One example of how the online community helped our 18 yr old

My wife and I were still F members on the "mission field" and our 17 yr old son was still living with us in the home even though he was officially out of the F.

Because we had no place to send him we had to leave the "field" home we were in and we returned together to W Europe. Not long after arriving we left the Family for good.

He went into a school but dropped out after only 3 weeks. Work possibilities did not pan out either. A big difficulty for him was not knowing the local language very well even though he's a dual national. He felt much more American having grown up with American home schooling courses in the F, and etc. As an electric guitarist and a good one at that, he joined a couple of bands that were only jamming together and he started doing more and more drugs. No work, no school, just death metal and lots of booze and drugs.

To make a long story short, he needed to get away from mom and dad, and the place he really wanted to be was in the US, but my relatives there could not/would not help. We needed a solution quickly. We read something Achieck posted about teens working in national parks, and sent in a bunch of applications, but we were late in the season, and there wasn't much prospect of getting any answers any time soon.

Then, on the MovingOn.org site, I found in the section "Leaving" under "What we can do to help", a post by an SGA who said her Dad had a contruction business and he had hired teens that were leaving the Family. I emailed her and she immediately contacted her dad, who emailed me the following day. So within a few days we had found a place where our son could go to in the States to live and to work.

Things have worked out really well so far. When he got to the States, he took and passed the GED, and has been working at the constuction job since then. This week he will try to pass the test for a driver's license, and his other plans are all working out really well too. He just wrote us, "At work, we're currently sheetrocking a ceiling at a school, it's going pretty good.. Yeah, I've been getting expierience in a lot of fields -- floors, roofs, scafolding type work etc..."

So thanks to the exmember sga community over on movingon.org, and thanks to the dad of one of those sga's, our son has had a really good opportunity to learn to start making his way in life successfully. Let me also say thanks to Achieck too. When we needed to get started on finding something for our son she supplied support, encouragement, offered concrete help and gave us good advice for our son and his situation. Jus' super cool!