Allison Fuqua said when she was a student at Samford University, she felt God prompting her to learn Spanish, but with no particular place or people in mind.
It wasn’t long before that vision took shape, though.
“My husband, Tyler, went to an orphanage in Iquitos, Peru, for the first time in 2002, and he fell in love with it. He started leading college trips there,” Fuqua said.
Then the two met, and she knew that was the place and the people God had been preparing her for.
Iquitos is “a hard place,” she said. It’s isolated and only accessible by boat and plane, and it’s home to a lot of spiritual healers and sex trafficking.
“For many children who live there, there are a lot of needs,” Fuqua said.
Keeping up
But the orphanage they were helping was understaffed and under-resourced, she said. “The year after we graduated from Samford, we started an organization called Not Forgotten, which we hoped could raise money to help. We wanted to try to help them do more things, like buy a boat to get into the city and hire teachers full time so the kids wouldn’t have any gaps in their education.”
Their efforts made a difference, but as much as they and the staff tried, they were still having a hard time keeping up with the level of need, Fuqua said.
“Although the people who cared for the kids were very well meaning, they didn’t have the resources they needed,” she said. “There was not enough to produce real heart and life change, and we would watch kids grow up and return to the same cycles that had landed them in a home like this in the first place.”
So the couple started thinking about how they might help the orphanage staff do things differently. Fuqua was now a social worker and had experience working at Big Oak Girls’ Ranch, a children’s home in Springville. Her husband was a doctor and was thinking through how to address the kids’ huge physical and medical needs.
“We started talking to Peruvian friends about what we might be able to change, and we prayed for a while,” Fuqua said.
In 2011, they purchased property for a future children’s home, and by January 2015, they had built two bungalows on that property and officially opened with two sets of house parents who would care for no more than six to eight boys in each home.
Both bungalows filled up quickly.
“We approached this with this model of family-centered care,” Fuqua said. “What we wanted to do was provide more holistic care and life-on-life discipleship, teaching them how to build friendships and addressing the darkness of their past that they through no fault of their own have suffered through.”
Life stages
Ten years later, the Fuquas are celebrating a decade of Not Forgotten’s new children’s home setup. They have bungalows in two locations that cover three life stages.
Las Lomas — which means “the hills,” referencing Psalm 121 — serves children until secondary school. They then move as a “family unit” to the next phase, Aporcar, which means to till the earth and prepare it for deep planting.
“In that phase, they attend secondary school in the city and learn how to do life in the city in the context of their family,” Fuqua said.
Then at 18, they legally age out of the program, but if they choose they can move to Apthapi, which means “harvest” in one of the local languages.
“There, they learn life and job skills and get practice at being independent adults,” she said.
The oldest child in the program, Andy, is now around 20 years old and is studying fish farming and aquaculture at the university level.
“We’re employing him also to be the art teacher for the younger kids,” Fuqua said. “He’s an amazing kid and has just taken off.”
She said it takes a staff of teachers, cooks, psychologists and many other roles to keep Not Forgotten running for the more than 40 children who live there.
She asked for prayer for Gene and Patty, the Peruvian couple who run the children’s home, that God would “guide them as they lead the organization on the ground in Iquitos and protect their family as they are pouring out so much.”
Fuqua also asked for prayer for the house parents who serve there.
“Our children come with a lot of baggage and they make slow progress, and sometimes when you’re in it day in and day out, it’s hard to stay motivated,” she said. “There are behaviors that are hard to respond to, and it is a thankless and tiring job. We pray for their endurance and for low turnover for the kids.”
But Fuqua said they’re constantly celebrating the success that comes from those parents’ faithfulness in the midst of difficult situations. She and her husband had originally planned to move to Peru, but she said God continues to provide the right people for the work — people who are connected to the culture in a way she and Tyler wouldn’t be.
“We’re humbled and beyond grateful for the support that has made this journey possible,” she said.
For more information, email info@notforgotten.org or visit notforgotten.org.
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