This picture was taken three weeks ago on a trip to Korogocho, Kenya.

Korogocho is located next to one of the largest dumpsites in Nairobi and is one of the three largest slums in the city. Navigating through Korogocho can be challenging, not to mention asphyxiating, as it lies in an underdeveloped, bustling area where thousands of people live and work. Small makeshift homes are piled one on top of the other.

The pastor of the church, Redeemed Gospel Church, told us that the name ‘Korogocho’ has the meaning of being ‘crammed shoulder to shoulder’ or ‘piled on top of one another.’

This picture, taken in the midst of the slum, tells an amazing story because it represents the firstfruits of a Church-to-Church (C2C) partnership.

In the picture are parents and their children, newly registered in our Child Sponsorship Program at Redeemed Gospel Church.

Also included in the picture are leaders from Trinity Church in Michigan.

Our C2C program focuses on building long-term relationships between well-resourced churches in the U.S. and our partner churches in the field.

C2C is now active in nine of the 26 countries where we work.

The idea of churches working together in partnership is not necessarily new, but our C2C Partnership is. What began in a beta test last year with 36 churches is now in the second year, closing in on a benchmark of 100 church partnerships.

C2C creates a relational mission, one church to another, beginning with connecting church leaders on a Discovery Trip, where congregation members from each U.S. church can get connected in a special way.

The first goal of C2C is to ensure at least 50 children from the church partner’s child development center are available for the U.S. church congregation to sponsor.

Redeemed Gospel is one of the bright spots in the community of Korogocho. In spite of being under resourced and facing a multitude of other challenges, the person of Jesus is fleshed out on a daily basis.

It is such a powerful thing to witness. A church like Redeemed Gospel has so much to offer a church here in the U.S. As churches build relationship together our prayer is that learning and ministry sharing will begin to take root in both directions, benefiting both partners and meeting kingdom goals with exponential impact.

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

A couple of weeks ago, Canadian telecommunications provider WIND Mobile launched a first-of-its-kind competition called “Best Conversation Ever,” asking Canadians the question:

If you could talk to anyone in the world, who would it be?

Five people will actually win the conversation of their dreams, and to make it happen, WIND Mobile will donate more than a half million dollars to Canadian charities.

One of the ways they’re doing this is through their Charity Challenge.

What’s the prize?

Based on your votes, the most popular charity will receive $50,000 and the five runners-up will receive $10,000 each.

As you can imagine, with $50,000 (or even $10,000), we could make a tremendous impact in the lives of the children we serve. With around 30 days left in the challenge, we need your help to win!

Please head over to BestConversationEver.ca, sign in and vote today and the next day and the next day.

How do you vote?

Create an account at BestConversationEver.ca and then vote for your Compassion Canada. All voters are allowed one vote per day per charity.

Why do you need to create an account?

People who vote are eligible to win weekly prizes, so if you are selected, “Best Conversation Ever” needs to know who you are in order to issue your prize.

Competition entries must be in by 11:59:59 p.m. ET on Wed., March 7, 2011, and are open to anyone over the age of 13 who is a resident of Canada.

What will we do with the money?

Once the votes are tallied and the winners are announced, we’re going to hold a vote on Compassion Canada’s Facebook page and you get to decide how we’re going to use the winnings.

The list will be based on our most urgent needs at that time.

Thanks everyone!

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

You started sponsoring little Jessica three years ago. You picked her because of her mischievous grin and her pigtails. You’ve been writing letters back and forth and are slowly starting to feel like you’re getting a glimpse into her world and what her daily life is like. You’re praying for her, and you find you’ve grown quite attached.

Then you find out that her child development center has closed, and suddenly this relationship you’ve begun to build comes to an abrupt end.

Naturally, you want more information, but are left with the little that you got through the last communication.

We partner with more than 5,000 churches worldwide to implement our sponsorship program. And last year, 95 centers closed, about 1.7 percent of the centers open at the time.

The number of child development centers that close each year varies. They close for a variety of reasons, and each case is different.

• A center might close because of unresolved financial integrity issues.
• A center might close because the church partner is having difficulty maintaining the staff and volunteers needed to successfully implement the program and no longer wants to continue the program.
• A center might close because the church leadership and the center’s staff have relationship conflicts.
• Or, on the positive side, a center may close because the church partner no longer needs assistance from Compassion.

If in the future the church would like to engage in another partnership with us, they can, but they would need to follow the process of opening a new center at their church.

The Partnership Facilitator (PF), the direct link between our Country Office and our centers, is the person who visits the centers to ensure they are running properly.

If the PF encounters problems at a particular center, he works with the center staff and the Country Office to resolve the issues. He will visit the center to work on development plans to help resolve the issues. He will meet with the pastor and the leadership of the church.

If necessary, the Country Director will meet with the pastor or even with the president of the church’s denomination.

Sometimes, however, the issues may persist, in which case the center will be put on suspension. In some cases, if the problems remain unresolved, the situation may end with the closure of the center.

However, not all closures follow this process. Sometimes a church partner will decide to end our partnership without going through the suspension process, or vice versa, depending on what the circumstances are in that particular case.

If a center is closed, the Country Office fills out the appropriate forms and sends them to the Global Ministry Center in Colorado as soon as possible. The closure is processed within seven days and is communicated to the appropriate Global Partners so they can share the news with you.

The Country Office also tries to transfer as many sponsored children as they can to another nearby center. However, if this is not possible, the children are “departed” from the program.

It is never easy to hear that a little one you have been praying and caring for is no longer part of our program. But know that we do all that we can to ensure that not only are our programs implemented with the utmost integrity, but also to resolve issues within our centers whenever possible, and ultimately, to transfer children to nearby centers when necessary.

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

Passport. Check.
Warm clothes and toothbrush. Check.
Plane tickets to Ecuador. Check.
Cards for unsponsored children. Check. Thanks to you.

I know my trip to Ecuador to deliver your Christmas cards is still about two weeks away, but I like to make sure I am prepared, over and over and over again.

We (I and the people over at DaySpring) are hard pressed to express how honored, grateful and humbled we are to carry your words to children who know poverty – to carry your words to children of God.

Because of you we have been able to witness the goodness of God as you have responded by creating hundreds of cards for unsponsored children.

The boxes of cards we carry are not just cards. The cards we carry have your words and words bring life.

Your words are not just printed ink on paper. When I think of the cards I see a weapon that will be used by God. I see hundreds of hammers, in the shape of letters, shattering the lies of poverty. I see the grip of discouragement falling away from the children Jesus watches over.

• “I am not worth anything” will be replaced with “I am deeply loved by the Creator of the universe.”
• “I have no purpose” will be replaced with “My God has a plan for me.”
• “No one cares about me” will be replaced with “My Savior knows my name.”

I cannot stop dreaming about what God will do with your words. I cannot stop believing Him to bring hope where there is darkness.

So, in case I have not made my point yet, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you for taking this season to bless an unsponsored child. You may think your words are simple. Maybe when you were creating your card you did not know exactly what to write, but we know these cards will bring light because we carry these words for God.

Now, would you like a peek into the travel itinerary? I have that for you! Well, I have the preliminary travel itinerary. God has the real one. He probably won’t unveil that until we are in Ecuador! But don’t worry – it is my hope to keep you updated along the way!

I am traveling to Ecuador on Dec. 11 with two wonderful ladies from DaySpring. Then, December 12 – 15, we’ll be visiting three child development centers, and with us will come your words.

The centers we intend to visit are:

• Embajadores de Dios Student Center (EC-104)
• Nuevo Amanecer (New Dawn) Student Center (EC-142)
• Eden Student Center (EC-479)

I know that these are only center names and numbers, but each of these centers holds the faces of such beautiful children, with intricate stories and struggles we cannot imagine. I am excited and hopeful to report back to you with pictures and stories.

Oh, and if you have not had a chance to create a Christmas card for an unsponsored child yet, you still have the rest of this weekend.

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

I recently spoke with a sponsor about gift giving. I explained that he could send a monetary gift for his child, and one of the program staff would take his child to the market and help them purchase what they would like.

The sponsor replied, “So you actually have staff in her community? Someone close by that can take her to the market?”

You may laugh, but this is a common question. Our purpose and mission may be well understood (to release children from poverty in Jesus’ name), but new and veteran sponsors alike have trouble understanding what our program looks like once implemented in a community.

When your sponsored child attends the child development center, or CDC, he or she is actually visiting a local church with whom we have partnered. This partnership is what sets us apart from other sponsorship organizations. Our desire is to support the church to complete its God-given mission (Matthew 16:18). We believe that this partnership is a strategic catalyst for community change – starting with changing one child’s life.

We depend on the church in your sponsored child’s community to carry out our program. We, with the help of sponsors and donors, provide them with finances, guidance and accountability in order to make the program a success. According to the needs in their community, church leaders establish guidelines for what they will provide to the children registered at their center.

These guidelines are established according to our standards of holistic child development, individual child attention, use of a national or Compassion-approved curriculum to meet our desired outcomes, a commitment to a one-to-one sponsorship (one child to one sponsor), meeting a time requirement for engagement with the children, and adhering to an attendance standard.

To ensure that the program is effective and funds are used wisely, the church is audited, at minimum, once every 30 months. Each CDC is visited by a Compassion staff member from the field office a minimum of three times per year.

Currently we partner with more than 5,000 churches worldwide, serving about 1.2 million children through our Child Sponsorship Program, and more than 21,000 mothers and babies through our Child Survival Program.

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

For those of you who don’t know, I’m a recovering “Lame Sponsor” with Compassion International. I have a checkered past when it comes to keeping up regular correspondence with the two boys we sponsor. To date, a five-year-old in Ghana has been out-writing me!

That all changed after I traveled with Compassion International to Guatemala this past September. And I got asked the same question over and over again in a language I couldn’t understand by faces I could read as easily as those of my own two sons, “Do you know my sponsor? Will you ask them to write to me?”

My heart cracked into all kinds of tiny pieces on that trip – each one determined to take home the message they’d entrusted me with, “Please ask them to write to us.”

Sponsor or no sponsor, turns out what every kid really wants is a letter. A letter to tell them they are special and loved and beautiful and necessary and that they matter much, much more than their circumstances may tell them.

When you’ve stood in a corrugated iron shack that houses a family of five who barely escaped a mud slide and watched them pull an envelope of letters that stretch back for years out from under the mattress pad you know you’re in the presence of something special.

Paper and ink can be an anchor in the storm.

Often our words are more important than our money.

And we’d like to make a way to send hundreds and thousands of words of encouragement to kids who really need them in this season of Thanksgiving. That’s where YOU come in! Well you, DaySpring, and Compassion International. From now through November 29th (the Monday after Thanksgiving) Studio DaySpring will be hosting a Christmas Card Drive for the children of Ecuador.

You design the card, Compassion will translate it, DaySpring will print it, and a team from both organizations will travel to Ecuador to deliver it in person in time for Christmas!

Four student projects with more than 100 unsponsored kids are looking forward to hearing from you. Did your tummy just do the happy flip? Mine sure did!

Here’s how it works:

1. Click here to go to the Studio DaySpring Christmas Card Drive page.
2. Design a card for a super special kid in Ecuador just dying to hear from YOU (for as little as $1.99).
3. Tell them what makes them so worth celebrating this Christmas season.
4. Include a photo of you and your family and a little bit about you so they know who the card’s coming from – kids LOVE photos!
5. Bear in mind we’ll need some room on the card to translate your message into Spanish.
6. Add to Cart and Voila – you’ve just created a Christmas message that will be hand delivered from you to a child in Ecuador. Our team will be there December 11-16.
7. Oh and we’ve got a blog button to help spread the word – you can grab it off (in)courage’s side bar.

Kind words are like honey – sweet to the taste and good for your health (Proverbs 16:24). Your words will nourish no matter whose hands your card finds its way home to. You don’t have to know a child to impact their life. You only have to know the Jesus you both have in common.

And we can’t wait to report back – with words and photos – how your cards were received. We’ve got a feeling it’s gonna be nothing short of Christmas-tacular!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Lisa-Jo Baker lives in between countries, callings and kids, believes motherhood should come with its own superhero cape, and as the Community Manager for (in)courage loves dreaming up ways to serve the hearts of women.

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

  Church La Capilla 20 de Mayo began in 2004 under a small shade tree on the street, with some borrowed chairs and a lot of enthusiasm from neighborhood children.

At the time, Pastor Raul was a youth pastor at another church in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. He began visiting the Normandia neighborhood to spend some time with the children, sharing the gospel with them, and providing the families with clothes, medicine and other items.

“The teenagers have high possibilities of joining gangs, drinking and using drugs. Children and teenagers live this reality. When they are older they mix the alcohol with marijuana or other things. They can find alcohol in every store for less than $.15. Girls get pregnant very young, so the best way they see they can support their children is to work in prostitution, in the best cases, they wash clothes or make Jell-O to sell. The majority choose prostitution or to work in a bar, drink, and receive some tips from the drunken men. Most of the pregnant girls do that.”

Because the teenagers are at risk of joining gangs, dropping out of school, or following their parents’ steps into alcoholism, the Compassion-assisted child development center at Church La Capilla 20 de Mayo, which the church opened two years ago, provides strong spiritual and educational support.

Education in the outlying neighborhoods is poor, so the center tries to help the children as much as possible in math, spelling and grammar.

“For these youth, studying isn’t important because at this age they already want to work and earn some coins. I speak about this with the parents because the parents would rather their children go to work in anything and produce something. Studies aren’t important to the parents.”

Parents make their children work at any job where they can earn money, such as washing cars, taking care of cars, selling things, or helping at the market. The childen allowed to attend school are those who can’t work yet, usually the youngest.

Through the increased awareness of the importance of studying, all of the adolescents who attend the development center are still in school.

“They are the children who we taught with puppets, sang and played with under a tree when we first came to the neighborhood. We are advancing with them. They stayed in the church and … they know that if they do God’s will, they will be OK. They have temptations from the world, but they are prepared for that, so they could go out and be sure that what they are doing is correct, not only in front of the pastor or tutor — they have to make those correct decisions and put limits on their own.”

Thanks to the testimonies that the children and adolescents give in their homes, many parents now attend the church. They see the good things God is doing in the lives of their children. The worship ministry at this church is made up of the teenagers; they play the instruments.

However, this is not the only way La Capilla Church is reaching out.

A short time after starting work in the area, church staff learned about a woman, Ana Maria, with six children, who had just become a widow.

“I lived at the church three years ago and now I participate in the church activities. Before I didn’t know anything about the church. I knew the pastor when he used to meet under a tree. He and his wife used to come on Saturdays, [and they] brought clothes. It was good. She was like a mother for me.

“When my husband died, my 4-month-old son got sick. I didn’t know what to do. My son was about to die, but the pastor’s wife gave me medicine. I didn’t have anyone, they gave me everything, I love them very much. They gave me food and then I came to live here. Now, I’m in peace here. I attend church and I am very happy. As they say, the Lord helps me a lot.”

Another testimony comes from a family who the church found living in a dump. The husband had just had an accident and couldn’t walk. The mother had just given birth to their third child. They didn’t have anything to eat.

Immediately the people from the church went to them and built a small room for them  out of wood and canvas on land the church owns.

“I was very thin when they picked me up,” says the husband. “Now I’m recovering. The church helped me find a job as a caretaker of a house. They built a room for me and my family. Now we attend the church and the family meetings on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We are very thankful to God and to them.”

The church holds discipleship meetings on Tuesdays and Thursdays at houses in three neighborhoods. Around 100 people attend these meetings and are growing in their faith.

One cultural issue the church has encountered is that people often do not get married. They just start living together and have a family. However, this year the church celebrated the weddings of four couples. The church is planning to organize more weddings in response to requests from many parents who want to do things correctly, as they have learned in God’s Word.

La Capilla 20 de Mayo church is serving the community and, thanks to God’s help, is accomplishing many improvements and changes. Pastor Raul reports that the rate of alcoholism is diminishing. Although it is still a problem, he believes the church’s influence keeps it from growing.

“People ask them what happened to you that you look so good, so they share their testimonies of how they stopped drinking, and attend church, etc. People are impressed that some of them left the alcohol for God. Those testimonies, plus the development center, the Child Survival Program, and our work with the teenagers is a big package to share with the community. One of the most beautiful things is that their lives are a testimony so others can get close to God.”

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

“Write your sponsored child – you have no idea how much it means to them,” said the worker at Sendero de Amor Child Development Center.

While it didn’t surprise me, I hoped I wouldn’t hear this while I was at the center.

The truth is, I’m not really one for writing letters.

I’m not sure that I should be admitting that, given that I work for Compassion, but there it is. At 31, I’m part of a generation of Canadians for whom letter writing is virtually a foreign concept.

Facebook? No problem.

Twitter? Easy.

E-mail? Sure.

But to sit down and write a letter? That’s different.

Writing a letter feels very formal. It’s not something I do with my friends. So when I wrote my first letter to my sponsored child four years ago, it was … strange. And, in all honesty, it never got easier. Writing has always felt a bit awkward. But as often as I could for a long time, I faithfully wrote.

At the beginning of 2010, things kind of went off the rails. Life got in the way and before I knew it, it had been six months since I’d written a letter. Now I was in Honduras, visiting some of our church partners and getting ready to meet my sponsored children.

At nearly every development center, I had the chance to ask the staff if there was one thing they wanted me to communicate back to Canadian sponsors. With the exception of one center, it was always the same thing:

“Write your child.”

I eventually asked why it was so important that we write. Here’s what I learned:

When letters are distributed, it’s a big celebration. The children who receive a letter are so excited that they can barely contain themselves. They show their friends their letters and can’t wait to share it with their families, too.

But for the kids who don’t get a letter … it’s a hard day. They’re happy for their friends, but their hands are empty. They feel left out. They feel unloved.

Ouch.

When sponsor visit day came, I knew the first thing I had to do was ask my children for their forgiveness. Hearing these stories made me realize just how much I’d – however inadvertently – hurt these kids who we care about so much. And the look on their faces when I told them that I’d done wrong showed me that, yes, I had hurt them in my failure to write.

When we write our children we’re giving them something to celebrate. Even when it’s a short, silly, awkward note that takes us forever.

But, as awkward as it is for me, knowing the difference it makes in the lives of our children helps me to know that it’s worth it.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a letter to write.

Aaron

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) states that over the last four decades, 1.3 million refugees have emigrated from Burma to Thailand.

Thailand has been willing to help refugees by providing shelter, schooling and basic survival needs (e.g., food, shelter and medical care) via nine refugee camps along the border. Currently, Thailand hosts 112,000 registered refugees, of which an estimated 50,000 are not in a border camp.

According to the humanitarian group Free Burma Rangers, “The Regime’s army has built roads and camps in ethnic homelands forcing people to relocate or flee into the jungle. There is documented forced labor and the use of rape as a weapon … The Regime’s army lays land mines down to keep villagers from returning home and supporting resistance. They aim to dominate the population, assimilate them and exploit them.”

The Burmese refugees are mainly ethnic Karen and Kareeni. They’ve been in exile longer than many other groups in the world. Returning home seems unlikely.

Compassion Thailand has 13 child development centers located along the Thai-Burma border, where Karen children are receiving support through child sponsorship. But among these children, there have been many issues of non-citizenship and child rights.

We equip the center staff with knowledge and understanding about child protection, but one form of child protection training is offered by IJM. Every staff member from our 201 child development centers in Thailand attended IJM’s training last year. The training taught the center staff how to provide a safe environment for children, discussed forms of abuse, and addressed ways to educate both parents and children on how to treat one another.

The staff also learned how to recognize the physical and behavioral signs of child abuse, along with how to respond properly.

For the center staff working along the Burmese border, citizenship was another training topic conducted. Many of the refugees have not received Thai citizenship because they don’t know how to apply. The staff learned the proper procedures from the town baliff and a citizen specialist.

IJM is also helping Compassion Thailand through the legal process of obtaining citizenship for refugees. The centers along the Thai-Burma border are in the process of surveying and collecting the documents to prove that the children were born in Thailand and have a right to Thai citizenship. After the staff collect the documents, they send a report to the Compassion Thailand office and IJM assists our office staff with the next steps.

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

Barry was leading a weeklong vision trip for six Canadian pastors and their wives. Their home for the week was to be the Hotel Montana. But less than an hour after landing in Haiti, it became clear that this trip would take a very different turn.

Instead of settling into the hotel at 4:53 p.m., they were still en route, traveling in a minibus with two Haitian staff. Barry recalls,

“We were driving on the back streets to avoid traffic congestion, and the bus had been bumping around a lot anyway, but all of a sudden it started heaving from side to side. We saw people who had been walking all falling. One lady fell right in front of us, and walls crashed down on both sides of us.”

As buildings shook and began to crumble before their very eyes, the passengers could barely process what they were seeing.

“From our vantage point, we could see the city of Port-au-Prince beneath us and all the dust that was blowing up. That’s when the gravity of the situation hit us.”

Miraculously, nearly three hours after the quake struck, they were able to text their families back home when one of their cell phones began working for about 15 minutes. As soon as everyone had typed out a quick message to report that they were safe, the signal was lost.

With people and debris filling the streets by the second, their vehicle could barely move forward. One woman was killed right in front of them, and bodies were already piling up as they inched toward their new destination, the Compassion office on Delmas Street. Still, the Haiti staff were determined to press on, even as their Canadian passengers pleaded with them to leave and go check on their families.

What should have been a 12-minute drive instead took three horrifying hours.

“We felt so helpless, but we knew the one tool we had was prayer. Our vehicle became a mobile prayer chapel. When we saw someone wounded, we cried out to God on their behalf.”

When they turned onto Delmas Street and saw huge commercial buildings flattened, they could only gasp, “There’s nothing left.”

At 8 p.m., they arrived at the Compassion office and were surprised to find it still standing. Also standing, across the street, was the Canadian Embassy, built just four years earlier.

As the first Canadians to arrive at the embassy, they were welcomed but told they would have to sleep outside since the building was still considered unsafe. They spent the night — most of them not sleeping at all — in a parking lot, trying to breathe through the thick dust that had hours ago been Haiti’s center of commerce.

Twenty-eight hours later they boarded a Hercules military transport that would take them to the Dominican Republic. By Thursday afternoon, they were home, where Barry sat glued to the media coverage of the country he had just left.

“The hardest part was leaving. Tears ran down my face as I asked God how I could leave my brothers and sisters at such a time. But I felt like God was telling me I needed to go back home and do what I could do here — be an advocate for these people, tell their story, raise money for their recovery. I haven’t stopped since I got home.”

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates