Story of the Week: Make Way Partners
Human trafficking. Those words didn’t mean much to me until my freshman year of college, when I became friends with a girl whose parents founded the ministry Make Way Partners. MWP is a Birmingham-based organization that fights human trafficking at both a local and international level.
“Our passion is to go where children are at most risk and with the fewest resources. This has led us straight to the heart of war, civil conflict, extreme poverty and lawless lands.”—Kimberly Smith, MWP President.
MWP travelled to the deserts of Sudan to build the only orphanage in the country for children at high-risk of slavery. Instead of having to hide from human traffickers or sleep in trees to escape from wild animals at night, 400 orphans now have a safe place to live. MWP provides long-term care that includes not only food, shelter, and clothing, but also counseling, discipleship, and educational programs so that women and children can break out of the cycles of poverty and slavery that are so rampant in Sudan.
MWP has also reached the sewer people of Romania and partnered with indigenous ministries in Eastern Europe to build a Transitional Living Center for women and children at risk of being trafficked. On a more local level, MWP seeks to educate people about human trafficking, a billion-dollar industry that currently enslaves 30 million people around the world.
Find out more from Make Way Partner’s website, visit Kimberly Smith’s blog or click here to see a video on the orphange built by MWP.
Each week Bedouins International posts a story. Maybe it’s one we’ve helped to tell, or a story we hope to tell, or it maybe it’s just a story we think deserves to be told. In any case, we hope you find them inspiring and motivating. Read more stories here.
Tags: human trafficking, Kimberly Smith, Make Way Partners, modern-day slavery, orphanage, story of the week, Sudan