The following was taken from The Christian Post.
Christian volunteers and foster parents at a Moroccan orphanage were forced to abandon dozens of children on Monday after they were accused of proselytizing.
"Watching the children be told by their parents that they had to leave, that they would maybe never see them again, is the most painful thing I have ever witnessed," said Chris Broadbent of VoH.Moroccan authorities raided Village of Hope and said they were expelling the 20 workers and parents. The 33 children who were being cared for cried out "hysterically" for their foster parents as they were left behind.
Village of Hope registered with the Moroccan government in 2002 as an official Christian organization and received permission to talk about Christianity to the children in their care, according to Broadbent.
The North African country is a predominantly Muslim country where Christians make up only 1.1 percent of the population. The government restricts non-Islamic religious materials and proselytizing and monitors the activities of non-Muslim religious groups.
Also, it is only legal for Muslims to adopt children. Volunteers at Village of Hope were thus acting as foster parents, though the children considered them to be their parents, Broadbent noted.
For nearly ten years, VoH volunteers had been open about their faith to the authorities and were allowed to take in and foster abandoned children, who would otherwise be killed or placed in state-run "mega-orphanages," the organization stated. Despite that, authorities accused them of trying to convert the children to Christianity and forced the foster parents to board a bus heading to the airport to leave the country.
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