Each morning when Omar* entered his classroom at Dar El Awlad School (DEA) in Lebanon, tears streamed down his face. The moment he sat down, a quiet wall seemed to rise between him and the rest of the class. He struggled to participate, to focus, or to join the curiosity of his peers. It wasn’t defiance or fear of school. It was a sadness his six-year-old heart did not yet have words to express.
Overwhelmed by the conflict and instability of the Syrian civil war, Omar’s family fled to Lebanon in search of safety. Like many families who crossed the border over the past decade, they arrived carrying uncertainty and loss. In Lebanon, they have navigated crowded housing, informal employment, and the difficult work of starting over. It was through this upheaval that Omar came to Dar El Awlad School — a place serving refugee children whose education and sense of stability have been disrupted. Today, his family is rebuilding together, working to create steadiness for their children amid fragile circumstances.
When Grief Has No Words
At Dar El Awlad School, teachers recognized that Omar’s tears signaled the need for deeper care. DEA is more than a place of academic instruction. It is a restorative learning environment where structured routines, trauma-informed teaching, daily meals, and individualized academic support come together to create safety. Prayer, Bible stories, and gospel conversations are woven naturally into the day, grounding children in the truth that they are seen, deeply loved by Jesus, and never alone — even when life feels uncertain.
The school also maintains close connection with families, offering encouragement and steady presence that strengthens both the classroom and the home. For families navigating displacement, that consistency matters deeply.
For Omar, that steady care became a turning point.
A Moment of Childlike Faith
One day, as he sat at his table in tears, a classmate quietly suggested to the teacher,
“Miss, why don’t you pray to Jesus and He will help him?”
Most of the children in this classroom come from Muslim refugee families, and for many, DEA is their first sustained exposure to prayer in Jesus’ name. Day by day, they are learning that God listens and that He cares for them personally.The teacher later shared,
“When we began to pray, every child in the class — without exception — closed their eyes and bowed their heads. And as we prayed, Omar stopped crying.”
Cautious but hopeful, she continued watching him closely. Two weeks passed without a single tear. More than that, his whole demeanor changed. He began participating in lessons, smiling, and engaging freely with his peers. The wall that once separated him from learning gradually came down.
The Fruit of Daily Faithfulness
Omar’s transformation was not the result of a single moment alone, but the fruit of daily faithfulness — compassionate teachers, structured classrooms, nourishing meals, and the steady reminder that he is known and loved by God. In a school serving largely Muslim refugee families, Dar El Awlad bears witness to Christ through love that perseveres.
Today, Omar participates fully in his classroom community. His story reflects what happens when restorative education and Christ-centered care meet children navigating displacement.
Omar learned he is not alone — and that truth changed everything.
Become a Student Champion
Your support helps children like Omar experience education that heals — steady care, safe classrooms, and the life-changing truth that they are deeply loved. Become a Student Champion today and help hope take root.
June is Reunification Month, a time to honor families, caregivers, and child welfare professionals working toward the safe reunification of children who have entered protective care.
For many people, the idea of child protective care raises an important question:If a child is receiving excellent care in a safe environment, why would we ever want them to leave?
Imagine a child named Julia.
After experiencing abuse and neglect, Julia’s case is reported to authorities and she enters protective care. For the first time in a long time, she has regular meals, a safe place to sleep, trusted adults, counseling, education, and the stability she needs to begin healing. Day by day, she starts to experience safety again.
At first glance, it might seem like the goal is simple: keep Julia where she is safe.
Yet from the very beginning, another question is being asked: What family can Julia belong to?
At Kids Alive International, our goal is not simply to provide excellent care for children. Our goal is to help children experience the healing, belonging, and permanence that family provides. Whether that happens through reunification with a child's family of origin, kinship care with extended family members, or placement with a foster family, we believe children thrive best when they can grow within safe, loving family relationships.
This conviction shapes everything we do through Protective Care, Family Strengthening, Restorative Education, and Justice Advocacy. Together, these programs help children move toward what every child deserves: life in family and community, free from fear and violence.
Bonds that Mend Are Why Family Matters So Much
Every child needs a safe, loving, and nurturing adult in their lives to thrive. Life inevitably create wounds. Bonds to an adult based bonds hears to that give children develop the tools to build resiliency and maturing into a healthy self-identity. The best place for Thurs bonds to form are in family.
Long before researchers studied attachment, child development, or family systems, Scripture revealed God's heart for belonging. Psalm 68:6 tells us that "God sets the lonely in families." Throughout the Bible, we see God's desire for people to live in loving relationships where they are known, supported, and cared for.
Research continues to affirm what many families intuitively understand: children need more than safety alone. They need consistent relationships, healthy attachment, and a sense of belonging.
Family provides the environment where children often learn some of life's most important lessons. It is where identity is formed, trust is built, values are modeled, and resilience begins to grow. While schools, churches, mentors, and communities all play important roles, family remains God's primary design.
This is why Kids Alive's work focuses not only on healing children, but also on strengthening families.
Because whenever it can be achieved safely, family-based care offers children something no program, institution, or service can fully replace:
the opportunity to belong.
Julia's Journey Begins: A Season of Protective Care
For some children, however, remaining at home is not immediately safe. The majority of children in Kids Alive's protective care programs have experienced sexual abuse or have caregivers struggling with substance use, often compounded by violence, neglect, or other significant challenges. In these situations, protective care offers a Safe Haven where children can experience immediate safety, stability, and specialized support as they begin the healing process.
At Kids Alive, this often includes:
Trauma-informed caregiving
Counseling and emotional support for both child and family of origin
Restorative education
Spiritual discipleship
Legal advocacy to make the home safe
Consistent relationships with trusted adults
For Julia, protective care creates space to breathe again. She no longer has to focus every moment on survival. Instead, she can begin processing what she has experienced, rebuilding trust, and discovering that she is safe.
Scripture reminds us of God's concern for vulnerable children:
“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world." (James 1:27)
Protective care reflects this calling. Yet it is important to understand that protective care is not intended to be the finish line.
It is often the beginning of a larger journey.
Looking Beyond the Child: Strengthening Families
While Julia is receiving care and support, another important process is taking place.
Social workers, counselors, caregivers, and family members are working to understand the broader circumstances that led to her entering care. They are asking difficult but necessary questions:
What is the legal process against her abuser?
What support does her family need once the home is safe?
Are there extended family members who can provide care?
How can healthy relationships be rebuilt?
This is where Family Strengthening becomes essential .
When abuse occurs in the home, a child’s removal can become a devastating turning point for the whole family. For Julia’s mother, coming to terms with the reality that her daughter had been sexually abused brought grief, guilt, and profound shame. Yet it also began a journey toward truth, healing, and change.
Family Strengthening seeks to walk alongside mothers, and the family, in that journey.
Through counseling, parenting support, and ongoing encouragement, she is given space to face hard truths with honesty and courage — to truly see, believe, and grieve what her daughter endured. It involves the slow, difficult work of forgiveness: releasing the weight of what she missed, what she wished she had done differently, and finding the strength to move forward. And it means building the awareness, boundaries, and resolve she needs to become the safe, watchful presence her daughter deserves.
Restoration, where possible, is never rushed — and always begins with the child. This work reflects God's heart for restoration:
"He will turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents." (Malachi 4:6)
Family reunification is rarely about fixing a single problem – even in cases of abuse. For Julia’s family navigating the aftermath of abuse in her home, it means holding the needs of Julia and the family at once — grieving with her daughter, reckoning with abuse, and rebuilding a family that was fractured from the inside. It means strengthening relationships that have been deeply wounded, restoring trust that was broken in the most intimate of spaces, economic empowerment to reduce their vulnerability, and developing the awareness and tools to ensure safety is never again compromised.
In the case of most processes for reunification at Kids Alive, support to navigate the legal processes, the family's willingness to support the abused child in that process, and legal representation against the abuser is essential for reunification to the family of origin.
This process is what child welfare professionals call reunification.
And that work takes time.
Reunification is not a single moment when a child walks through the front door of their home again. It is a carefully guided process built on safety, accountability, healing, and trust. The goal is not simply to return a child home; it is to ensure that the home is ready to support the child's long-term wellbeing.
Throughout this journey, children and families often need an entire community walking alongside them. Social workers, counselors, pastors, teachers, caregivers, and advocates all play important roles in helping families move toward restoration.
This is why Reunification Month exists: It celebrates the courage of families who do the difficult work of change and the communities that support them along the way.
When reunification can be achieved safely, it is often a beautiful picture of restoration; children and parents moving forward together with new tools, healthier relationships, and renewed hope for the future.
When Reunification Is Not Possible
Not every story follows the same path.
While reunification is often the preferred goal, there are situations where returning home is no longer safe or appropriate. In these cases, the question remains the same:
How can this child experience the belonging and stability of family?
For some children, the answer is kinship care.
A grandparent, aunt, uncle, older sibling, or other trusted relative may be able to provide a safe and loving home. Because children already have existing connections with these family members, kinship care can often help preserve important relationships, cultural identity, and a sense of continuity.
For others, foster care becomes the best path forward. Foster families open their homes and hearts to children, providing the stability, consistency, and care needed for healing and growth.
In some situations, adoption may ultimately become the permanent solution when reunification is no longer possible.
While each pathway looks different, the goal remains the same: helping children experience life within the context of a safe, loving family.
At Kids Alive, we celebrate reunification whenever it can happen safely. We also celebrate kinship care, foster care, and other family-based solutions that provide children with permanence and belonging.
Because the goal is not a particular placement;
the goal is a child thriving within family and community.
It's Hard. But It's Worth It.
Family preservation, reunification, kinship care, and foster care are rarely simple. They require children who are brave enough to trust again. Parents who are willing to confront difficult realities and pursue change. Extended family members who step forward to provide care. Foster families who open their homes and hearts. Social workers, counselors, teachers, pastors, judges, and advocates who continue showing up even when progress feels slow.
This work is hard.
Yet throughout Scripture, we see God's heart for restoration. We serve a God who reconciles, restores, and draws people back into relationship. His story is one of redemption—not because restoration is easy, but because it is worth pursuing.
This is why Kids Alive takes a holistic approach to care.
Together, these programs work toward something greater than temporary safety. They help create the conditions where children and families can flourish.
It is hard work. But it is worth it.
A Resource for Families and Caregivers
Whether a child is reunified with their family of origin, welcomed into kinship care, or embraced by a foster family, healthy relationships are at the heart of long-term healing and belonging.
At Kids Alive International, we believe strengthening families is one of the most powerful ways to create lasting change for children. That's why we created the Family Systems Therapy Guide—a free resource designed to help parents, caregivers, ministry leaders, and families better understand the relationships and patterns that shape family life.
As we celebrate Reunification Month, we invite you to explore how healthy family systems can become places of healing, restoration, and growth.
If you're looking for a way to help children on this journey, consider becoming a Safe Haven Champion. Your support helps children experience the care, healing, and relationships that make belonging possible. You're not just championing a child: you're championing their story, helping them heal, belong, and become all God created them to be.
Alongside their older sister, they entered protective care looking for safety, stability, and a place where they could begin healing from difficulties that abuse and trauma in their . Over time, their older sister reached adulthood and moved out to begin a life of independence as a young adult. But Julia and Ana remained.
For the next decade, Juniper Tree became the place where they grew up.
The girls attended school, built friendships, participated in discipleship programs, and were surrounded by caregivers who invested deeply in their wellbeing. They received the care, support, and encouragement they needed to thrive. Yet beneath the stability they found at Juniper Tree remained a longing that many children in protective care quietly carry.
They wanted a family of their own.
For years, that hope felt distant. Yet even while Julia and Ana were growing up at Juniper Tree, God was quietly weaving together relationships that would one day change their lives. What began as regular visits to a nearby church would eventually become something much more.
Throughout their childhood, the sisters attended a nearby church where Pastor Daniel and his wife, Sonia, faithfully served. Week after week, the girls participated in church services, discipleship programs, and activities led by the couple. Over the years, trust grew naturally through shared meals, conversations, encouragement, and spiritual mentorship. Daniel and Sonia became familiar faces in the girls' lives—people who consistently showed up and cared.
Then, when Ana was fourteen years old, she asked a question that would change everything.
She looked at Daniel and Sonia and asked if they would consider becoming her foster family.
As Daniel and Sonia prayed about her request, they sensed God stirring their hearts. For years, they had walked alongside Julia and Ana through church, discipleship, and friendship. Now, God seemed to be inviting them to take a new step of faith—one that would transform those relationships into family.
With prayer, guidance, and support from Kids Alive Peru and local authorities, Daniel and Sonia learned more about the foster care process and gradually felt God confirming the invitation He had placed before them.
Eventually, the answer became clear: They said yes.
In December, Daniel and Sonia arrived at Juniper Tree to bring Julia and Ana home. Excitement filled the day, but so did uncertainty. After spending most of their lives in protective care, adjusting to family life would take time.
Throughout the transition, Kids Alive Peru continued to provide wraparound family strengthening support. Counseling, educational support, parenting resources, and ongoing encouragement helped ensure that the girls and their foster family were equipped to navigate this new chapter together.
For the Kids Alive Peru team, the goal has always been more than providing protective care. Whenever possible, they work toward helping children experience the blessing of family—whether through reunification with relatives or placement with carefully supported foster families. By equipping caregivers with practical tools, ongoing support, and trauma-informed guidance, the team helps families build the trust, stability, and connection that allow children to thrive.
For Julia, learning to trust and fully express herself was a gradual process. She shared that at first she did not feel confident, but over time she began participating more freely in family conversations, sharing meals, making jokes, and allowing herself to be known. Little by little, she developed a deep connection with the people who had welcomed her into their home.
Ana's transition was slower. New routines, household expectations, and family dynamics required adjustment. Yet as the months passed, she too began finding her place within the family.
Today, both girls are thriving.
Julia spends her time serving in church ministries, helping with children's and youth programs, and dreaming about studying graphic design and English after high school. Ana enjoys school, caring for her pet chicken, and looking forward to celebrating important milestones with both family and friends.
Their story reflects a truth that has been present from the beginning: healing happens in community, not isolation.
Long before Daniel and Sonia became foster parents, they were faithful friends, mentors, and spiritual leaders in the girls' lives. Through years of consistent care, trust was built one relationship at a time. What began as simple acts of kindness eventually became something much greater—a family.
Scripture reminds us:"A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13:34-35)
Today, Julia and Ana are experiencing the blessing of belonging—not only to a family, but to a community of people who have faithfully reflected God's love along the way. Their story is a reminder that brotherly kindness is more than a single act of compassion. It is the steady, faithful presence that helps children discover they are known, loved, and never alone.
Why Healing a Child Means Healing a Family: Download our free resource guide to learn how Family Systems Therapy can help families break unhealthy cycles, strengthen relationships, and build a healthier future together.
Ayaan* was only 11 years old when the foundation beneath his family began to shift.
What started as family separation soon created a ripple effect throughout the home. Financial pressures mounted, daily necessities became harder to secure, and the adults Ayaan depended on were struggling under the weight of their own challenges. As his mother tried to navigate overwhelming changes in her own life, the stress and uncertainty affecting the family began spilling into relationships at home, creating emotional and physical harm for Ayaan and his siblings.
Like many children experiencing prolonged stress at home, Ayaan began internalizing the challenges unfolding around him. The fear, instability, and conflict gradually shaped his sense of identity, leaving him feeling responsible for problems he did not create. The confident, joyful boy he once was became withdrawn and discouraged.
When Ayaan arrived at the Nairobi Hope Center the team recognized something important: healing would not come from focusing on Ayaan alone.
The whole family needed a team to walk alongside them.
The team recognized that he needed more than temporary support for school supplies and daily meals. He needed safe adults who could help him process what his family had experienced and begin rebuilding his confidence, sense of identity, and hope for the future.
Through regular sessions with the Hope Center's social workers and psychologist, Ayaan began processing the difficult experiences his family had endured. Through therapy, discipleship, and consistent encouragement, he slowly started letting go of the belief that he was responsible for the struggles around him. Although Ayaan and his family are Muslim, both he and his caregiver were welcomed into a community where they could hear the gospel, find encouragement through Scripture, and begin discovering a hope that extended beyond their current circumstances.
The team also helped him return to school with confidence by providing uniforms and learning materials, allowing him to join his peers with renewed dignity and continue building toward the future that once seemed out of reach.
At the same time, his mother began receiving wraparound support.
Through counseling, caregiver training, and ongoing discipleship, she learned new ways to support her children while working through her own experiences and challenges. She began participating in entrepreneurship training designed to help their family build stability and resilience.
Rather than focusing only on the child's needs, the Nairobi Hope Center walked alongside the entire family.
This is what family strengthening can look like in daily life. Healing happens most effectively when children and caregivers are supported together, creating healthier relationships and stronger foundations for a future together.
Scripture reminds us:"Carry each other's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ." (Galatians 6:2)
God never intended for people to walk through life's challenges alone. Through caring relationships, community support, and practical guidance, families can begin rebuilding what hardships had broken.
Over time, Ayaan began to change.
The boy who once looked sad and hopeless began growing in confidence. He became more engaged in school, more willing to step into leadership opportunities, and more hopeful about what lay ahead. Today, he enjoys playing football, embraces opportunities to lead, and actively participates in the Nairobi Hope Centre's weekly mentorship and Bible study programs.
One of the most remarkable changes has been Ayaan's willingness to encourage others. As seeds of the gospel are taking root in his heart and mind, he eagerly participates in Bible studies, reads and memorizes Scripture, and often helps lead discussions with other children. The same child who once carried deep uncertainty is now growing into a young leader who encourages those around him.
As Ayaan continues to grow, he is discovering the power of perseverance. The challenges his family faced did not disappear overnight, but through counseling, discipleship, and the support of a caring community, he is learning to hold onto hope and trust that God is still at work in his story.
As Scripture reminds us:"Let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up." (Galatians 6:9)
Today, Ayaan is preparing to transition into junior school and dreams of one day becoming a professional soccer player. More importantly, he is learning that his family's hardest season does not define their future.The boy who once struggled to see beyond his family's difficulties is now growing in confidence, leadership, and faith. As hope continues to take root within his family, Ayaan is discovering that perseverance is not simply enduring hardship; it is believing that God can redeem it and create a future filled with purpose and possibility.
Become a Safe Haven Champion
Become a Safe Haven Champion today today and help children and families experience healing together as bonds mend and futures are renewed.
Why Healing a Child Means Healing a Family: Download our free resource guide to learn how Family Systems Therapy can help families break unhealthy cycles, strengthen relationships, and build a healthier future together.
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