Dear family and friends, What a wild year 2020 has been! Here are some highlights for our family… Winter: *We moved from the city of Winston-Salem to a small town we had never even heard of before! Our search for a fixer-upper home with sweat equity potential led us here, but since then we’ve seen […]
We’ve been working toward this day for a long time. We’ve talked about serving in the Guilford County Juvenile Detention Center for what feels like forever. We’ve completed our background checks, we’ve been fingerprinted, we’ve studied the trafficking safety curriculum, we’ve visited with the staff – we’re ready. At least we thought we were. I […]
This was a good week, but a draining one. We volunteered at this year’s Juveline Sex Trafficking Conference in Cincinnati. And now we’re exhausted. Physically and emotionally. And we’re also fired up, encouraged to continue fighting for those who can’t fight for themselves. It was a long drive from North Carolina to Ohio. And the […]
Just one year ago we boarded the plane to America. Emotions were running high, and I recorded a little bit of that in a short Facebook post: Perspective on our trip home: Humor: When Delta Airlines announced (on our flight from Hong Kong to Seattle) that ALL the bathrooms on the right half of the […]
Due to the confidential nature of our work in counter-trafficking, many of the details of the following story have been intentionally omitted to preserve the privacy and dignity of those involved. While we were in Thailand I had the opportunity to spend many hours with survivors of human trafficking. I don’t think I was ever […]
Repatriation /rēˌpātrēˈāSH(ə)n,rēˌpatrēˈāSH(ə)n/ noun the return of someone to their own country One hundred seventy-four days. Our family has been on American soil again for one hundred seventy-four days. Emotions I fully thought would hit back in July are coming in waves. Grief, guilt and more. As much as I wish I could push […]
After leaving our dear friends in Minnesota, it was back to the road and through Wisconsin. We stopped at a campground that night that turned out to offer the least amount of sleep we’d had so far, thanks to an extremely loud train roaring past once an hour all through the night. It was also […]
It’s the completion of our first week on the road. I’m surrounded by the forest and breathing in the smells of campfire. We are somewhere in Wisconsin near a train, which is bringing all kinds of joy to Bubba. This trip wasn’t destined to start on time, or so we believed up until the […]
I apologize ahead of time to anyone reading this blog post, as it’s more of a brain dump than anything else. But if you are curious to know what’s up in our corner of the world, read on! The Phoenix Alliance. We’ve found that starting a foundation from the ground up is such a learning experience. […]
*This post contains affiliate links, which can benefit our family if used to purchase anything on Amazon. Our lives right now are all about setting kids free from the worst kind of pain imaginable. Sometimes it’s tough to make ourselves sit down and read more about what we deal with regularly, but we feel it’s […]