Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going
Dear friend,
Thank you so much for caring enough about what the Lord is doing around the world and specifically here in Indonesia that you asked to receive our ministry updates. Please allow me to introduce my husband and myself and provide some background into the journey we’ve been on, where we’ve been, and where we’re headed.
Though we didn’t meet until our 20s, my husband and I both received a clear call from the Lord to be overseas missionaries at the young ages of around six or seven. When I began using my allowance to sponsor a little girl in Indonesia through Compassion International at the age of nine, the Lord immediately burdened my heart for the country and made clear that is where He would one day send me. Always adoring children and jumping at any opportunity possible to care for them, as well as being blessed with an unfathomably strong bond with my own mother and being unable to comprehend the tragedy of a child never knowing such a bond, it became increasingly clear the older I grew that I was called to orphan care ministry.
Like most who have grown up in church, I always believed the call to help orphans (James 1:27) was synonymous with the call to start an orphanage. Therefore, I always had a clear idea of what this journey would look like: a big house in a rural village where I would be a mother to hundreds of motherless Indonesian children.
During a school night a few months before graduating high school in 2012, I heard an audible “GO”. It was a simple two-letter word, but I knew Whose voice said it, and exactly what He meant by it. It meant forgo college, ignore academic and athletic scholarships, forget all my well-laid-out plans, leave my beloved mother and family, and book a flight to Indonesia. Nine months later, I was a 17-year-old on a flight bound for an orphanage in Jakarta.
I volunteered and lived at *Light Orphanage for nearly four years. At first, I believed God sent me there for “training”, to learn the language and culture while absorbing how to start and run an orphanage until I was ready to start my own. But what I ended up learning was vastly different than what I’d expected to learn. Once I was able to understand the language, I learned nearly every one of the children in the orphanage were not orphans at all. They all still had living parents who, for the most part, loved them and would care for them but couldn’t afford to. I learned that wasn’t a unique case, but just about every orphanage in Jakarta, in Indonesia, in Asia, and in the world was exactly like it. I learned that in most cases these children were recruited from rural villages, oftentimes told they would be brought back to Jakarta “for schooling”, only to be put into an orphanage. I watched the children be paraded all around Jakarta to various events to sing and dance for donors. They had to practice their performances for hours, sometimes till past midnight, and ironically would sometimes skip school and even important semester testing to make it to these performances, when the whole reason they were there away from their families was “for schooling”. I saw hundreds of kind, generous, well-meaning people come in and out of the orphanage every single day to give donations, to play with, take pictures with and love on the children, only to leave the children feeling emptier than before they came. I saw family members of the director on the pay role, some who didn’t even live in the same province, and realized orphanages were oftentimes considered family businesses, and the children were their product. It was a horrifying revelation to realize this was a form of child trafficking. I saw neglect, I saw depression, I saw identity crisis, I saw attachment disorders, I saw malaria, I saw typhoid, I saw measles, I saw children crying themselves to sleep night after night, I saw major behavioural issues, I saw corruption, I saw abuse, I saw horrible things until I couldn’t see them anymore.
In 2016, I left that orphanage and took a trip to America to get refreshed and prepared to begin the process of starting my own orphanage. During that trip I spoke at a ladies small group, where I met John’s mom, aunt, and grandmother. They signed up for my newsletter list and John’s mother, Angie, instantly became a second mother to me. She always responded so kindly to newsletters and over time we shared more intimate and detailed prayer requests and correspondence. She told me of her son, John, who also had a call to missions since early childhood and felt drawn to Asia, but he was three years younger than me, had a serious longtime girlfriend, had just graduated high school and was attending Bible college so for the longest time I very much viewed him as “Angie’s son”, my little brother. Little did we know a seed had been planted that would sprout almost a decade later.
I returned to Indonesia and “founded” an orphanage with several Indonesian ministry partners. I wasn’t able to be on any of the legal documents as a foreigner, but was the “unofficial cofounder” along with my friend, Udur. I had witnessed terrible things, but I was still not willing to let go of my life’s dream to be the “Mother Teresa” of Indonesia. I told myself that I could still have the orphanage I always dreamed of, but it would just be better than *Light and most orphanages. I would call it a “children’s home”, never use the word “orphanage”, I wouldn’t allow guests and donors to visit directly with the children or take pictures of/with them, I’d strictly only take in true orphans, I’d raise them as my own, etc.
We started by renting a house in Jakarta. In May 2018, we took in our first child, Yosua, a one-year-old abandoned baby from a rural village on a tiny island in Sumatra. He called me “Mommy”, I shared a room with him and immediately began raising him as my “son”. Soon after, we obtained our orphanage permit and expected our house to be overrun with more children within weeks. We began looking for land and planning our move to a rural village. All was going as I hoped and dreamed!
But then there was silence. Month after month, year after year passed and we couldn’t find any more orphans in need of a home. God slammed the door shut every time we found a piece of land somewhere outside the city. Covid came, and for over a year we could barely even leave the front door of our dusty house in the middle of that concrete jungle. I was stuck and utterly bewildered. After months of crying out to God, angrily feeling as though He’d abandoned me, I was humbled as I read James 4:3: “When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives…”
Ouch.
It suddenly dawned on me that I’d never asked God if I was supposed to be in Jakarta or not, I’d just always envisioned and preferred the thought of being in a rural village. And so, begrudgingly, I winced and asked God if He wanted me to stay in Jakarta—the most uncomfortable, polluted, traffic-jammed, suffocating place imaginable for a girl who grew up in the mountains of Colorado and the wheatfields of Kansas. It made no sense why God would want me to raise children in that stifling, unhealthy place, and yet His overwhelming answer was YES. Almost immediately after I prayed that prayer, the dam of God’s blessings broke. Only days later we received an eviction notice in the mail, leading us to leave the house we were renting and find a house to buy. Months later, we moved into our new $100,000 house that God miraculously provided for. Very shortly after the move, we took in our second child, then our third, then our fourth. And somewhere within that time I was asked by a friend to do an interview for a church’s YouTube channel. The interview went a little viral, and soon my phone was blowing up with invitations and opportunities to speak at churches, podcasts, and YouTube channels.
It was then the Lord began to reveal why He sent me to the capital city of Jakarta. To be a voice. To advocate for Indonesian families to form and stay together, to expose the truth about orphanages and promote family-based alternatives such as foster care and adoption. I would later find out Indonesia has over half a million children living in institutions, more than any nation on earth aside from China and India. And 90% of them still have at least one biological parent living. Far from caring for orphans, for the most part these orphanages were creating them! And well-intentioned Western churches have funded the vast majority of them.
I carried on for a couple years taking speaking engagements when I could while still trying to be a mommy to the four children at our children’s home. But I was being stretched way too thin. Over time Udur brought over several of her family members to serve as staff to help with the children and office work because I often had to be away to write, speak or take trips overseas. It worried me how the children’s home was beginning to feel more and more like a typical orphanage, and I was starting to notice the children acting more and more like the children at *Light.
Then in 2023, just when I’d committed to being single for the rest of my life, God sent my beloved husband, John, to Indonesia to serve alongside me. It is a very long love story I will write a book about one of these days, but it was quite incredible how it all came about. Not only did John share the same vision, but in many ways his passion for families, particularly for men, boys, husbands, and fathers, surpassed mine. We married in the mountains of Surabaya, Indonesia on February 24, 2024, our four children being our wedding party. I thought after all these years, my dreams were actually coming true. We would be a true family to the children, they would have a Daddy as well as a Mommy. He would be the much-needed steady masculine presence that would bring an end to the years of chaos. We wouldn’t need staff to help care for the children anymore, as he would help take care of the children and keep the house in order while I was busy writing, speaking or traveling. The degression towards an orphanage would be stopped and we would return the children’s home to it’s original vision—to be a true home and family for orphans.
But then, almost immediately after our wedding day, John was struck with a chronic illness that brought us back to the US for almost half a year. I was utterly devastated, angry, and confused. Very similar to the way I was years prior when I was stuck in Jakarta with a stagnant ministry wondering why God wasn’t answering my prayers. After many months of complaining, crying, and trying desperately to get my husband well seeing every doctor we possibly could, I landed in the same place of surrender I had years prior. Okay, Lord, once again I don’t understand why, but for some reason you have allowed all this to happen. Just as I was in Jakarta for a reason, you now have us in America for a reason. What are you doing and how can I take part? And once again, in that state of surrender, the dam broke and things started happening.
The Lord began to open up more and more doors and connections towards advocacy. In short, the Lord switched our priorities. Before, our first priority was to be parents to our four children, while advocating was something we’d do on the side. But the Lord was telling us advocating and fighting for family-based care was to be the focus of our life and ministry. John read the book “Children Belong in Families” by Mick Pease, the founder of SFAC (Strengthening Families and Children) in the UK. He has been one of, if not the most, influential figures in this global movement of the deinstitutionalization of children. We were blown away by how similar his story was to mine, and we were also torn up as we read about the detriments of taking children away from their cultural context. We thought of each of our four children, how they struggle with identity and belonging, and how they’ll never know their village language or culture or extended family. As we video called them almost every day, it became apparent that although we missed each other terribly, their lives were far less complicated without us. As I watched them from the security cameras on my phone day after day, they were simply being raised by Indonesians in an Indonesian family in the Indonesian language in the Indonesian way. We didn’t have to constantly be in conflict with Udur and her family over cultural differences and miscommunications and misunderstandings. The children weren’t asked multiple times a day why their parents are white foreigners and where their “true” family was.
We scheduled a video call with the CEO and Social Work Trainer of SFAC, Dan Hope, which was unbelievably encouraging. He connected us with multiple other resources and organizations and assured us they’d successfully implemented family-based care in multiple nations and would be there to walk alongside us as we do so in Indonesia. At that time, we were still committed to our four children, but the Lord was telling us to stop taking in any more children and to transition the ministry towards family-based care. It was the final blow where we truly died to ourselves. No longer did we care what we hoped for and wanted, all that mattered was what God was telling us to do, and what was in the best interest of each Indonesian child. And what is in their best interest is to be in loving, safe Indonesian homes and families, not orphanages and children’s homes.
During those months living with John’s wonderful, generous, loving family, it was fortified in our hearts and minds the importance of home, parents, and a family no matter who, where or what age you are. The Lord began to grow in us a heart for adult children aging out of orphanages wandering the streets of Jakarta having no family or home to which they belong. I recalled all the children who had reached out to me after aging out of *Light but never made time for. We began intentionally praying for and reaching out to them, and were heartbroken and touched to see their response, as if we’d offered bread to their starving souls. Then just before returning to Jakarta, we found out we were pregnant with our daughter, Lilliana. And once again through this most miraculous thing called pregnancy, God solidified our passion for marriage, home and family as God intended it to be.
We returned to Jakarta in September, 2024, on fire to begin the fight for Indonesian families. We shared all the Lord had done in us and our renewed vision with Udur upon our arrival, but were horrified by her response. She said the “orphanage” was her calling, that God had told her to start it back in 2013, that those were her children, that she was their mother just as much as I was, and she was looking forward to growing the orphanage by taking in more children and hiring more staff and starting to allow donors to come visit. I felt utterly betrayed upon realizing the slow transformation into an orphanage over the years was not accidental, but intentional.
John and I agonized over this for many months, earnestly hoping and praying for a change of heart, as she was hoping and praying the same for us. But the more we talked about it the more she doubled down. When it became clear neither of us were budging, the Lord directed us to make the most heartrending decision of our lives. After seven years of raising those children, we disassociated ourselves with the children’s home and the four children we love so much in order to begin advocating full-time for the deinstitutionalization of the children of Indonesia.
It was an embarrassingly long process to officially die to ourselves and our will, but now we are finally there. No longer are we dreaming big and praying for God to make our dreams come true, but we are letting Him lead the way as He reveals the vision He’s had for us all along. And the scale of what He has planned is quite daunting. What He’s asking us to do is vastly different and far bigger than anything we planned on doing. It requires so much more time, effort, travel, forethought, and resources. It takes the focus off of us, where we no longer get to be the ones caring for the precious Indonesian children we love so much and have dedicated our lives to, and is far less immediately gratifying and glorified a task. But it is what God told us to do, and so we obey.
We are currently in the process of starting a nonprofit called “Fortifying Families of Indonesia”. We are receiving mentorship and soon training from SFAC and another organization called “The Family First Framework”. We are networking and learning best practices in keeping families together and properly implementing foster care and adoption in Indonesia. We are taking any speaking engagement opportunity offered us, and we continue to open our hearts and home to the aged-out adult children from *Light, helping them obtain necessary life skills, jobs, psychological and emotional healing, spiritual guidance, and a safe place to call home where they otherwise have none.
Our mission is “to provide every child in Indonesia with the opportunity to belong in a family through training, supporting, and monitoring child care organizations across the country of Indonesia”. Please pray for us as we continue following Jesus, walking in humble obedience to pursue this vision and calling He has given us. Thank you!
“God settles the lonely in families.” -Psalm 68:6
God bless you and thank you again for wanting to keep up with what God is doing over here in Indonesia and around the world! May He use you in powerful ways wherever you are in whatever season.
Amanda Laughrey
*name changed to protect identity of orphanage
