The Vision

At the age of sixteen, I had the opportunity to visit Buenos Aires, Argentina on a short term missions trip with the West Florida District. It was a special time in my life and God used that trip to soften my heart to his calling to missions. I guess you could say that at that time, I truly felt "called to the missionfield" but I began to ask God what it was exactly that he wanted me to do.

One day as I was at the altar of my church praying I had a vision. I remember seeing a van driving up and down the streets of Buenos Aires, picking up prostitutes. I went home that day to tell my parents that I had figured out what I was going to do with my life. I was going to go to Argentina to rescue prostitutes in a Speed-the-Light mini-van. My mother and father smiled with that supportive, yeah-that’s-a-teenage-wild-idea expression.

Time passed and the Lord led me down what I thought to be and entirely different missionary journey. I forgot about the vision over the years. Instead of Argentina, God sent me to the Dominican Republic. We had been serving Jesus there eleven years the day that the vision was resurrected from my memory banks.

I was asked to participate in a meeting with former Congresswomen Linda Smith. She had come to the DR to see how her organization, Shared Hope International, could get involved in the Dominican Republic. It had come to her attention that the DR was the third worst country for human trafficking. She explained to us that the most severe case that had come to her attention was the problem of trafficking between the DR and Argentina. She wanted to see how she could form and alliance of people of faith in the DR that could help rescue Dominican women in trapped in prostitution in Argentina. That was when it all came back to me.

I literally had chill bumps all over my body. I could see that vision in my minds eye all over again. God always had it in his plan for me to rescue prostitutes from the streets of Argentina. He just had me doing it across the international borders and in his perfect timing.

It was from that meeting that I began to work with Shared Hope to form the Alliance against the Traffic of Women, Children and Adolescents. We set up offices and a home for temporary shelter. We had been working for just a little over a year with women who called our hotline or were referred to our offices when Jeannie Turner and her ministry team came to work with us on the streets of Santo Domingo and Boca Chica.