Hincesti was the first orphanage we visited in Moldova.  Although much had been done to transform the orphanage there, it was still a truly horrific place.  As we worked hard to ensure that we stopped children freezing to death or dying from malnutrition, we got to know many of the children personally….. one young girl in particular had touched our hearts….  her name was Stella.

At sixteen, Stella was forced to leave the Hincesti orphanage. In the place she was sent to be “cared for,” she was treated brutally and she ran away. We searched desperately but never found her. Finally, the dreaded news came… She was selling her body to live! But even worse news was to come…

“She’s dead… AIDS!” This tragic young girl was used by vile men until they killed her.

Although there are some state programs that are supposed to care for these kids, Moldova’s resources are extremely limited. At this stage, untold thousands of them simply fall through the cracks and are never seen or heard from again. These children are sent away from the orphanages with a few pounds and a bus ticket to whatever town appears on their birth certificate. That’s when the sex-traffickers make their move, and pounce on the girls. Corrupt orphanage officials have even tipped off the traffickers as to the availability of “suitable girls.” These vile men show up at the bus station with fancy cars and lure girls away with promises of good jobs, plenty of money and nice apartments. But once a girl enters the car, she is enslaved, tortured, raped and beaten until she complies with the wishes of her new masters. Finally she will arrive in some far off country, where she must comply with the vile demands of countless men, who will use her as much as thirty to forty times a day. Moldova has been described as “the engine of the sex industry.” Human trafficking is rampant. When we realised that girls like Stella, whom we had worked so hard to protect in the orphanages at Cupcui and Hincesti, were being abandoned to lives of horror at the hands of the sex traffickers, we knew that an answer had to be found immediately.

THAT ANSWER IS STELLA’S HOUSE!

With the opening of Stella’s House 3 next to Stella’s 2, and the adjacent sites for Stella’s 4 and 5 already being worked on, we will have four girls’ homes on one adjoining property. This makes security and supervision much more manageable. We have already moved the girls from Stella’s House 1, which is a few minutes from the other homes, so that all the girls are now living at the same site.

This gives us an opportunity to deal with an equally pressing need that has long been on our hearts. Young boys face the same dangers as the girls when they, too, are put out of the orphanages at age sixteen. The original Stella’s House has been newly updated and redecorated; it now provides a safe haven for teenage boys who would otherwise also have to deal with the dangers of trafficking, crime, and trying to survive on the streets.

The first four boys of Simon’s House