[vc_row full_width=”” parallax=”” parallax_image=””][vc_column width=”1/1″][vc_column_text]Our speaker was Stephanie Fast, author of the book “She is Mine,” in which she chronicles the horrors of her childhood as a young orphan in Korea. Stephanie opened her talk by saying that there were 143 orphans worldwide when the book was written; recently that number was reported to be 210 million but with the current refugee crisis in Syria the number is untold. Not every orphan’s story has a happy ending, but Stephanie’s does. Now she pays it forward by doing what she can to help other orphans through the organization, Destiny Ministries.
Before delving into her personal story, Stephanie related her philosophy of life and her deeply held faith in God. She believes that individuals, no matter what happened to them in the past, can decide what kind of life they will have. “Everyone has a choice, even in the midst of chaos.”
Stephanie still has flashbacks to life on the streets of Korea as a child of only four years of age. She was born in Korea during the war, but because she was orphaned she has no papers—no birth certificate, passport, etc.—from her birth country. She explained that it is up to the male member of the family to name a child, and since she had no father, she had no official name. When she was only four years old her mother put her onto a train bound for her uncle’s home, a man she had never met and who may have never existed. The “uncle” never came for her and she was forced to live on the streets. No one was willing to help her because they could barely help themselves. (The war had left most Korean people with little enough to get by much less enough to be able to help others.) They also saw her as an outsider because she was of mixed race.
Stephanie lived on the streets until she was adopted at age 9. During that time she learned to steal food from the fields and lived among other orphans who mistreated her. She was nearly drowned on a water wheel at the hands of farmers who caught her stealing.
Although hers was a life filled with chaos she also encountered many “heros.” One of these was a woman who would leave her door open at night so that Stephanie could come in and have a bite to eat by the warmth of the fire. Another was the man who saved her from the water wheel. The nurse who found her, near death from cholera at age 7, made the decision to help her and set her on a path to adoption.
Stephanie told her story with grace and no one present was unaffected.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]