then rescued on the India-Bangladesh border.
"We have had a couple of situations where we have been able to get some children back when they have been snatched. One time, we got three kids back," the Queenstown founder of Orphans Aid International says.
It was about 18 months ago. Workers with Orphans Aid’s local partner, who feed more than 1000 destitute children in the Kolkata (Calcutta) slums daily, noticed some children were missing. The aid workers contacted local police who issued a nationwide alert.
"They had been sold for $20. Someone pointed out the street kids to a trafficker who snatched them," van Schreven says.
The man gave an excuse to slip off and did not return. Police, who happened to have seen the Kolkata-based alert, were called.
The children were returned, relieved to be saved from a fate likely far worse than their daily struggle for food and shelter.
In 2004, van Schreven felt enormous compassion for children lacking the love and care she and husband Carl were able to give their two young sons. Fifteen years later, she is the founder and director of a humanitarian aid organisation operating in Europe, Asia and Africa to fulfil a simple but enormous vision — to see the abandoned rescued.
In Romania, Orphans Aid has a home, Casa Kiwi, for orphaned children who would otherwise be living in state hospitals. In Russia, there is a day programme for at-risk children. In Uganda, a family-strengthening project to reduce the number of children being abandoned. In India, the Kolkata slum work; a Himalayan school for Nepalese and Bhutanese refugee children; and, more recently, work in a leper colony, in Siliguri.
Orphans Aid is now a $2-million-a-year organisation, working with local partners in each country. It is funded by op shops in four New Zealand cities, including Dunedin and Invercargill, as well as street appeals, bequests and its financial backbone: 500 mostly Kiwi donors.
Van Schreven says the desire to help orphaned or abandoned children was there even as a girl growing up on a Rotorua farm.
But the catalyst for a global aid agency came from family tragedy after she left home.
By the early-1990s, her parents were farming in Southland and van Schreven was a youth worker in Auckland. In October, 1993, her brother Peter took his own life.
Van Schreven left her job and moved south to be with her parents.
"It’s one of those things I don’t like chatting about. But it is a significant part of the story," she says.
"It did stop me in my tracks and make me think, ‘What is it I actually want to do?’
"So ... Orphans Aid is dedicated to my brother’s memory."
Van Schreven admits she was apprehensive about the prospect of being confronted by children in dire need and not knowing how to help. In Romania, a man took her to visit several private orphanages.
“It was actually a very good thing that he did. Because he showed me the success stories.
“It helped me see [that] we can really be part of the solution here.”
Three years later, Orphans Aid International was officially registered as a charitable trust. Later that year, during a trip to Transylvania, Romania, Casa Kiwi Bucuriei (Kiwi House of Joy) was purchased and opened.
“And then we came home and thought, ‘Heck, now where do we get the money we need month-by-month?’”
Looking back on 15 years of growing an international organisation that today is responsible for the well-being of more than 1000 impoverished children, van Schreven says she is driven by the scale and depth of the need and by the hope of offering each child something better.
The terrible lives so many children experience is a constant motivation.
She quotes figures that are almost incomprehensibly large and awful: the United Nations says 25,000 people die of starvation each day, its World Health Organisation estimates there are 153million orphans ...
“There is a massive need for children to have someone to look out for them; someone who has their best interest at heart,” she says.
“Orphaned or abandoned children are so vulnerable because, well, they’re children; they can be exploited so easily.
"I get very upset when I see children being treated unfairly, or who have no one protecting them, when it doesn’t have to be like this in our world.
"They have done nothing wrong. They just happened to be born where they were. That seems very unjust."
With time, stories of successes, small and large, have also fed into that daily drive to do more.
"We have a school we opened there three or four years ago.
"When you see those kids ... now receiving an education; proudly coming to school wearing their uniforms and getting fed; actually changing their whole future ... that’s been a real highlight."
Many of those children would otherwise have ended up being beggars, slaves or sold to brothels.
Sometimes, a little knowledge can make a huge, heart-warming difference, van Schreven says.
Orphans Aid workers in Uganda visited an expectant mother at her home and were surprised to find she was no longer pregnant. The newborn child was found in a back room where he had been left to die.
"The child had a deformity that meant it couldn’t eat or drink. It was quite treatable, but the mother didn’t know that.
"Through another charity we were able to get the baby to a hospital for surgery and then back to the mother."
Then there are the 64 Romanian children who have gone from cots in state hospitals to loving care in Casa Kiwi before being adopted by Romanian families. Not to mention, a further 40 children who have not been adopted and for whom Casa Kiwi has been, or is, their long-term home.
"Some have been with us for 15 years now and are heading off to vocational training. They feel like family.
"It’s been a real joy to see kids who were left in a hospital cot, with no future, just flourishing."
Seeing children making progress, with hope and a future "always spurs you on".
"You might be having a hard time fundraising or feeling, ‘Oh my gosh, this is hard work’ — because everyone has moments like that — then you spend time with those kids and it’s like, ‘Oh, this is so worthwhile."’
Christian faith underpins Orphans Aid but the work is humanitarian not religious and people with a variety of beliefs are involved, van Schreven says.
"The activities we are involved in are very much what Jesus modelled to us. Caring for the poor is certainly an act of worship."
All of the countries Orphans Aid works in are under Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns. Each had a small window of opportunity to make some preparations.
In Uganda, the workers had not received official word of an impending lockdown but were sufficiently concerned about the possibility to distribute six weeks of dried food to the families they assist.
New Zealander Darin Walsh is a key Orphans Aid worker in that country. He decided to stay rather than return to New Zealand.
"Of course, we wouldn’t force anyone to stay, but we were really rapt that he decided to," van Schreven says. "People are really relying on him to co-ordinate food distribution."
Romania went into lockdown before New Zealand.
"We’re lucky at Casa Kiwi that, although the kids haven’t been off the property and are doing their schooling inside, we have a large backyard."
In Russia, where most of the work is with institutionalised children of parents who are in prison or are alcoholics, the day programme has had to be closed. But the workers are using technology to keep in touch with the children as much as possible.
Although gatherings are prohibited in India, designated people are able to collect food to take back to distribute in the slums. On the streets of Kolkata, there is little understanding of the virus or the reason for the lockdown. The children they work with are constantly sick and testing is virtually non-existent, making it impossible to know if, or how much, community transmission of the virus is taking place.
Lack of resources and lack of empathy are the two biggest barriers van Schreven sees to making a difference in a world of need.
There are people who want to help but do not have the opportunity to do so. Lack of funding is a big issue, she says.
And there are people who prefer to turn a blind eye.
"I think the biggest barrier is ... people having a heart to get their hands dirty or to be inconvenienced."
There is much still to do.
"During the Covid-19 lockdown, we are shut in our houses with all our food and our running water and our nice warm beds to hop into. For many children around the world that is just a dream."
