🎙️Bob McDonell is the founder of House of Life in El Salvador, a shelter providing care, protection, and hope for abandoned children and teenage mothers with their babies. This profound conversation reveals the dark reality of child abuse, trafficking, and exploitation in Central America, while showcasing a transformative model of healing through love, structure, and opportunity. Bob shares his journey from a physics student in Buffalo to answering God's call to serve El Salvador's most vulnerable children during the civil war. We explore the systemic failures & corruption of international organizations, the devastating impact of flawed orphanage studies, and how Bitcoin adoption in El Salvador has created unprecedented opportunities for these girls to own their own homes and build independent futures.
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My takeaways:
Bob received a divine calling at age 24 to serve abandoned children, transforming from someone who didn’t care about kids into someone who dedicated his entire life to rescuing and raising them in El Salvador.
The program has served children for 35 years, with the original 28 kids now around 45 years old, none of whom have abandoned or abused their own children - breaking the cycle completely.
The Harvard Bucharest orphanage study led to catastrophic policies where UNICEF and UN organizations incentivized governments to remove children from orphanages and return them to abusive environments, causing immense harm across Africa and beyond.
El Salvador’s transformation under the Bukele administration has dramatically improved child safety by imprisoning gang members and abusers.
The greatest resource in any children’s home is the 18+ year olds who stayed, as traumatized children arriving don’t trust adults but will believe other kids who tell them about safety, food, education, and protection from abuse.
Creating a protected, loving environment with opportunities is more therapeutically effective than weekly trauma therapy sessions where children return to unsafe environments, according to Harvard trauma specialists working with the House of Life.
Some children of gang members are now abandoned as their parents are imprisoned, creating a new lost generation similar to children abandoned during the civil war, with insufficient homes to care for them.
Only 900 children are in protective custody in El Salvador (population 6 million), and the number of available homes has decreased by more than half in the past decade due to misguided international policies.
International aid organizations spend $800 per day on each child in US border holding facilities, while Bob’s program provides comprehensive care for a mother and baby for less than $800 per month - 60 times more efficient with 96% going directly to children.
Bitcoiners are providing land for homes, funding construction, teaching skills, and creating a multiplying system where girls save half their earnings in Bitcoin until they can build a home for another teen mom, then receive their own property.
Bob needs $50,000 to expand House of Life capacity from 8 to 16 girls, allowing them to serve twice as many teenage mothers and their babies while maintaining the intimate family atmosphere.
The vision includes building senior living centers next to future Houses of Life, where elderly Americans can live with purpose for half the cost of US nursing homes while helping care for babies and learning Spanish.
Girls cannot have cell phones until age 18 and only if they have jobs to afford service, teaching responsibility and the value of earning privileges rather than entitlement.
Some girls do find healthy relationships and marriage, with Bob encouraging them to commit to good partners given how rare they are to find.
Real change happens not through hoping others will fix problems, but through individuals answering calls to action and building solutions, even when they seem impossible or receive no initial support.
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I was recently banned from Stripe, so I cannot have paid memberships on Substack… but there’s always another way!
