How do you come back from devastating defeat? What do you do to recover when you realise something you believed in, is not anything like what you thought it was?

Mel Manley is the owner of The Imperial Hotel at Eumundi, which under her creative guidance has become the main meeting place in this bohemian hamlet in the Sunshine Coast hinterland. 

She is also a great believer in giving back, and so supported the establishment of an orphanage and charity in Nepal, in the hope of giving children there a safe place where they could receive education, good food and were safe from harm.

But years later, after gaining the trust of the children in their care, she discovered those children had living families, and were not in fact orphans. As Mel later realised, this was part of a global trend.

The number of orphanages across the developing world has grown dramatically in recent years. More than 80% of children in these orphanages are NOT orphans at all. Research shows that children are often taken from their families, trafficked into orphanages and used to generate funds, in a form of modern day slavery.

She is now the chief advocate for the charity Forget Me Not, which has reunited 700 orphans from Nepal, Uganda and India with their families, and also supported them for years to readjust to normal life.

Mel tells how she came back from the devastation of realising she had been so cruelly deceived, and how we all can learn to look for the gift in terrible events.”

https://fmn.org.au

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