Jantsen's gift

"Ten years ago, Pam Cope owned a hair salon in the small town of Neosho, Missouri. Her life revolved around her son's baseball games, her daughter's dance lessons, and family trips to places like Disney World. She had never been out of the country, nor had she any desire to travel far from home. Then, on June 16, 1999, her life changed forever when her fifteen-year-old son Jantsen died from an undiagnosed heart ailment. Drowning in sadness and needing to get as far away from her loss as possible, she accepted a friend's invitation to visit orphanages in Vietnam. From the moment she arrived, everything began to shift. By the time she returned home, she had a new mission: to use her pain to change the world, one small step at a time, one child at a time. Within one year, Pam had rescued thirty children from the streets of Vietnam. Within five years, that number had grown to more than two hundred. Then, in 2006, a New York Times article about young children being sold into slavery in Ghana galvanized her to travel thousands of miles to intervene on their behalf. Today, Pam is the director and founder of Touch A Life, an organization dedicated to helping at-risk children all over the world, and she is working to build a center in Northern Ghana that offers a safe shelter and a promising future for the children she has rescued from slavery. A deeply moving account of loss and recovery, Pam Cope's story offers inspiration to anyone who has ever suffered great personal tragedy or has dreamed about making a difference in the world.:--From book jacket.