Most likely the girl you sponsored was sponsored by someone else who had to cancel the sponsorship for some reason. It’s possible that she had several sponsors during her time in the program.

I think your plan of sponsoring older teenagers and sowing love as much as you can is fantastic. Many of these older teenagers go without sponsors for quite some time because most people want to sponsor a younger child or to sponsor a youth that will be in the program longer than a year.

But now I’m wondering if this means she was waiting for a sponsor for 10 years?

Generally, Ecuador will only register two children per family.

We do everything we can to advocate for the older children and children with special needs; however, its the sponsors that make that life changing decision about who to sponsor. I do not know this for certain, but I personally anticipate that part of our relief / rebuilding efforts in Haiti will involve special awareness campaigns and sponsorship drives for the children, students and babies and caregivers who have been affected.

From what I can tell with my letters from three boys on three different continents, they ONLY get mail on letter days.

How and when do children learn that they are sponsored? That’s a good question. One that’s quite common and somehow has avoided becoming a blog post … until now. I’ll get someone to write on that subject.

As far as the distribution of letters, our church partners do have some leeway on this; thus, there is the “letter day” idea, but mostly the letters are distributed as they are received. Vera Mensah-Bediako, our Ghana field communications specialist, wrote a good explanation of the letter writing process for her country. It should give you some more insight into how the process works.