We sketch out our beliefs through the words we say, the tones we use, the expressions on our faces, and the way we live our lives.

In a phrase, we are living advocates. But what are we really advocating?

St. Francis of Assisi famously said,

“Preach the gospel, and if necessary, use words.”

Francis was not arguing against the use of human vocabulary. He just recognized its limitations — and the fact that actions very quickly drown out the sound of one’s voice.

As a child advocate and member of Compassion’s Advocates Network, I have been trained in the words to say. What Compassion can’t teach me in words, though, is what it means to live out this principle.

You see, I’ve learned about the impact of poverty. I know the numbers of how many children die every day of preventable causes.

I have been taught about the impact of one child being released from poverty and given the opportunity to break the cycle of hopelessness in which he or she previously dwelt.

Not only do I have the head knowledge, but I have had my heart broken by the impact of poverty on a child’s life, and I feel passionate about getting others involved in child advocacy and sponsorship.

Genuinely living as an advocate for children, though, is something that I have to walk out — and work out — one day at a time.

It does not matter how many blog posts I write, how many conversations I have about the desperate nature of extreme poverty, or how many presentations I give to churches.

What matters — what really matters — is how I live each and every day. If my everyday life is not a shining example of the care and nurture and love and respect due a child, all my words will fall on deaf ears.

But …

If my life and my words add up, that is a powerful testimony.

Since you read this blog, you probably sponsor a child. That means you are also a child advocate. You became one the moment you acted on the belief that your sponsored child, a young person you had never met, has a purpose and a future and you chose to invest in that purpose.

How are the rest of your everyday actions saying what simple words can hardly do justice:

“Children are worth it. They are worth our resources, but they are worth so much more than that. They are worth our time and energy.”

As you consider this question (and I hope you’ll share your thoughts in the comments sections), check out Compassion’s Advocates Network.

I have personally found it to be an invaluable resource and support system for learning to live out my answer to the question above, and I would be remiss if I didn’t share this beloved network with you.

Consider joining us if you haven’t already.

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The marketplace is alive, buzzing with the hum of shuffling feet and bartering voices. No one is buying housewares today, but down the rows of sellers offering spices, nuts, teas and tobacco is a steady stream of faces and animated exchanges.

Slipping out a back entrance to this outdoor extravaganza, we cross a street of small restaurants and maneuver through a parking lot of buses that will soon head off in every direction that offers a road. Around another corner and up some dusty stairs, we find ourselves among a collection of bright second-story rooms that beam from direct sunlight and the radiant smile of the staff director.

This is STEP, a small NGO (non-governmental organization) hidden behind a marketplace in Sulaimaniyah, Kurdistan, in northern Iraq. It exists for one purpose: to provide a safe space for young boys who spend their days as sellers in the bazaar.

The director’s grin covers his entire face as he grabs our hands and welcomes our small band of Americans to his country. He proudly shows off his humble surroundings — the artwork of the boys who spend time here, a TV propped up in the corner, a small music room that consists of a little keyboard and a chair, and a space for a tutor and social worker.

We hear the story of STEP:

“Many young children, sometimes as young as 6 or 7, come here to the market to sell something. They start off selling chewing gum or maybe plastic bags. Later they will sell bigger things. Many of them drop out of school. They get tired after a couple of hours of working but don’t have anywhere to go.

“We provide that space. This entire place was built around the design of the kids themselves. They told us what they wanted — a place to get away, a safe place. They write the rules of the center. They draw the artwork. They tell us what they need from the staff.

“We provide a place with adults who can be trusted and who believe that every child is worthy of respect and is just as important as an adult. This is the most important thing, I think. So many people just look down on kids, like they are worth less than an adult. Like they don’t deserve anything.

“But that is not true. Why, I learn something from a child every single day. They are worth just as much as I am. And they need someone to tell them so.”

Then the director shared a little of his story:

“I dropped out of school when I was young. I never went to high school. But I realized after I started working here that I can only ask these kids to do things that I have been willing to do myself. We are a model for them, you know. They watch what we do in addition to what we say.

“So several years ago, I went back to high school. Last year, I graduated. I am over 40 years old, I have a wife and three children, and I just graduated from high school. It was a really hard thing to do.

“But now these kids know that it can be done. That sometimes you have to have the strength to do something that feels embarrassing, because it is the right thing to do. That an education is important. That it doesn’t matter what anyone tells you — you are important, you have skills and abilities, and you need to use them.”

Iraq is a corner of the world that we as Americans are quick to stereotype, but kids and adults are not so different here than they are anywhere else. Children bear the brunt of bad choices. They work early, either out of necessity or because it is culturally more honorable to spend time working than getting an education.

They spend so much time on the streets that they become easy victims of abuse and violence. It is hard for them to find an adult they trust to share their stories with and get help when it is needed.

Here in Kurdistan, one man and a small staff have found their niche. They are reaching out to the working boys of the marketplace to give them a safe haven, get them back into school, and provide counseling and a trusting relationship.

They take this calling so seriously that they change their lifestyles to be better models for these kids, whether that means going back to school, quitting smoking, or a number of other things.

Each of us needs to take seriously the call to be an advocate for children. Kids watch us, and we have a responsibility to model fully the life we encourage them to walk.

I encourage you to find your niche! Identify how you can be an advocate for children, and throw everything you are into that calling. It can change the lives of the children you come in contact with, whether they live in your house, your own neighborhood, or halfway around the world.

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Dave Walton is a Compassion Advocate of two years and a sponsor for nearly 30. He reflects here on his first visit with his sponsored child and the importance of recognizing and encouraging the child’s natural parents’ role in his life.

Whether or not our sponsored children realize their God-given potential has much to do with our support. Not withstanding this and the encouragement the parents and caregivers receive from us because we sponsor their children, we add value to the parents’ lives when we include them in our correspondence to “our kids.”

No different from parents everywhere, parents in poverty are in the trenches of child-rearing day in and day out. So, encourage your child’s parents in your next letter. Consider including a Bible verse or a small card “For Mom & Dad.”

I believe that by our encouraging and expressing appreciation for their efforts, they will be better parents and that will be reflected in the life of your sponsored child.

I recently had the opportunity to visit my sponsored child in Ecuador. I had anxiously awaited and prepared for this adventure for almost a year. While on the threshold of this event, I thought about the language barrier, the food, the water and what it would be like to meet Luis in his own country, culture and family. This was going to be different … very different.

Luis, like most young boys, is full of energy and adventure. When we met, he wanted to try everything. He handled questions and conversation easily, even through the dynamics of an interpreter.

Luis has a natural passion for ball games and ice cream, and he also has a younger brother as well as a sibling on the way. It was a delight to spend time with him.

Though soft spoken, it was easy to tell from the tears in Luis’ mother’s eyes how much she and her husband appreciated that someone very far removed from where she lived would care enough to partner with them to give their son opportunities they could never provide alone.

The quality of time spent with Luis helped me to realize that Mom and Dad are doing the best they can with what they have.

I put together an assortment of pictures from our day together. I included a letter addressed to Dad and Mom and made a point to express admiration for the great job they are doing in raising Luis and the privilege it is to partner with them for his future.

From what I saw, Mom and Dad are making every reasonable effort to “raise up their son in the way he should go.” This truth is evident to me every time I look at Luis’ picture.

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

Several years ago when I started sponsoring a child through Compassion, I thought I was doing a good thing. I made a small but noticeable donation to a nonprofit doing great work. Some little kid in India had a better life, I felt good for caring for the poor, the kid probably felt better because he had more food to eat, I was being oh-so-Jesus-like, and all was well with the world.
 
Then, I went. I went to where “the kid” lived. And I discovered something.
 
I discovered that this child sponsorship thing isn’t a game to make rich (or middle-class) people and poor people feel better about themselves.

I walked the prostitute-filled streets of Mexico City. I walked among the sick and dying lying hopeless outside the Buddhist temples in Kolkata. I walked between the standing puddles of water left over from floods that had brought down a string of houses in the Dominican Republic like a row of dominoes.

I saw poverty and the reach of its ugly hand. The beautiful young Latina girls who would sell themselves away for almost nothing because they needed money and, let’s face it, what were they really worth anyway? No one was going to rescue them.

The orphans of lepers and cripples in India, begging for food and being smacked upside the head by a passerby for being “bothersome.” Where would they go? They are no one, nameless to the world. 

And the Dominican Republic … what is the DR if not a place for drug lords and dealers to get rich off the poor and addicted? 
 
This is the world I live in, though I often choose to block out the images and pretend they don’t exist.
 
This is the world Compassion lives in. And they refuse to close their eyes.  
 
Compassion releases children from poverty in Jesus’ name. They do not simply release children from the economic plight of poverty. They provide them with the hope that can only come from Jesus, the hope that says,

“You matter. You are precious. You are made in God’s image. You have a purpose. We refuse to let you believe that you are no one, that you don’t matter.”

Yes, they meet the physical needs. That’s imperative. But meeting physical needs in a life devoid of hope isn’t enough. Meeting physical needs by extending the hope of a life in Jesus, though — that produces transformation.
 
And so I discovered just that. Transformation. For while I saw what appeared to be endless lines of prostitutes along the colorful streets of Mexico City, I also saw young girls and boys who entered the doors of a Compassion child development center in a local church, received nutritious meals, health screenings and checkups, tutoring and life-skills classes, and were personally loved and cared for by families within the church.

In India I saw young children in school uniforms who sang songs and created beautiful works of art, who were no longer captivated by the lie that told them that just because they came off the streets, they were trash.

In the DR I saw hope and life in the eyes of young teenagers who were refusing to deal drugs or join gangs because they had another reason to live. That reason just happened to have a name. They called him Jesus.
 
I discovered that child sponsorship isn’t about making me feel better. It’s about transforming lives — in every sense of the word, releasing children from poverty in Jesus’ name. And I became, in a word, humbled. Even a little humiliated. 

For $38 a month (which has at times been pocket change and at times been a sacrifice), I get to provide the bridge needed for a child to cross over from the streets to the Compassion child development center, from the land of hopelessness to a place of love, hope and joy.

As a sponsor, I’m not a part of making someone just feel better. I’m a part of a transformation.
 
When I returned home, I quickly realized that so many of my own friends and family members were right where I had been. They didn’t know the reality of so many kids in our world today, the hopelessness that binds itself around the hearts of children because the kids are caught in the grip of poverty. 

My friends and family didn’t know because they hadn’t seen it. Or, maybe they knew about it, but they didn’t know what could be done to really make a difference.

I was a little overwhelmed — how could I communicate all that was on my heart?
 
My journey of discoveries led me to Compassion’s Advocates Network. The Advocates Network is a team of volunteers who commit to speak up in their spheres of influence on behalf of children in poverty.

These child advocates create and share resources, provide coaching and training and spiritual retreats. They pray for each other and know each other by name. They get that advocacy on behalf of children is hard – and desperately important. So they encourage each other to press on.
 
Has your heart been broken by the reality in which your sponsored child lives? Do you want to do more on behalf of your child?

Become a part of our movement to see hundreds of thousands more children released from the cycle of poverty and hopelessness. Become a child advocate. I’d love to have you join me.

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1. The primary effect of Jesus’ healings was to include social outcasts into community.

   Jesus’ healings restored outcasts to community by removing the obstacle that made them outcasts. By eating with outcasts, Jesus welcomed and accepted them just as they were.

   With the temple incident He critiqued a system/structure that excluded outcasts on the basis of their race.

2. Jesus touched those whom He healed. He was willing to get dirty and even become unclean by touching them.
• Lepers (Mark 1:40–45)
• Bleeding / Hemorrhaging Woman (Mark 5:24b-34)
• Jairus’ Daughter (Mark 5:22-24, 35-43)
• Physically Disabled (Mark 2:1-12; 3:1-6; 7:32-37; 10:46-52)

As Compassion Child Advocates we are critical in the work of restoring social outcasts — children in poverty — to community. While I can’t say that I’ve ever healed anybody in Jesus’ name (I’ve tried), I do believe that Jesus is bringing healing through our advocacy — a healing that gives children a voice and that begins to take the poverty out of them.

What I’m especially convicted by is Rindge’s second observation about Jesus’ physical touch. Jesus got dirty, even unclean, according to Jewish law, by doing so.

I confess that a lot of my advocacy hasn’t gone that far.

Wess Stafford, our President and CEO, regularly shares that his mission is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

I love this statement. What’s also true is that the comfortable may afflict you right back. They did Jesus when they denounced Him for reaching out to social outcasts. And if my advocacy doesn’t result in me being marginalized myself, it’s lacking.

As you “speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves,” are you encountering resistance?

If you are, it’s probably because you look a lot like Jesus.

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Richmond Wandera

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

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
— Theodore Roosevelt

When I was asked to write my first post for this blog, I sent an e-mail to my family and friends joking, “Apparently my ability to drone on and on, (and on), about Compassion International and child sponsorship has gotten back to the organization. I have been given a public forum at last!” I have no doubt there was some good-natured snickering around many computer terminals in Iowa that day.

Let me put it this way. If you know me, AT ALL, you know I sponsor children — you know how I feel about Compassion — and you know that I think child sponsorship is one of the best possible ways to help children in poverty. It is a regular topic of conversation for me and I am known for it.

Jesus told us to let our light shine before men. We are not to light our lamp only to put it under a bushel. If someone who had been a friend for a long time suddenly came to me and said, “I had no idea you believed in Christ!” I would feel that I had not done my job as a Christian. If my faith was so absent in my daily activities that there was no outward sign of it, what would that say about me as a follower of God?

I feel exactly the same way about my ministry with Compassion. And that is what I consider child sponsorship to be — my ministry. What kind of a ministry would it be if I told no one about it and gave no one the information that would enable them to participate? To minister is to tell others — to share the good word! Why would I keep it quiet?

So my challenge to everyone today is to BLOOM WHERE YOU ARE PLANTED. Think about how you can share your Compassion ministry, wherever it is you may be.

Not all of us are great orators. Speaking in front of a crowd of more than 10 would probably give me a rash or hives of some kind. Not all of us are good at the “hard sell,” so I’m certainly not suggesting you go door to door. But I know there is some way that is immediately available to you to put Compassion out there, front and center.

Compassion advocates, can you offer some suggestions on how the average sponsor can share Compassion with others?

Sponsors, is there something unique you have done to get the word out to family and friends?

Has anyone taken advantage of the free brochures, posters, etc., that Compassion offers? If so, how have you used them?

Please share…

And thank you!

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

The center is in a quiet place far from the noisy avenues, although the homes of squatters surround the church mission. The houses are built with precarious materials that show the poverty this community has to face. The mission is on a large property with buildings built long ago.

As I walk through the church’s wide, dusty dirt-floor patio, the center director greets me. With a wide smile and wearing blue jeans and a black hat, she looks ready to film the perfect Western TV series. Her name is Miss Pino and she is a graduate psychologist who has also studied at a Bible institute and has specialized in child advocacy and child evangelism. She has been appointed by her mission authorities as center director for Semillero de Campeones Student Center, which started in June 2008.

In this position, Miss Pino has to deal with many things she never thought she would, such as trying to keep the center open. The rising costs of household items – cooking oil, chicken, milk, etc. – has led to a 20 percent increase in food costs for all student centers in Peru.

For Semillero de Campeones, this has made it difficult to manage a program with 166 young children to feed, from which 40 percent do not have a sponsor yet.

Because of the rise in prices, many student centers have had to stop some activities such as camps, retreats and extracurricular activities. The budgets for each center are simply not enough.

Development centers with less than 160 registered children, such as Semillero de Campeones, have been more affected as they have fewer resources to face the crisis. Therefore, in order to continue serving the vital meals to the children, Semillero de Campeones received a special assistance through our Complementary Interventions Program (CIV).

According to statistics, nearly 750,000 children in Peru have chronic malnutrition, a serious problem that is hidden from the eyes of society which links the short size and the glum temper of the poor indigenous and Creole people to their idiosyncrasies and not to malnutrition.

One out of four children younger than 5 years old is malnourished and does not reach the minimum required size and weight. This causes irreversible damage to their physical, intellectual and emotional development, and this situation continues because of the poverty and illiteracy of mothers in Peru, who don’t know how to combat malnutrition.

Investigations show that the lower the educational level of a woman, the earlier she becomes pregnant, and the more likely she is to raise larger families, heightening the probability of chronic malnutrition of her children.

Miss Pino tells me,

“A good number of families prepare their meals using only chicken innards to add some flavor to their meals. Even the fruit has increased its price, and now some very poor families prepare as a supper for their children a cornstarch pudding and a cup of tea, either yams and tea, or simple bread with tea to have something in their stomach to be able to sleep at night.

“Therefore, if not for Compassion, many of the registered children would not have a chance to eat any decent meal at all.”

Because of this serious situation, Compassion is responding in two ways:

1. Educating the mothers who are registered in our Child Survival Program (CSP) to reach the children when they are most vulnerable, as infants.
2. Covering the immediate nutritional needs of the children with CIV funds.

Many of the CSP mothers are illiterate and have only basic education. Education will teach them a trade to help them improve their income, teach them about proper child care, and also how to prepare nutritious meals, with help from a nutritionist. This response began in February 2009 and will last one year.

The dining room at Semillero de Campeones bursts with children at lunchtime eager to receive what they would not receive at home. These meals will ensure the children can receive the nutrition so important to their growth, including proteins (chicken and beans), carbs (rice), vitamins (vegetables and fruits).

Miss Pino and I visit the family of a sponsored child for whom child sponsorship has made a difference. A young man who also works at the center comes with us, as the place is not safe at all.

Although there are no gangs in this community, there are many thieves who commit robbery inside the many poor homes. There is also a problem of alcoholism and many broken homes and single mothers.

It is also quite common for men to abandon their family, and so there are many young mothers who have to work to support their home, and many children who have to stay at home all day alone, a danger for their well-being.

As we enter a small squatter house located on a hill, I see a middle-aged woman in bed. She is Nydia, 42, the mother of Sayuri.

I notice that they live in only one room with a roof of matting and plastic. The house walls are bare bricks, and the only furniture is two beds, a chest drawer with a TV set on it, and the TV cardboard box used as a night table by the mother’s bed.

There are many flies around Nydia and on her bed. She moves her head toward me, indicating to come, and at the same moment, she tries to kill a fly with a swatter.

As I enter the room, I sense immediately a strange odor that takes me back 18 months to the day when we, a group of Compassion workers, entered into one of the towns south of Lima City where a strong earthquake killed many people. Most of the bodies were still trapped in the debris and the strong odor of death made it difficult to breathe.

In fact, Nydia, a single mother of five, is dying day by day with uterine cancer. She was diagnosed in May 2008, and the doctors could do nothing but put her on radiotherapy. Now she is taking morphine to alleviate the pain in her swollen legs that have made it impossible to walk.

Nydia has five children: Jhon, 20, Martin, 17, Luis, 15, Rosa, 12, and Sayuri, 4. The two older ones live on their own and seldom see their mother. Luis works whenever he has a chance and brings home the money to cover the most urgent needs, and Rosa, although she is only 12, had to quit school because they couldn’t afford the school expenses. Instead, Rosa looks after her mother and younger sister.

We begin talking to Luis, and after some minutes Nydia tries to join our conversation. I look at the dirty mattress and blanket where a good number of flies keep landing, but choose to ignore it and sit down on the bed by Nydia’s side with a microphone in my hand and a camera in the other.

“My daughter Sayuri is very picky to eat so I am surprised she likes the meals that are served at the center. I thank Compassion for it because our budget at home is quite low to cope with our needs.”

Before she was ill, Nydia supported her family cooking at a restaurant in downtown Lima, and used to come home late completely exhausted. At the time she learned she had terminal cancer, she also learned about the Compassion program that was beginning at an evangelical mission located about 10 blocks from her home. So she registered her daughter, Sayuri.

Now Sayuri is attending the Compassion program and also attends school through a scholarship at the small grade school the mission runs to benefit the community children.

“If not for Compassion, Sayuri would have been at home just as her older sister. But now besides having a meal, she has a place to enjoy gathering with other children and learning many new things, instead of watching the TV all day as before.

“You see, I am dying with cancer and what worries me most is that I don’t know where my two daughters are going to end up. The boys are already grown up, and they can look after themselves.”

As our visit comes to an end, it is time for Nydia to take the prescribed morphine. After saying a prayer, we leave this home and walk toward the mission, having been a witness that without the loving care of Compassion that Sayuri is receiving now, this family would have no hope.

Nydia lost track of her relatives when she was quite young, and now her only family are the mission church members who volunteer at the center. Miss Pino, who is quite aware of the situation, tells me that the center helps this family by giving them spiritual counseling and some food supplies.

By giving them some food supplies, the family is able to eat at least something simple as a supper and to have a breakfast to help them get started for the day in better shape.

The center also pays for the medical fees and the prescribed medication sold at a special cheap price to Nydia at the hospital, after the hospital’s social workers declared her as a destitute person.

Nydia’s neighbors have also found a way to ensure the family receives a free lunch at a soup kitchen run by the government, where meals of rice and beans with tea are sold to the community for U.S.60 cents a dish.

Miss Pino has hope for this family, as she does for the center in general.

“Pastor Fonseca, who already has 15 years of experience working with Compassion at another center in the city, has been appointed to this church since January.

“He is quite acquainted with many foreign missions and foreign businessmen and professionals who are willing to help him in the development of the mission and will begin soon helping our mission work.

“In fact, in April we began a breakfast program on Sunday mornings for all the children who want to come to listen to the Bible stories after a good breakfast. And there is the possibility to extend this benefit for at least three more days during the week, so that all the community children may be able to attend school after having a nutritious breakfast.

“The beneficiaries will be the Compassion-sponsored children, the mission school children as well as all other children who live nearby.

“Besides, there are two foreign agronomy engineers who are Christian who teach at the Agronomy University in Lima City, they have the desire to help the mission install a small farm with a special method of watering. Since the mission has a big space of land, they want to use it to grow some vegetables to be used for preparing the program’s meals.”

Pastor Fonseca also has a long-term project in mind – to build an orphanage and day-care center to help many children that stay home alone all day and are in imminent risk, just like Sayuri and her sister Rosa.

Though this family still daily faces such serious burdens, the Compassion program has been able to help with their basic needs and provide vital emotional and spiritual support.

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Compassion is committed to protecting children from all forms of abuse and exploitation. Our board policy communicates this clearly by stating that:

“Concern for children is the cornerstone upon which Compassion International has been built. We are opposed to all forms of abuse and exploitation and will do everything within our power to ensure that no harm comes to any child registered in our program due to his or her involvement in the ministry of Compassion International.”

By protecting children, we are responding to Christ’s mandate to care for and protect His little ones.

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They’re called “throw-aways,” people whom the world has no use for. Children who don’t have anyone to feed them, youth with no identification papers, people with no options. So the world finds a use for them.

There are more slaves in the world today than there were in the entire trans-atlantic slave trade of the 1800s. Approximately 1.2 million children are trafficked each year into exploitive labor, such as agriculture work, prostitution, or child soldiers. 2 million children currently are forced to work as prostitutes.

When I first heard about this several years ago, I found it hard to believe. I was living in Amsterdam, and I’d walked many times down the narrow canals of the Red Light District, known for the prostitutes standing and advertising their wares in the windows.

It would make my skin prick to see the European and American businessmen grouped outside the windows in their button-ups and ties, jeering and leering at the women. Amsterdam is one of the destinations for young women trafficked into prostitution. Some of those women who keep the red lights burning in Amsterdam are slaves.

Around the world, the situation is bleak. In Asia, countries like India and Bangladesh and Burma and Thailand are from where many pimps get their wares. There are plenty of poor here, children no one would care or notice if they were to go missing. Little girls and boys whose parents can’t feed them, who are from minority races or tribes that aren’t valued in the larger society. The parents are offered money in exchange for their children. Sometimes the children are promised jobs working in restaurants or as maids. A better life. Many children aren’t sold, but kidnapped. As children walk, as they do each day, several miles to go to school or get water, they are an easy target.

Whether children are kidnapped or sold, some are then transported to brothels in big cities. They are abused and raped and sold as “companions” for western tourists over and over again.

Other children, in places like Africa, become soldiers, sex slaves of warriors, or workers in fields. I’d like to think that this only happens in faraway countries, but America is not exempt. Not only are American tourists some of the consumers of such “goods” abroad, human trafficking and sex slavery is alive and well in America.

What are we to do with the knowledge of such atrocities?

Abroad, Compassion promotes child advocacy. Country offices and projects promote advocacy and hold advocacy events to raise awareness of the value of children with parents and in the community.

For example, Compassion Honduras held events throughout the country this spring to educate children about their rights and how to respond to abuse and to educate parents, the church, the community, and local leaders about the value and rights of children.

When I first heard about these advocacy events, I didn’t really get it. Children are valuable — seems like a no-brainer, so why do we need an event to tell others that? But clearly not everyone knows and practices this message. Through community advocacy efforts, Compassion-assisted churches are bringing Christ’s message that children are infinitely valuable to transform communities.

Compassion International Asia has also developed a masters program in holistic child development to train and support those who work on the frontlines of children at risk, which is being implemented in seminaries throughout Asia.

At home, we can be child advocates ourselves, continuing to raise awareness of the needs and value of children in this country and abroad.

If you’re an American male, you can Take the Pledge to not participate in any way in the sex trade and protect the women and children around you.

If you want to learn more about human trafficking, visit International Justice Mission, one of Compassion’s ministry partners.

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