My sponsored child taught me …

Popularity: 9% [?]

Story and Photo by Barb Liggett, Global Strategy Office Intern

Eugine is an 8-year-old from Kenya who wants to be a teacher when he grows up. Compassion believes that he — and all kids with big dreams — can do it. So does Katie Peters. This 15-year-old, from Colorado Springs’ The Classical Academy, has been raising money for Compassion since 2002 to help kids like Eugine reach their goals. Katie places jars with the slogan “Pennies for the Poor” in classrooms and hallways around her campus, about a mile from Compassion’s Global Ministry Center.

Katie posted signs around the school encouraging students and teachers to drop loose change into these jars. This simple act has gone a long way.

To date, Katie has raised more than $880 to help children across the world. Although Katie humbly claims she “was not a huge part, and it wasn’t all [her] money,” she organized this effort to raise money out of a caring and pure heart. She took the initiative to get permission from her principal to set the jars out, and at the end of each day she collects the jars and locks them in cabinets for safekeeping.

Despite all this work, Katie hopes her efforts go unnoticed by peers. She says that “I don’t try and tell people that I am doing it … I almost hope they don’t know it is me doing it. I hope they just know somebody cares.”

This is the servant’s heart Compassion seeks, the type of heart that is so powerful when embodied in a young person.

Katie chose Compassion from a long list of organizations, but for her the choice was simple. Her family began sponsoring a boy when she was 5, so she was already familiar with Compassion’s ministry.

About her family’s Compassion child, she explains that “he had graduated about the time I started Pennies for the Poor, so I decided there were still others like him who needed [help] through Compassion.”

Her family’s sponsorship was not the only experience that influenced her. When asked what provoked her to start collecting change, Katie says that “I started thinking I wanted to do something after my class had a character lesson about giving.” This, along with understanding the results of child sponsorship firsthand, inspired Katie to become an advocate for impoverished children around the world.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Have you been following the discussion on this post - Why We Can’t End Poverty?

It’s been lively, deep, heated, tense, stimulating, frustrating and just simply down home good. We like honesty.

The comment thread birthed a related, but new subject. We’d like to give our new baby its own home.

Welcome!

Let us know what you think. Why does poverty exist?

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It’s Saturday. Here are two halves for you to wrestle with. It’s a tag team thing. Take on one or try to pin ‘em both down.

To follow Jesus is to …

My response to God’s mandate is …

Thanks to Melissa Coast and Jill Foley for sharing their best half with us.

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Here’s a little more from the heart of Edwin Estioko, our Field Communications Specialist in the Philippines.

We arrived half an hour earlier than scheduled and did not expect for our sponsored child to be there. “Edwin!” I heard a project staff howl, and from the tone of her voice I knew right away that our child was already there waiting. She came an hour early. I looked to where the voice came from and there she was, smiling, walking towards me with a card in her hand. I walked to get the card and knelt before her. My wife followed closely behind.

“Are you Shan?” I asked.

She nodded and gave the cutest smile.

My wife approached her and gave her a big hug. We opened her card together and read her carefully written message, “Welcome! I love you Daddy Edwin and Mommy Daisy.”

Later we found out, that every day for a week before we came, Shan has been asking her center director when we would arrive.

After she warmed up a bit and began to communicate freely with us, I asked her a few questions not many sponsors can ask. “Shan, is it OK that we are Filipinos?” (more…)

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We wanted ‘em. Now we got ‘em. Meet the 2008 All-Star Compassion International Internship Squad! Yaaayy!

Give ‘em a hearty welcome, y-doncha.

Back row: Meredith Dunn, Tim Hurley, Adam Kroneberger, Nicole Bond, Carl Chan, Molly Gibson, Brooke Gilbert and Abby Steiger

Middle row: Abby Walter, Whitney Davis, Barb Liggett and Big Jesus

Front row: Amos Garcia, Emily Royal, and Abbe Knake

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“As I sit here and write this, I have mixed emotions. Part of me is embarrassed that my child behaves this way, and her selfishness …”

my twelve year old daughter came from camp this past thursday and the first thing she said as soon as she entered the house was, “Mum, I am now a mother and that makes you a grandmother!!!”

Popularity: 41% [?]

Last Saturday’s half sentence post went well, but there’s only half a brain on this team, and its synapses are fried.

Fried synapses are gross. They smell bad, like a fizzled out smoke bomb (Happy Fourth of July y’all!) and they elevate cholesterol to unhealthy levels.

Anyway, back to task.

Give us your best half … not your spouse, your best half sentence, so we can use the brain we do have for more pleasant things, like not thinking.

We’ll post your best halves in the weeks ahead.

Apparently, our half brain works okely dokely. We knew we couldn’t post ‘em in the weeks behind.

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My name is Lisa Miles, and I have been a sponsor with Compassion for two years. My husband and I sponsor a 9-year-old boy in Ethiopia, and we have a correspondence child who is 17, also from Ethiopia.

I am not a Compassion exec or even a Compassion advocate (yet!), I was never a sponsored child myself nor am I a fabulous Christian recording artist. My perspective is simply that of a sponsor with a passion for Compassion — and someone who deeply loves her sponsored kids. I have to confess that the day of fasting and prayer on behalf of the global food crisis did not impact me. At all.

I fasted — I felt some minor discomfort — but speaking as a mother, one day without food is like a drop in the bucket of sacrifices I’ve made since my child was born. You mothers understand.

We have sacrificed our sleep, our free time, our career goals, our figures, our freedom to watch anything on television that isn’t animated. One day without food — not a problem. To be a mom is to sacrifice for others.

Now I’ll tell you what would impact me — and again I’ll speak as a mother.

Ask me to wake my child in the morning and tell her she will have nothing to eat today. Ask me to put her to bed at night crying because she is so hungry. When she looks at me with complete love and trust — knowing that she depends on me for everything — ask me to tell her there will be nothing to eat tomorrow either. Now ask me to repeat this daily until her ribs protrude, her tummy bloats, and she can hardly walk.

As a mom, I want to give my child everything — the best of everything. Now tell me that I can give her nothing — not even the food she needs to keep her alive.

In a heartbeat, what was once a token activity would take on an awful significance.

Sixteen thousand children die of hunger-related causes each day. Each day — 16,000!

Even as I write this, I feel the need to go back and double check that figure, because I think surely it must be wrong. It is not.

The majority of these deaths are not attributable to outright starvation, but to diseases that move in on children whose bodies have been weakened by hunger. (1) I weep for these children — but I weep doubly for their mothers. I cannot imagine their pain.

How easy it is for the rest of us. We don’t have to live that reality. We don’t even have to watch it happen. In fact, we can lead our daily lives pretending that it doesn’t happen. And I think that would be not just sad but heartlessly cruel. These mothers need our help, and if we can offer it, we should.

So I’m asking you moms today to dig deep and do what you can. Give generously and often to the Global Food Crisis Fund. In fact, give something now. Sponsor a child — or an additional child — in a country where poverty is real and deadly.

I have to add that I won’t feel bad if there aren’t a lot of comments on my post. I know firsthand that you mothers are incredibly busy laughing, cuddling and playing with your kids — and cleaning up a mess or two, or twenty, along the way. (I cleaned an entire can of blue Play-Doh off the cat today. That was a new one.) So all I’m asking is that you give me an “amen” or two — then donate what you can.

Thank you for everything you do — and will do — to help children and their mothers. I know they would do the same for you.

P.S. My husband said “ditto for the dads.”

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It takes two to tango, and during June, these two non-employee blogs sent us the most dance partners.

They got sweet moves.

1. Rocks in My Dryer - 206 visits
2. musings of foreign hearts - 75 visits

Anyone up for the cha cha in July?

Get 50 friends together and meet us at here on August 1. It’s gonna be a Dance Dance Revolution.

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