Breaking Chains: Rescuing Lives in South Asia

SPEAKER 01 : 0:00

This is Rachel Mainz with Crawford Media Group, and joining me today is Leanna Cinquanta, and she’s the founder and president of WIN. Thanks for joining me. Thank you, Rachel. It’s a joy to be with you today. Well, it’s a joy to have you, and your organization is quite amazing. For those who aren’t familiar with WIN, explain what you guys do.

SPEAKER 02 : 0:20

Yeah, our organization is called WIN We Ignite Nations. And we are really passionate about really changing the face of nonprofit work and transitioning it from kind of a dependency where we just kind of help feed people to actually empowering those people out of poverty so they can feed themselves. Or instead of sponsoring children, why don’t we empower the families so they can sponsor their own kids and send their own kids to school and feed their own kids? So that’s what WIN is all about.

SPEAKER 01 : 0:57

I love that because oftentimes, you know, we give money and I’m not trying to say it’s bad to help somebody in a poor spot, of course, and give them money versus teaching them how to have the skills for a job. But I just love how you’re going in there and you’re doing practical steps to help these people. Now, real briefly, how did you come to know the Lord and then, of course, have him share with you this amazing vision for this organization?

SPEAKER 02 : 1:26

Yeah, and it does all come out of the love of Christ. And he is the motive behind what we do to say, wait a minute, we can solve problems in the world. And yes, Rachel, we are all for helping people when they’re really needed. We help people during the COVID pandemic. We did lots of relief work there. And there’s a place indeed for relief and aid, but it’s not a long-term solution. And see, because Jesus, gave us a long-term solution right he by dying on the cross and rising for for us and paying the penalty for our sin he gave us the opportunity to live eternally with him and to have new life and that’s why i was an atheist at age 15 i didn’t said i don’t see god i don’t see your god i don’t feel god i don’t think god’s out there and uh had a pretty good life i had wonderful excuse me wonderful parents and uh was he pursuing my equestrian career and uh But one night, I woke up about 5 o’clock in the morning, and there was a person in the guest bed. I had two beds in my room where my friends would stay once in a while, and nobody’s staying that night, but there was somebody in the bed. And I was terrified. I got up out of the bed. I crept across the room to the light switch. I was terrified, didn’t know what to do. I don’t know why I got back into the bed, waited and watched. It was a very short time. before the person in the guest bed sat up on the side of the bed, and it was Jesus.

SPEAKER 01 : 3:00

Wow.

SPEAKER 02 : 3:01

I don’t ask me how that happened, but God allowed me to see Jesus as he would have looked on the cross when he gave his life for our sins and the suffering he took upon himself to pay the penalty for us. And I realized in that moment, God is real. Jesus is real. The Bible is the word of God. And I gave my life to Him, and I was transformed from a very selfish person, from a very narcissistic person, into a person that said, God loves this world so much, and that means now I want to follow Him, and I want to bring His love into this world. And that is the basis of what we do in When We Ignite Nations. Before I came to the Lord, I was a teenager pursuing my equestrian career. And, you know, I gave that up in my mid-20s to go to South Asia and to begin rescuing kids out of trafficking and starting schools and education centers, which is what we do, part of what we do now. But I wasn’t doing nothing. I was a teenager. And I was, you know, but I do have my equestrian, you know, kind of as a hobby more. But I’m experimenting with equine genetics now and have that back again to do as well as kind of an expression of God’s creativity. But, yeah, but it did transform everything. I basically wrote a farewell letter to my parents at age 26. and said, sell the horses, sell the horse facility. I’m going to this part of the world, which I had by then, the Lord had shown me the powers of poverty and child trafficking and oppression, holding the people in bondage with these big chains and holding whips and driving them as slaves. And I knew I had to set those people free. And that was when I got on the plane with a one-way ticket and didn’t expect to come back alive because people told me, you’re crazy. You can’t just go over there as a single 26-year-old girl. You’re going to be the victim of the same trafficking. You say you’re going to rescue. Well, God was in control. And when he calls you, he’s faithful. And if you’re listening out there right now and thinking, And you’re like, well, I feel God’s calling me to do something, but man, I don’t know. I’m afraid. Go for it. Go for it. Because if it’s something that you know is the heart of God and he’s speaking to you, go for it because he’s with you and he will do miracles to bring it to pass.

SPEAKER 01 : 5:51

Amen. Well, how long were you out there when you first went out there?

SPEAKER 02 : 5:55

Yeah, I was there trying to figure out what I was supposed to do. I kind of knew, but I was out there living. With the local people in the small towns and villages, I remember sleeping on string cots where they are so sagging in the middle that you’d wake up with a backache and getting sick drinking the water out of the open wells with floaties in it. Living just like the local people. And they actually gave me a name that in their language means light, because they said, you’ve brought light into our darkness. You’re the first one to come and actually live with us like us and experience what we’re experiencing. It’s just that kind of what God did in Christ. You know, Jesus came and was one of us. He didn’t just he didn’t build himself a golden castle to live on the planet Earth. But then through that experience, The Lord, then he showed me the next step. See, God wants to give us strategy. And whether, you know, you’re listening to this, whether you’re a believer or not right now, you have a calling on your life. You have a destiny. And you have, there is a purpose for you. It’s a high and a glorious purpose, and the purpose is beyond yourself. And God will give you the strategy for your life to make a difference. And so he gave me step by step. He said, you’re not going to be the one to go out and rescue these kids out of trafficking. You’re not going to be the one to run the schools. You’re going to be a servant of the local people. They’re the ones that are going to do all that. And you guys are going to be a team. Well, I got very mad. I said, wait a minute, guys. I want to do it. I want to be the one to go and bust in the brothels and get the girls out here. And it’s like it took me a year kind of fighting with God, you know. And one day, boom, it just clicked. And I’m like, yeah, I can’t do this alone. We’ve got to do this as a team. And this is my part and that’s their part. And that is what is one of the pieces of this strategy that has allowed Wynn to make an incredible difference in these very difficult places where no one else was able to get in. This is the part of the world that was considered the – this is a quote from a researcher that said this region of the world is the poisonous hub of human trafficking in all of that region. So we were able to get into there, and through raising up teams of the local people, training them, equipping them, We’ve now rescued hundreds of girls out of trafficking. We’ve prevented thousands of kids that otherwise would have been trafficked or otherwise abused through child labor. We’ve prevented that from happening, got them into education centers and schools and developed three schools that are fully self-sustaining, do not depend on ongoing foreign funding, but are fully running on the local finance. And that’s just a little bit. of the things we’ve been able to do by allowing God to give us a different strategy than what was traditionally kind of the way to do it in the time.

SPEAKER 01 : 9:17

Right. That’s amazing. So I know that he connects people. He connected you and I to come on the show. But explain some of those first connections, if you will, as you were kind of fighting him, how he moved you and connected you to show you, hey, this is some of your team members here.

SPEAKER 02 : 9:37

Well, this is a story that’s really precious to my heart because, you know, Too many times when we as Westerners go to nations that are a different culture than our own, we kind of unconsciously end up importing our own culture and thinking our culture is better than theirs. You know what? That has actually prevented so many people from receiving God’s love and otherwise what we would bring to them. Well, I’ll never forget when I was out in this village with one of the local people, And we were trying to, you know, minister to these folks. And we had a bunch of folks sitting out there, and we’re playing the guitar, right? And we got our guitar. Well, very Western, right? We got our guitar, and we’re playing these songs, and we’re trying to get them to participate. And they’re kind of half-sleeping. They’re so bored. They’re like, oh, yeah, here’s the foreigners. You know, they’ve got their foreign. And see, previously in this region, the people who had come from the West had said, well, That drum that you guys play, you know, that’s not, we can’t use that to worship Jesus. That drum, you know, you’re using that to worship idols. So you got to throw that out and you got to use the guitar. Like, wait a minute, wait a minute. Who made music? Did the devil make the music? No. The music is part of God’s creation. I don’t care what kind of music it is. It all belongs to him. We just have to redeem it. We just have to allow his love to come into the culture, but not try to import our culture. And so finally we said to the young man there, he was already writing songs in the native dialect, in the native style, the same style of music that they used to worship whatever gods they used to follow. And the same drum, you have to have that drum to play that music. I mean, that’s just how it works. And we finally said, hey, J.D., that’s what we call him, J.D., go get the dolet. Go ahead and do one of your songs. Well, everybody came alive. Then somebody ran into the hut and got this little drum that they have, their indigenous drum, you know. And they started their style of music. But they were playing it in the, they were doing a Bible story that told about God’s love, that told about the redemption and the hope that we have and the salvation. And the people said, wait a minute. This is our drum. This is our music. But we can worship the true living Savior with our own style and our own culture. They just came alive. And boom, the Holy Spirit said, and that’s when I realized, wow. This is so beautiful. Why don’t we allow their culture to be the basis, but we just allow it to be redeemed and bring God’s life, bring life and hope into that, but celebrate their own indigenous culture. And that has become, again, one of the things we cherish in Wynn is we look for that local culture and how can we encourage and allow that to blossom.

SPEAKER 01 : 12:56

I love that. I love that. You know, getting people out of sex trafficking can be quite dangerous. So how have you built a team there to handle that? Because I know that this is just really difficult.

SPEAKER 02 : 13:11

That is. We started by developing a three-pronged approach. The first part was we had to meet with the police and figure out who was really honest. That was challenging.

SPEAKER 01 : 13:24

Right.

SPEAKER 02 : 13:25

Because half the police force was corrupt, and they were being paid off by the pimps, and so they didn’t want to solve the problem. And so we found the ones that really were honest, and we started working with them. And we started training them. We actually went and got trained ourselves from another part of that region that was already doing it successfully. We came back. We trained the police force. Well, pretty soon, the corrupt ones, they were going to get exposed if they didn’t come along and toe the line themselves. Then we got a whole police force on board. Meanwhile, we had another team of young men that had been trained to be decoys. And boy, was that dangerous. They had to pose as johns and go into the brothels under the guise of a customer. And then they’d get into the room with the girl. They would say, hey, I’m not here for what you think. I’m here to rescue you. Tell me all about this operation. And then the girl, hopefully the girl would be honest, right? The girl could, could turn him in right there. Um, but the girl would then tell, but these are all minors. We worked with minors. Uh, and so they were trafficking victims and they hadn’t been brainwashed too heavily yet. So they wanted out. And so then he would collect information and plan, uh, the rate when they could do the raid and, And then we would do the raid in partnership with the police and get the girls out, bust the brothel owners, you know, get them all in jail. And so that’s what we still do today where we basically do the research and then the police. In partnership with the police, we carry out the raid.

SPEAKER 01 : 15:10

Wow. Wow. And I know when you rescue someone who just even, I think, even a day, you know, forced to be in the sex trafficking ring, how do you rehabilitate them after that?

SPEAKER 02 : 15:26

We had safe homes for a while. Right now we don’t because it is a very expensive ordeal to properly operate a safe home. The easiest thing is the rescue. People think that’s easy, but the hardest part is rehab. If you really want to invest in their lives right now, because we do not have a committed, I mean, you need a donor that’s ready to commit to about $80,000 a year for at least three years in a row.

SPEAKER 01 : 15:57

Right.

SPEAKER 02 : 15:57

And because to rehab maybe 20 girls, it’s very expensive. And so We do not have that, and so what we’ve been doing right now is we have the girls that are rescued go to the government safe homes. Now, they do not get the training, job skills training we would prefer to give them. They do not get the spiritual healing we would be giving them. They don’t get set up in a business at the end. These are all things that we would prefer to do that we were doing with our girls, but they get a safe place. They get some you know, an opportunity to get back on their feet and get a start to life.

SPEAKER 01 : 16:35

That’s beautiful. Well, another thing that you guys do, you know, I’ve given to Compassion International before and, you know, also right now I’m supporting another kid with another organization. But I like that your approach is to help the parents to get jobs and you give them some training as well. Can you go into that?

SPEAKER 02 : 16:56

Yeah, yeah, man, that’s our newest initiative that is just really exciting. Yeah, because I really believe that poverty is a trespasser in the earth. I don’t believe it’s God’s will. I don’t believe it is God’s will for anyone to lack basic necessities. Right. Okay. The same way it’s not God’s will for anyone to suffer oppression or slavery. And the two go hand in hand. Wherever there’s poverty, there’s oppression. Okay. And so if you solve poverty, you also, for the most part, solve oppression at the same time quite often. Let me give you one example. We’ve been going in a mountainous area where the little girls don’t get to go to school because every morning and every evening their job is to walk one half hour to two hours to the mountain spring to collect the water for the family, and they have to carry this 40-gallon jug. I did it with them once. It is back-breaking. And I’m an adult. I mean, these little 12-year-olds. And they’re literally slaves in their own home. Their brother, he gets to go to school, okay? But the little girl has to carry the water, usually along with her mother and the other women. But it’s not just that. The whole village is impoverished because they don’t have irrigation water. Number one, they’re sick because they don’t have enough water to practice proper hygiene. It’s barely enough. But they can’t irrigate. So the fathers have to leave the family and go for weeks and months at a time away from the family to try to work. They get hooked up with brothels. They get hooked up with alcohol, all these bad. So what we are doing is we find we work with our engineer. We find that spring in the mountain, crystal clear mountain spring that never runs dry. We tap into that spring. And we bring that spring down to the village. We build a big holding tank, and the village has irrigation water year-round. It solves child slavery. They don’t have to carry water anymore. They’re a little girl. They’re all going to school. It solves poverty, and it solves fatherlessness because the fathers can come home and work their fields now, and they can generate. And now I come back a year and a half later. They’ve got tomato farms. They’ve got chicken farms. They’ve got goats. They’ve got vegetables. And it’s just a garden of Eden compared to what it was before Desolate and Brown. And it’s just really exciting to see the whole village transformation that we can do with that kind of a project.

SPEAKER 01 : 19:40

Yeah. You know, here in the first world, we don’t even think about such trials or such things that would prevent you from, you know, a girl going to school and a father being with his family and something we just definitely take it for granted here in the United States for sure. What’s the biggest ignorance that you feel when you talk to people about your organization and what you do?

SPEAKER 02 : 20:01

It’s a stretch for people to realize that a nonprofit organization… can be entrepreneurial. Right. We’re so used to just charity and give, okay, I’m going to give, you know, and again, it’s a good thing. We also were a partner with Compassion International. You mentioned they’re a great organization. We had three. A lot of folks don’t know that the way Compassion operates is they partner with the local people on the ground that already have the buildings, they have the relationships, they have the people to work And they provide the funding, and we provide all of the management and oversight, and we run the whole program. And so we had the top-rated Compassion project in that whole region at one time. And then Compassion got kicked out of that country, actually, because of the situation there that makes it hard for foreign funding to be sent in. Their foreign funding got cut off, and so they could no longer do anything anymore. And right there is an example. See, one reason that we’re working to build up business to internally within these nations to help fund the work is because in the nations that are the most needy and also the most where Christians are the most persecuted, those are the nations where the authorities are trying to cut off access to the foreign funds. So there’s a case in point. See, Compassion can no longer operate to serve one-fifth of the world population because it was dependent on the funding being sent every month, right? And that’s fine, but the other thing is then that nation says, well, all these people are becoming Christians because of foreign money. No, no, we don’t want that. That’s not true. We know that’s not true, but that’s what they think. And it prevents so many people from turning to Christ. It causes so much persecution. Whereas if we can allow those people of that nation to see that Christians are creating business, we are generating revenues, we are contributing to the economy of the nation, we’re not just importing foreign funding, we’re empowering families, we’re creating jobs. When they see that, they can no longer say that Jesus is here because of foreign money. They have to recognize, wait a minute, this is God’s love. Get back to God’s love. See, how do we show God’s love? It is really, it is by empowering people out of poverty through the work of their own hands. And the more we can do that, the more powerfully we’re going to impact that nation.

SPEAKER 01 : 22:50

Yeah, that’s beautiful. I love that. What type of job skills do you train the folks in? What are some of the top job skills that you’re training them in?

SPEAKER 02 : 23:00

Two of our really exciting projects are computer centers. We have two computer centers. I think each one is training over 300 kids. Well, one’s new. It’s just getting off the ground. The one that’s established is training 350 young adults. These are kids that did not get a chance to get a good education, and so they are stepping into their employable years. They’re in their late teens and early 20s. And they are terrified because they look at their parents and their grandparents and their great-grandparents. They’ve all been in this systemic poverty, and it’s a trap that they can’t get out of because they couldn’t afford an education. And so they look at the big computer institutes in the city, and they can’t begin to afford those fees. It’s very expensive. But we’ve made computer institutes out of the city a little ways. where they can afford to pay the fees. We keep the fees as low as possible so these low-income kids can come and get the same accreditation that they would get in the expensive ones in the city, but it’s affordable to them, and our computer institutes are self-sustaining. We do not send a dime to support them. We started them. We invested the startup capital, and that’s it. They run totally self-sustaining programs. But we’re setting these kids free from poverty that would otherwise face a lifetime of oppression.

SPEAKER 01 : 24:31

Wow. Wow. Just a really great organization. And I want to give the website. It’s win.global. And that’s win.global. We have a couple minutes here. Anything else that you want to share with our listeners regarding your organization and how they can help as well?

SPEAKER 02 : 24:48

Thank you. Yeah, well, you know, what we do is really based, if you want to consider a Bible verse, that is one of the basis of what we do. It’s the Bible book of Luke, chapter 4, verse 18. And it’s where Jesus actually quotes from the book of Isaiah in the Old Testament. And he’s really telling us what his mission statement is. And you know, for too long, the Christians have spiritualized that and said, well, that’s all just spiritual. No, no, no. This is really what Jesus really did. It says that the Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he’s anointed me to preach the gospel, the good news, to preach the good news to the poor. What’s the good news to the poor? It’s going to be water so you can irrigate your field. It’s going to be education for your children. It’s going to be empowerment out of poverty, right? And so it’s not just a spiritual good news. It’s a physical good news. It’s a whole person, whole life, because God created everything. He’s king of it all. So he wants to bring us up out of those works of darkness. And give us power over poverty, over oppression. So, you know, so that’s and I’m saying this because this pertains to your lives, too. You know, you sit and listen right now. You know, you are empowered to be good news. Good news. Where is the bad news in your community? Where is the bad news? Well, you are empowered to be some good news, you know. We hear all this bad news on the radio, right, or on the TV and whatever, right? But you are empowered to be good news. And so in what small way can you be good news? He goes on that he is opening the eyes of the blind and setting the prisoners free, setting at liberty those who are oppressed. So where can you make a difference in your area, your sphere of influence in your community to give life, to give hope, to bring good news into somebody’s world?

SPEAKER 01 : 27:07

Beautiful. And once again, the website is win.global. Thank you so much, Leanna, for coming on. Thank you, Rachel. I sure appreciate you.

SPEAKER 02 : 27:15

God bless. And God bless all of you listening. And remember, you have a great and a high calling and a great destiny to bring hope and healing into this world.