Think about it for a second. A birthday may be the most special day in a little kid’s life. Yet nearly 9 million kids a year never make it to their fifth birthday.
You can also view the Infant Mortality video on YouTube.
Our Child Survival Program helps fight the infant mortality problem plaguing these vulnerable children.
UPDATED Oct. 16
Make a donation to Compassion International through our Facebook Cause.
The 2009 America’s Giving Challenge has begun, and through the Giving Challenge, the Case Foundation will give away a total of $170,000 in daily and overall prizes to non-profits over the next month.
America’s Giving Challenge offers Compassion a great opportunity to demonstrate the worthiness of using social media in pursuit of our mission, and it offers you a chance to make a significant difference on behalf of that mission:
In response to the Great Commission, Compassion International exists as an advocate for children, to release them from their spiritual, economic, social and physical poverty and enable them to become responsible and fulfilled Christian adults.
America’s Giving Challenge – How Does It Work?
America’s Giving Challenge – How You Can Support Compassion International (more…)
Holistic child development has four aspects: physical, socio-emotional, economic and spiritual, and there are different issues that we have to grapple with when applying our child development model to the child survival and child sponsorship programs.
This is what holistic child development looks like in eastern India. (more…)
The Child Survival Program in a tiny village in India may not be vastly different from hundreds of other Compassion centers around the world, but to this community it is a powerful, unique and tangible demonstration of God’s provision and an essential lifeline for mothers and their children.
Villagers speak the Bhil language, which has no written form. They are classified as tribals by the government. They remain close-knit and marry only within their community. They worship animistic spirits and believe sickness represents the spirits’ anger toward the people. Major illnesses are ignored by the family, and the sick family member is left to die without any medical help. But many ailments are simply the result of insufficient food and malnutrition.
The village is a primitive agricultural community with no clean water, no sanitation, no electricity, no streets, no medical facilities and no modern transportation. Abuse of arrack, their home-made alcohol, is commonplace. Understanding and practicing hygiene is absent from local customs. To discourage theft, a family’s animals are brought indoors at night to share the living quarters, contributing to a dangerous health environment for the entire family.
Yet in this desperate corner of India, God is moving through the Child Survival Program. Program workers take the village women to a nearby hospital for regular prenatal and postnatal medical checkups. Most pregnant women in the project are anemic and underweight, so the program additionally provides iron tablets, tonics and calcium tablets, and pays the medical expenses.
Hepshiben Parmar, the Child Survival Program coordinator, elaborates on their duties.
“Twice in a month we monitor the growth of fetus as well as the development of children. I am a qualified nurse and Mrs. Swetha, our Implementer, a qualified nurse trained to check the fetal heartbeat. If we find any variation from the normal level, immediately we take the mother to the hospital for further treatment. In spite of this, some miscarriages have taken place because pregnant women are forced to do heavy work in the fields.”
Demonstrating the powerful love of God by serving the village families is the heart of the Child Survival Program’s mission.
“We pray before food distribution. When we go on a house visit we pray for the respective child. We teach them the importance of the true God and knowing God personally. We teach them how the love of God leads us to help others.
“The Child Survival Program deals with the most difficult and sensitive issues in this tribal area where many social evils are still rampant. In a community where giving birth to a girl child is considered a bane and where child care is negligent and taken for granted, the Child Survival Program’s role is laudable and paving a way for healthy living and a prosperous community.”
Being a mother takes courage. Being an expectant mother in desperate poverty takes courage and so much more.
Each year more than 500,000 mothers die in childbirth or from pregnancy complications, most of which are preventable. The babies who survive while their mothers die are much more likely to die in their first year of life.
Facts About Child Survival
Our Child Survival Program strives to reduce the troubling mortality statistics. (more…)
After passing by a hazy eastern tip of Cuba, our American Airlines flight banked steeply to the right and within minutes we were passing over the northern peninsula of Haiti, so recognizable due to the heavily rutted landscape.
The French had not been kind when they ravaged the once-lush western half of Hispaniola of all the mahogany trees and shipped the lumber back to Paris to make fine furniture.
More than 200 years later, the nation is still 90 percent barren, and what little good topsoil remains is eroding into the Caribbean.
We circled over the Canal du Sud strait approaching Port-au-Prince, a teeming city I had not been to in 19 years. As we touched down on the single runway “international” airport, memories began to take focus.
Child Survival – What Does Ti Chape Means?
I’ll never forget that trip. A wiry American with a unique accent was my guide. He had been living in Haiti for six years, assisting with various ministries, and eventually signing on full time with Compassion. His name was Wess Stafford.
It was on that trip that I snapped one of my all-time favorite photos: a little child of about 3 with a distended belly, wearing a ragged striped T-shirt and nothing else, proudly hoisting his torn little handmade kite on a 10-foot string made of scraps of twine and wire he had found.
The breeze was only keeping the kite about 5 feet aloft, but the boy was as gleeful as any child I had ever seen.
Wess was seated next to me in our van, and noticed my fascination with the tiny urchin.
“Ah, yes … another little Ti Chape.”
“What is a Ti Chape?”
“It’s a Creole phrase that many parents in these poorest areas of Haiti use with their youngest kids. I’m sure you’ll hear it often over the next several days as we visit homes. It’s a term of endearment … but also a harsh reality that reminds everyone of how devastating each day can be for people living on the brink. Ti Chape means little survivor or one who has escaped death.”
As a very tenderhearted man, Wess could not conceal his passion, and tears began to well in his eyes. With a catch in his throat he continued:
“Sadly, for the majority of the poor here in Haiti, the infant mortality rate is as high as 50 percent for children under the age of 5.
“Often parents won’t refer to their littlest ones by their birth name until they celebrate their fifth birthday because they know all too well that many of them won’t make it that far.
“While they are still in this most vulnerable toddler stage, the children are affectionately called Ti Chape.
“I guess it is often too painful to consistently call them by their real names for fear of assigning too much hope to their prospects.
“This same phenomena happens, by different names of course, in other desperately poor cultures around the globe.”
I watched intently for a few more minutes as that toddler joyfully tried to keep his tattered toy buoyant on the air. Then we lurched forward in the traffic flow.
For the rest of our stay I pondered what that child’s chances of survival really were.
Even now, whenever I look at that tyke’s photo in my collection, it gives me great pause, and those feelings all came back to me as we drove through the packed streets of Port-au-Prince again.
On the trip’s final day, we drove out the N2 highway along the southern Massif de la Hotte peninsula, weaving past colorfully painted tap-taps (old pickups converted into buses often over-loaded down with upward of 20 people), soot-spewing diesel trucks, and U.N. troop patrol vehicles that help keep the peace in the politically unstable environment.
We were headed out to see one of our child development centers — one that had been in existence for 23 years, but had added a new program just a few years before, a program that is helping revolutionize our work: our Child Survival Program. (more…)
What’s your mother’s name?
With Mother’s Day coming up, I’ve been reflecting on how much this question really matters. It’s not that a mother’s name is particularly important unto itself; it’s more that the name embodies a woman, a woman with a unique story, a woman who no matter what story she lives every day is deeply connected with her children (and maybe even children that she has not physically given birth to). (more…)
Subscribe in a Reader
