I first heard of Touch A Life in 2015, the summer I interned here while I was a college student at Pepperdine University. Rachel Brown, our Development Director, and I share Pepperdine as our alma mater, and I stumbled upon her work in an online interview while I was searching for something meaningful to do with the summer before my senior year of college.
I reached out to Rachel, and she asked me to come into the office so we could meet (we weren’t at Pepperdine at the same time), and we immediately hit it off. As they say, the rest is history.
I interned that summer with Touch A Life, read Pam’s book Jantsen’s Gift, and learned about the realities of human trafficking in a very real, tangible way. Though I still have yet to go to Ghana myself, I encountered photos of the kids at the Care Center during my workday at Touch A Life and imagined what they had been through — and I felt thankful that they were now safe thanks to Pam’s initial bravery in founding this organization.
Pam’s story is so daring and resolute that it’s almost unbelievable. But it’s true. What she writes about in Jantsen’s Gift really happened. And reading about a woman from the United States in the throes of grief traveling to Ghana and physically rescuing children from forced labor — that gave me hope, and it changed my perspective on life itself.
After a few adventures following my graduation from Pepperdine, I began freelancing as a photographer and writer in Dallas. That work included a lot of time spent with nonprofit organizations, documenting their work through images and words. It was, it seemed, meant to be that I would end up back at Touch A Life. Within my work as a freelancer, I now work with Touch A Life managing their marketing efforts through digital strategy and writing (and I look forward to going over to Ghana to photograph life at the Care Center someday!).
Why do I work for Touch A Life? In a basic sense, because of Pam’s book and the photos I saw in the summer of 2015. But reflecting on it more deeply, I work for Touch A Life because I see myself as a global citizen. I don’t care where you are in the world, what you believe, what you look like — if you are a person experiencing great injustice, I want to do what I can to change that. I’ve been given the opportunity to be a part of a beautiful redemption story, and that is an opportunity I’d never pass up.