Most of my Brick Yard blogs have been written on 15 hour flights to and from Pakistan on the previous missions. My head becomes filled with themes between trips, but it’s when I get airborne 35,000 feet high at 550 miles per hour to the other side of earth that the adrenaline and pen flows in the hand of this ready writer.
I moved my young family down to rural Missouri in 1988 to go to seminary with the intent of never doing tree work again but to launch into full time ‘ministry’. That was then when I was 30 years old. I’m now 67 and from the day I left seminary three And a half decades ago God launched me back into tree work. I had no idea of the cutting and chopping and pruning the holy Husbandman had to have done on me.
As a zealous young believer I wanted to preach to thousands. Had someone prophesied that I would be pioneering a movement of schools in the forsaken Brick Yards of Pakistan I would have brushed them off. I got straight C and C-Minus’ in high school, while always doodling my cartoon character named ,“Merferd”. If you sat anywhere close to me in my classes and left to go to the restroom, when you returned Merferd would be on your paperwork. My teachers would have flunked me if not for him. I drew my ‘Treetoon’ for everyone wether they wanted a Merferd or not. Decades later now Merferd is the logo and brand of the ‘Freedom School System’ registered in Pakistan under our ‘Freedom Cry’ non profit 501 (c) (3) organization in the USA.
Paying unjust ransom to free bonded laborers was expensive, and unless a whole Brickyard of families was emptied out in one fell swoop, as I got to experience once, only one family gets freedom, while the others remain behind to a lifetime of bonded labor. But when it came to my attention that the approx $1000 that freed a family could rather pay for a precious teacher and books and supplies for almost a year for all the children born into bonded labor inside a brick yard to have an education, it made good sense. Because one day not far away, the kids will be the freedom of their folks.
A Pakistani brother, Tahir Younas had already begun a school in a couple kilns. I joined in with him, and he asked me to give it a name. ‘Freedom school’ was all I could think of and Tahir added ‘system’, hence the Freedom School System. Three years later, accelerated learning from heaven has happened, as our students are learning English and Urdu within two years, even with only 2 to 3 hours of education a day, and after 10 to 12 hours of hard labor making bricks.
On the USA’s 4th of July we rented the Lahore press club, and a dozen reporters posted articles as our kids gave three minute speeches about their experience in bonded labor and their gratefulness for having a chance at education. A little over a month later ‘Minorities Day’ was two days away from Independence Day of Pakistan. I asked my Pakistani lead team about having a similar press conference, but this time, rather than at the Lahore press club we would erect a stage, back drop banner and sound system in one of the Brickyards. The guys didn’t think a single news reporter would come. But they were game and the same children gave speeches and a few more kids were added to the speaking docket. Two weeks later, Nadeem would report to me that 18 journalists had written stories about our kids, and that we had touched every part of Pakistan.
Who had I been to want to once upon a time preach to thousands, when the children of the brickyards, starving for education more than the meager meals they eat are already becoming the advocates and one day the evangelists of their country which they love. Even though their country still doesn’t know they exist.
Freedom Cry (Living Tree International) 