Agape Home - Thailand
By Simon Gonzalez

There was nothing cute or cuddly about the two-year-old girl. She had diarrhea, an infection that caused her ears to seep, and a distended stomach because of an enlarged liver and an enlarged spleen. She smelled.
The doctor looked at her, and judged her to be beyond his help. She had full-blown AIDS, and it seemed only a matter of time. A short time. “Leave to die,” he wrote on her chart.
The workers in the bleak government-run orphanage in Bangkok, Thailand, looked at her, and saw danger. They feared they would catch the dread disease. When they absolutely had to handle her, they wore rubber gloves.
But when Avis Rideout, a Canadian Christian volunteering at the orphanage, looked at the girl, she felt God stirring her heart.
“I came home that day and said to my family, there’s a little girl in a government orphanage with full-blown AIDS. I want to bring her in,” Avis said. “She was a write-off in society. She was dying. She could hardly sit on your lap because of the smell. But God very much impressed on my heart to bring this girl home who was dying of AIDS.”
Avis operates by a simple yet profound theology.
“I always say when God speaks, you’d better move,” she said. “And if he doesn’t speak, you’d better stand still and wait until he does.”
God spoke, and Avis moved. Because she moved, today the little girl is a healthy, happy, engaging 9 year old. Avis and her husband Roy adopted her, and named her Nikki. She remains HIV-positive, but there are no signs of the disease. She likes to laugh and play. She likes to wear bright colors, and have her sisters fix her hair. She likes to sing about Jesus.
Because Avis moved, today many AIDS orphans in Thailand no longer languish in government-run institutions. Instead, they have an oasis of Christian love and care in the city of Chiang Mai called Agape Home.
Agape Home, which receives much of its support from U.S. ministries such as Samaritan's Purse, is a lively place full of boisterous, happy children. Many of the children succumb to the deadly disease – about 40 have died since the home opened in 1996 – but it’s a place where miracles are a regular occurrence.
“These kids are dying of AIDS, but we’re not stressing death, AIDS, orphans,” Avis said. “We’re a family. They’re prayed with, they’re taught, they’re disciplined, they’re counseled with, they’re given good food, good clothes, and they’re loved.”
Nikki is still alive, and Agape Home exists, because Avis has been listening to God for the past 48 years.
“God called me to be a missionary when I was 6 years old, in a Salvation Army Sunday school, 3 o’clock in the afternoon, tears rolling down my face,” she said. “When I was 14, I made a commitment to God that I would one day have my own orphanage. When I was 16, I dedicated my life again. I was going to be a missionary, I was going to adopt kids, and I was going to have my own orphanage. It all came together. I’m 54 years old now, and I can still sense that same call. That’s what keeps me going.”
God’s call led her to leave her home in Newfoundland, Canada, and go to Thailand in 1972. She stayed for a year and half, working as a missionary, before going back to Canada to attend Bible school.
That’s where she met Roy. They married, and returned to Thailand in 1978 as full-time missionaries. They worked with churches, worked in refugee camps, worked with the poor, the sick, with people who needed to hear about Jesus. They worked wherever God led them.
When they had been in Thailand for 18 years, God led Avis to a government-run orphanage. That’s where she met the dirty, smelly girl who would become the seed that grew Agape Home.


The first miracle – Nikki comes home

Avis Rideout’s work as a missionary in Thailand fulfilled one of the promises she had made to God. She remembered her other vow, that one day she would have her own orphanage, but that door was not yet opened. So she did the next best thing.
“Avis was going out and helping in the government orphanage,” said Roy, her husband. “It was a dirty, stinky place. It was awful. When the AIDS epidemic started, they started getting kids who had been abandoned because mothers couldn’t look after them. They had set up a separate building, and the kids were looked after by a skeleton crew that wore rubber gloves. The kids were never getting any kind of human touch. They were getting no love and affection.”
Avis vividly remembers the moment when she felt God telling her that she had to give the children what they were missing.
“I walked up the stairs on a Monday morning,” she said. “On the floor there was a mat, and there were eight kids dying. God showed me instantly that they were not dying of AIDS, they were dying from lack of love and rejection. I said God, give me one seed, and I will open a home for these children.”
She felt especially drawn to one very sick girl. She knew that God was telling her to take the girl home. She could have argued. No God, not this one. She’s too sick. She smells. She’s dying.
“She had full-blown AIDS,” Avis said. “When you have full-blown AIDS, you don’t go back. These kids usually die by the time they’re two. If they live to five, that’s a very good age.”
Instead, Avis obeyed. This was the one she would adopt. This was the one who would be the cornerstone of an orphanage for AIDS babies and infants, operated by God’s principles.
There were two problems. The government didn’t allow foreigners to adopt Thai children, and even if they did, Nikki was close to death.
But Avis wasn’t deterred. She wasn’t trusting in her own strength. “With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26, NKJV). God was telling her to adopt this little girl, and God would make a way.
“The lady who was the head of the orphanage knew Avis very well, and knew it was hard to refuse her anything,” Roy said. “She said it’s impossible, it’s against the law. But after a while, she said you take Nikki home and get a picture of her with your family. I’ll take the picture to Bangkok, and talk to the committee about you and your family, and see what they say. Avis brought Nikki home, took the photo of her with the family. She didn’t take Nikki back, and she’s been with us ever since.”
Nikki was home with the Rideouts, but she still was very sick. Avis didn’t have any medicine to give her, but she did have something much more potent: the love of Jesus, and prayer.
“I never took her to a doctor, I never gave her drugs,” Avis said. “I held her, I loved her. I drank out of her cup, I slept in her bed. I was her heartbeat. The power of love did what had to be done.”
The power of love, and the power of God’s miraculous touch.
“She was in my lap in an Anglican church in Bangkok, dying, yellow, tiny little legs,” Avis said. “The man who was teaching kept looking at me. He said he saw something like a death angel coming over the head of Nikki, but he didn’t know what it was. He would say in the name of Jesus, don’t. And it would go. At the end I went up to pray, and by the time we got back to Chiang Mai the miracle had taken place. Her liver and spleen were back in place. Her ears stopped oozing. Her breath was clean. Her diarrhea stopped.”
Nikki was adopted by the Rideouts, and became the seed for Avis’ orphanage.

The second miracle – Agape Home

Avis had told God that if He let her have Nikki, she would open a home for AIDS orphans. With Nikki adopted as part of the Rideout family and growing stronger by the day, it was time to act.
Avis and Roy found a large house in Chiang Mai, and began praying for another miracle. It is virtually impossible for foreigners to receive a license to operate an orphanage in Thailand. God would have to make a way.
The Rideouts already had seen God work wonders. They marveled as He did it again.
“We didn’t have to do anything,” Roy said. “God did it all, getting interviews with government officials that normally would take forever. She would get to talk to them right on the spot.”
The license was granted, and Agape Home was ready to open its doors. Avis went back to Bangkok, and asked for more children with AIDS.
“I said give me the ones who have been rejected, the ones that no one wants,” Avis said.
All of the more than 120 children who have been cared for at Agape Home were born to HIV-positive mothers, and all of them tested positive initially. But not all of them remained positive.
Between 50-70 percent of all babies born to mothers with HIV initially test positive because of the mother’s antibodies, not because they have the virus. By the age of 2, they no longer are in danger. Thirty-seven of the children at Agape Home have become negative and been adopted.
“These kids who convert back, they come in as if they were HIV-positive,” Avis said. “You can’t tell. The symptoms are the same. One boy tested positive because of antibodies from the mother, and he came in sick and dying. Now he’s HIV-negative. Another boy was 2 _ pounds. Nobody could tell he would ever be negative. I did a blood test two weeks ago, and the virus is gone. Just suppose I didn’t take those boys in. They would have died. They would have died from pneumonia, they would have died from rejection. We want to give these kids a chance to live.”
But there is no cure for the children born with the virus. When a team from Samaritan's Purse visited Agape Home last year, 38 children had died. Others, including a pale, thin girl being held by Roy, were dying.
“It’s very, very hard,” Roy said. “This little girl is dying, and it’s heartbreaking. I see her wasting away, getting weaker all the time.”
It is heartrending to fall in love with a girl that is slowly wasting away because of a horrible disease. It is painful to hold, to hug, to play with a boy, knowing he doesn’t have long to live.
It is bearable when you have an eternal perspective, and look at that boy and girl through God’s eyes. The children at Agape Home are told about Jesus. They are told that there is a heavenly home waiting for them.
“We tell them they’re going to heaven and be with the angels,” Roy said. “They die knowing they are loved. They die peacefully.”
The children are taken to the hospital when they need medical care for the illnesses brought on by having AIDS. But they are brought back to Agape Home when it is obvious that they are in their final days.
“They’re given everything,” Avis said. “If they want a can a Coke every day, they have it. If they want 10 cans of Coke a day, they have it. One 10-year-old boy, he drank red Fanta until he was red inside and out. And when he died, we put cans of Fanta around the bed he was in.”
The cans were appropriate, because they were a celebration of the boy’s life. Many of the children at Agape Home are dying of AIDS, but death is not the focus.
“This is a happy place, and the kids love to be here,” said a volunteer from Canada. “We had a new girl come in last week, and you can already see the difference in her life. When she came to us she looked really sick. A couple of days ago she was smiling and we were all cheering. It was just such an exciting thing that she’s already getting so much better.”
Avis wants to make a difference in the lives of even more children. But for that to happen, she’s praying for another miracle.

The miracle in progress – the new home

The AIDS epidemic is sweeping across Thailand, and it is claiming innocent victims. About 23,000 of the one million annual births in Thailand occur to HIV-positive women. In the north, where the proportion of AIDS cases is highest, 6-10 percent of all pregnant women are HIV-positive.
When those women die, their children will become orphans. Many of the children will have AIDS themselves, and be rejected by society.
Avis is doing what she can to help, but has limited resources and space. Agape Home only has room for about 30 children. Avis began to pray that she might be able to help more children. Once again, God is answering her prayer.
Roy and Avis discovered a beautiful, four-acre tract of land outside Chiang Mai that would be perfect for a new facility. They were able to buy it at a price well below its value, and began planning for a building that would house up to 125 children.
There still were a couple of problems. The Rideouts had neither the experience nor the time to work on a major building project. And they didn’t have the money for a major building project.
God took care of the first problem when he began talking to an electrical engineer from Australia named Dominik Fechner, who was in Thailand on a short-term missions trip with his wife. He heard God telling him to stay and build the new home.
“The Lord said you know what they need, go do it,” Dominik said. “I resigned, and moved my family to Thailand. The Lord told me to do this, and I’ll stay until it’s finished.”
There is no firm date for when the project will be finished, because there is no firm source of funding.
“It’s going to cost us about $1 million dollars,” Roy said. “It’s a big project. It’s a bigger need than we envisioned to start with.”
It’s a big project, a big need, but it’s not bigger than God. Once again, He is providing the means to carry out the work that He called Avis and Roy to do.
“Whenever we run out, we seem to get more funds,” Roy said. “It comes from everywhere. Every time we’re running to the bottom of the barrel, we get an influx from somewhere.”
The money comes from individual donors, from churches, from large ministries. Samaritan's Purse, through its Australia office, supports about half of the children in the home. After a delegation from the United States visited Agape Home last summer, the international relief and evangelism agency headed by Franklin Graham donated money to construct a dormitory.
Slowly but surely, the new facility takes shape. When it is finished, it will include a main dormitory, a medical clinic, a school, a mother-baby unit, a toddlers unit, a babies unit, a cafeteria, play areas, and a swimming pool.
“The idea is to be a paradise for children, to spoil them until they are adopted or until they go home,” Dominik said. “It’s important for children to learn how to climb trees, to have a place to hide, to have toys, to ride bikes, to have grass.”
Even while the construction is going on, the children have a place to come and play. Almost every day, a group crowds into a van and drives out to the building site to ride bikes, run on the lush, green grass, play on the swings, and take a dip in the water tank.
“This is a building site, but I’ve been working very hard to keep this place in a state where the kids can come out and be here,” Dominik said. “By the time the building is finished, some of these kids are going to be dead. I walk around and I cry. I say, Lord, let’s get on with it. Do it, Lord.”
Avis knows that God will do it. Every day, when she looks into Nikki’s smiling face, she is reminded of His goodness, His power, His love.
“Most of our kids at Agape have TB, they have herpes, shingles,” Avis said. “That’s part of the virus. But Nikki hasn’t had any of that. She hasn’t missed one day of school. It’s a miracle. It’s all because God is keeping her alive to show to the Thai people that you can love these kids, you can kiss these kids, you can give them a quality live.”
Against all odds, Nikki is alive. Against all odds, a Canadian woman was able to open an orphanage for children with AIDS in Thailand. With God, all things are possible. The new building will be finished.


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