Justin and Janet Thomas Henry have two homes, but it’s not what you might think. For the past several years, the Henrys have split their time between Mount Juliet, Tennessee, and Cochabamba, Bolivia. Cochabamba is no tourist destination. Located in the Andes Mountains, the city is home to about 700,000 people, and every day three children under the age of 6 are abandoned on the streets.
In 2007, Justin went to Bolivia for the first time on a 10-day trip to construct a playground for the Bolivian Hope Center, a home for children whose mothers are in jail. When women go to prison in Bolivia, their children go with them. As if that is not bad enough, prisoners don’t get a cell phone, or blankets, or even food in a Bolivian prison, unless they pay for it. So, the prisons are full of children who often go to sleep on cold, hard concrete floors with empty bellies because there is no place for them to live. And just when it seems the situation can’t get any worse, some children are randomly removed from the prison due to overcrowding and kicked out onto the streets to fend for themselves.
Justin witnessed this firsthand in 2007 and could not forget what he saw. A police officer at the time, he was no stranger to witnessing dark and dire situations, but there was something different about those kids; they had no hope without the Hope Center he helped create. At the time, the Hope Center was under construction but not yet completed. As funds came in, more building would take place.
Over the next several years, Justin took more than 20 trips to Cochabamba to work on the Hope Center. Construction was finally completed, and the doors were opened to receive children in 2009. The next year, he convinced Janet to come down to experience Christmas with the kids in the Hope Center. For most of them, it was the first time they had ever celebrated Christmas, not because they didn’t know what it was, but because their families never had money to buy presents. It was a most humbling experience that forever changed the Henrys.