LET’S PRETEND!
Take a moment to look around you at your loved ones, pleasant home, clothing, tech equipment, vehicles, food, etc. that you enjoy. Truly God has blessed you well. Perhaps you are giving a contented sigh.
Now close your eyes and pretend all that is gone. You are a 12-year old “sleeping” on gravel under a truck in a different country, the Dominican Republic (DR), with a different language. You have left your large family in Haiti (poorest country in the Western Hemisphere) as your parents are unable to provide basics for you and your siblings. You were told that there is work across the border in the DR so you are hopeful you might find work so you can eat and have a place to stay. However, the work is hard to find as there are many other children like you. You aren’t sure when your next shower will be, much less your next meal.
Switch your pretending to sitting outside a grocery store in the DR where your wife is shopping. You spot some Creole-speaking Haitian preteens. While you are proficient in Spanish, you are still learning Creole. You ask one of the few questions you know in Creole, ”Where do you live?” When the answer is “under a truck,” you think that surely you misunderstood since you’re still learning Creole. When you discover that this is, tragically, the truth, you realize that these children need your help and, thanks be to God through people’s generosity, you are able to offer them a home with food, showers, and other basics including love and a family.
John and Melissa Hanley do not have to imagine any of this as it was their experience 16 years ago. God used them to create Three Trees Ministries which provides a home and family for vulnerable children or “unaccompanied minors” as they are called in the DR.
When you imagined your comfortable life above, did you fondly remember the love of parents, gifts on birthdays and Christmas? Clothes for school? None of the children John and Melissa have loved and now provide a home for could expect these basic, essential life foundations until they came to Three Trees.
Over the past 20 years, the Hanleys have been a family to over 50 children who otherwise wouldn’t have had a family. They provided temporary care to hundreds of children in vulnerable situations through no fault of their own. They feed, clothe, and educate the children with parental love. Currently, they rent a home where they and 15 children live while also overseeing an older boys’ home and a home for young women for a total of 27 children.
Recently, sufficient funds were raised to begin a “forever” home for 16 boys and girls as well as John and Melissa. This will be the first of three homes to be able to provide for up to 40 children at any given time. In social media updates, it is hard to determine who is more excited, the Hanleys or the children! Follow them on Facebook at Three Trees, or Instagram at threetreesministries and experience the thrill with the children as they watch the walls go up for their forever home.
How excited would you be to watch your home being built if you had none? I cannot even imagine this! Can you?
Something that continues to amaze me when I see photos of Melissa and John’s children are the SMILES. They are H U G E ! ! It tells me that these kids–who are just like you and me at those ages–are happy and loved.
How heart-warming and reassuring is that?
John and Melissa experience all the routine parenting tasks that you and I experience. In fact, while recently visiting with them via Zoom, Melissa left briefly, then came back and told John, “We’ve got to go NOW to the hospital. Eli fell off a bicycle and split his head open.” And they were gone.
How often have similar parental emergencies changed your plans?!
Being responsible parents and caregivers for some of society’s most alone and impoverished children, John and Melissa Hanley are looking forward to keeping the ministry alive as they age and know at some point they will no longer be able to parent children.
Three Trees is a nonprofit organization, works with the DR Child Welfare System, and is accredited.
Please prayerfully consider supporting Three Trees Ministries for daily needs and providing a present and future home for orphaned and displaced children. You will not have to pretend about seeing smiles–they will definitely follow your generous support!
