PeaceBike Interview

Sarah: Director of the Baby House
Fundacion ¨El Arca¨, Riobamba, Ecuador

Sorry.. unfortunately we lost the pictures on this one but I think you will still enjoy this great interview with Sarah. And she didn`t want her picture taken anyway. I guess she got her wish on this one.

I (Tad) truely believe that this organization is a great one to support ( whether or not you are a Christian) and that is part of why I did this interview with Sarah. Below the interview is information on how to donate to ¨El Arca¨

Sarah Allan, Age 23

PeaceBike: Hi. Sarah! Thanks for doing this interview with PeaceBike. I know that you have lots of little ones to take care of but I really want to share what you are doing with Friends of PeaceBike around the world so I really appreciate this opportunity.

Sarah: My pleasure.

PeaceBike: How about an easy first question? What is your favorite food? Sarah: I love spaghetti with meatballs.

PeaceBike: Sarah, what kind of things did you like to do when you were a kid? Sarah: I loved to play house with my brothers and sisters and I also loved to choreograph dances. We would always put on little dances for the family and I loved to do the choreography. Later, in highschool I really got into dance and took jazz and ballet for three years.

PeaceBike: Cool. Speaking of being a kid, how about giving us a little history of Sarah?
Sarah: I was born in Canada, in Cranbrook, British Columbia to be more precise. My parents were hitchhiking at the time. Right after my parents became Christians they went to a discipleship training class with YWAM (Youth With A Mission)and when I was three months old we went on our first foreign mission. We went to Baja California in Mexico and so most of my baby pictures are from Mexico! After our time in Mexico we returned to Canada where I got a chance to visit my grandparents in Ontario. Then when I was about eight years old we went to the Phillipines. Our mission was with a YWAM base. We lived in a squatters village and with headhunters.

PeaceBike: Headhunters? What does that mean?
Sarah: That basically means that the people we were with grew up in a culture of tribal war and if one had a disagreement the response was usually to go get the head of your enemy. I remember seeing the knives that were used to behead people. We were with people who were one generation from this tradition and things were starting to move away from this.

PeaceBike: Were you scared?
Sarah: No, I think I was too young to really understand the danger we were in at time. One time we had death threats from the local communist party. Someone called the military and we were protected for a time by the military, right outside our house. I just remember eating hotdogs for lunch and remembering that there were military personnel outside but I just thought it was no big deal. Generally, I felt like I fit in. All of the kids around us learned to speak English in school and so I could communicate with them in English. And we played lots of games together and we didn´t need to talk in the same language much when we were playing those games. I remember being happy there and feeling like I fit in. The only time I really had a hard time was when two of the members of our mission team were murdered. That was really hard. We never found out who did it or why. By that time my parents had five kids. Our house was the biggest and nicest house in the squatter town we were in but it still had a dirt floor.

PeaceBike: At some point did you come back to Canada?
Sarah: Yes, we would come back to Canada every year or so but we never lived in one house for more than 4 years. We came to live in Canada for a while because my grandma developed Alzheimer´s disease. Over the next two years I worked with her, bathed her, fed her until she was not able to recognize any of us and we finally put her in a nursing home. A few weeks later she died. That was very tough for my parents.

PeaceBike: And then at some point your family decided to come to Ecuador?
Sarah: Well, we took another mission trip to work with the Oaxacan Indegeneous people in Mexico. I was 13 years old at the time and remembered it being tough in some ways because living was harder than we were used to. It was a lot of fun too, living in a new culture, spending time on the Oaxacan beaches. Over the next few years my parents received many different messages from God through dreams, the prophesy of others, and through prayer that kids were dying in Ecuador and that they were needed. I had just finished 12th grade and was working at a missionary training school at the time and decided to come down and help my parents and the family get settled. I had planned to stay for a three months, and four years later, here I am. I guess I got hooked.

PeaceBike: So what did you get hooked to?
Sarah: My parents originally thought that we were going to work with street kids and help them but the first street kids we got was a 19 month old baby who had been abandoned. Within a few months we had 30 kids in our care and 11 of them were newborns. They were all in our home and so we had rooms full of cribs and I finally said that something had to give. We couldn´t keep doing what we were doing all from one house. We had all been helping out with the little ones but more and more I began taking a lead role. Finally, we moved into another house (the same place that PeaceBike is staying now!) and then that house filled up and now we are in a bigger house that we call ¨The Baby House¨. Most of the kids we get are abandoned and now we have 18 babies in our care!

PeaceBike: Now you said that most of these babies are abandoned? What is going on?
Sarah: Even more so than in the U.S. or Canada there is a taboo against having kids out of wedlock. From my understanding of the situation if a woman (mestizo or indigeneous) has a baby out of wedlock the family often disowns her, beats her, or worse. Therefore, many women, if they are pregnant hide the pregnancy by wrapping their bodies tightly and then when the baby is born she often leaves it. Many of the babies we have now were found in garbage dumps, doorsteps, or abandoned in hospitals by the young mothers. I wish that we could help with the whole situation, the families, the mother, and the villages but right now we are focusing on helping the babies. Many of of the babies I take care of are are severely disabled and once they outgrow our ¨baby house¨ they will live in the orphanage that my parents coordinate. We hope that most of the babies are adopted and although the process is very slow and takes a lot of patience and prayer about 14 babies have been adopted so far. We now have 12 employees working at The Baby House. Four work on the day shift and three on the night shift. The night shift cooks, and cleans all of the toys, floors and clothes. We have many sick babies too and therefore we have respirators, IV units and other medical equipment.

PeaceBike: How did you learn to do all this?
Sarah: The doctors at the hospitals who pass the babies on to us train me in what I need to do to take care of that baby and then I train the staff. Many of these babies would live in the hospital because of their physical conditions but we can give them more attention and so they are given to us to take care of. The quality of the staff is very important for the success of what we are trying to do. It is tough work and the staff need to enjoy working with all the kids, regardless of their conditions. We have observation cameras in all of the rooms which are reviewed on a daily basis. We did this after one baby got burned and nobody knew what happened.

PeaceBike: By now it is quite obvious to me, but to summarize, how do you see yourself as a peacemaker?
Sarah: I am working to connect kids to loving families, to save a few kids from an innocent, early death, and to restore relationships. I wish I could do more but we are doing all that we can with the current amount of people, money and time!

PeaceBike: If you could share a message with the world what would it be? Sarah: You can have all the programs in the world and that is good but I believe it comes down to having Jesus in your life to really make a lasting change. Jesus can break negative cycles and changes lives in a way that affects everything else!

PeaceBike: What kind of wild and crazy things do you do for fun when you are not rescueing and caring for kids?
Sarah: One wild and crazy thing I tried was arranging a Christmas pageant with all of the kids in our house. Many of them are disabled. Some of them were sheep but ended up forgetting to ¨bah, bah¨. Luckily we only invited the neighbors. I also enjoy watching movies (Sandra Bullock and The Net are favorites) and doing caligraphy.

PeaceBike: Thanks so much for this interview. I am so glad that Frank met your dad in the line at the bank in Riobamba! How can Friends of PeaceBike help in the work you are doing?
Sarah: Thank-you!

Friends of PeaceBike can donate to ¨El Arca¨ through the following avenues:

For us to receive quickly, the money can be deposited in our account in the Canada Trust, Branch 204, account number 101242

For Tax Receipts in Canada, funds can be received through our home church:
New Life Vineyard Fellowship
2041 Harvey Avenue
Kelowna, BC, Canada

For Tax Receipts in the States send checks to:
The ARk Children`s Homes
2416 South 101st Avenue
Omaha, NE 68124
USA