Whew!

This has been a busy year. Our world is in turmoil and much of that turmoil is affecting Compassion’s work.

Here’s a snapshot of the things I’ve reported over the past 11 months:

military rebellion, slum fire, dengue fever outbreak, H1N1 virus outbreak, flooding, strike, civil conflict, volcanic eruption, earthquake, heavy rains, political unrest, hotel bombings, protests and violence, typhoons, meningitis outbreak, polio outbreak, cholera outbreak, famine, landslide, tribal war, ferry sinking, riots.

As an organization entirely dependent on your trust, we have made a commitment to be honest and transparent in everything we do. This means, among other things, that we do our best to let you know as soon as possible when your child is affected by a crisis or disaster.

In a perfect world, here’s how the process would work:

• Within 24 hours of a crisis, our Field Communications Specialist (FCS) submits a crisis report via e-mail. This e-mail comes to an inbox that I check regularly.
• As soon as I receive this e-mail, I determine whether funds will need to be raised to provide relief, and summarize the report and e-mail it to our partner countries (the countries where the sponsors live).
• Meanwhile, the FCS is in contact with the Partnership Facilitators (PF), field-based staff members who are contacting our affected church partners.
• The FCS then submits a follow-up report via e-mail, with further details from the PFs about which centers are affected, how they are affected, and any other relevant details, photos or video.
• As soon as the church partners are able to provide specific information on registered children, the FCS e-mails that information to me. I do a quality check and then forward that information to the partner countries.
• Each partner country then contacts all the sponsors with affected children to let them know the status of their child.

Seems pretty cut and dried, right? And often, the process works exactly as I just described it.

However, as we all know, we do not live in a perfect world. Sometimes a disaster will wreak havoc on the field’s end, thus affecting our communications process.

Let’s take the recent typhoons in the Philippines as an example. (more…)

Typhoon Ketsana, which struck the Philippines on September 26, damaged more than 1,500 homes of Compassion-assisted children and families, and nearly 20 student centers were affected by the storm.*

Ketsana hit the Philippines on a Saturday, the day when registered children gather at the student centers. But on September 26 not many arrived at Marikina Foursquare Student Center. Ketsana was already pounding hard.

However, some children did come.

Bernadette, the center director, fed them and instructed them to go home immediately. And as she planned to visit the homes of other children to give them some food because the floodwaters were rising fast, she was called by her own family. Her home was flooded too.

“What I have learned from this is not to look back on the possessions I lost, but rather focus on saving myself and my loved ones. On that day, I couldn’t attend to the needs of the children since my own home was in disarray.”

In the following days Bernadette reports that none of the children from her student center were hurt, although all of their homes were flooded, damaged in some way or destroyed completely.

The student center and its surrounding communities were completely submerged under water. And five days after the typhoon, homes and communities were still flooded, muddied, stinky and a mess.

Mirasol, a mother at the church, says,

“It is still a nightmare for me. I still vividly recall images of people being swept away by the water. I couldn’t sleep thinking that I was not able to help them as they were crying, as they were swept away towards the river. My child was crying the loudest, ‘Mother, Mother, the water is so high already!’”

Two of Mirasol’s children, Maribel and Dominic, are registered at the student center. They are safe but their home is still under water.

Miguel, another child from the student center, says he was so afraid because he got separated from his father when his father took his mother to safety first, but could not come back for Miguel and his younger brother because of the dangerously strong current.

Miguel and his brother were rescued by a neighbor, also a Compassion parent, as the boys jumped from roof to roof. They were reunited with their parents the next day at the church, but their tiny home was washed away completely.

Miguel’s father confesses,

“I pounded on my heart in anguish, crying. I was thinking of my boys all the time. I didn’t know what to do. I tried to look for them several times. I even waded back and forth in the water calling out for my sons.”

But despite the situation he and his family now find themselves in, Miguel’s father says,

“I won’t complain because I still have what truly matters.”

His family.

When natural disasters strike, Compassion’s Disaster Relief Fund provides sponsored children and their families with food, clothing and basic supplies to help rebuild their lives. Learn more about the Disaster Relief Fund.

*Editor’s note: In the wake of a disaster we contact each sponsor who has a child affected by that disaster. We do so once we receive details from the country office about the child. If your child was affected by either Typhoon Ketsana or Typhoon Parma, you will be contacted when we receive information about your child.

Phil Fleischman of Prime Time America interviewed Rachel Wolf, World Vision’s Communications Director for International News, and our own Mark Hanlon, Senior Vice President of the USA Group.

The eight-minute segment aired on Moody Radio on July 31.

This is the byline on a recent op-ed piece in The Miami Herald:
“Edouard Lassegue is the Vice President of the Latin America and Caribbean Region at Compassion International, the world’s largest Christian child development organization.”

And this is why Edouard says we should care about what is happening in Honduras:

Poverty in Central American countries is the foundation for all other social justice issues. Honduras maintains an unemployment rate of 28 percent, and two-thirds of its citizens live below the poverty line. The instability the country is currently experiencing is not rooted in politics — it is social. It is hopelessness and destitution.

When Central American economies fail to produce opportunities and jobs — and if governments cannot protect citizens — populist demagogues promising reform but continuing the status quo are elected.

Where poverty flourishes, crime and corruption flourish. This is what we are currently witnessing in Honduras.

Read the entire op-ed piece in The Miami Herald.

Hey blog friends, resident Crisis Lady here, checking in and letting you know about a cool new feature on compassion.com that helps you stay informed about what’s going on in your sponsored child’s country.

We now have country-specific RSS feeds!

In other words, you can easily subscribe to information for each country where you sponsor a child, and then every time we publish something new, you will automatically be notified!

For instance …

Let’s say you sponsor a child in Haiti. Like me. You can subscribe to a feed specifically for crisis updates from Haiti.

If you want to receive crisis updates for all our countries, you can subscribe to the main crisis update feed.

And that’s not all! We also have feeds specifically for the Child Survival Program and the Leadership Development Program, as well as our press releases.

Subscribe to a Compassion feed. And happy RSS-ing! Make it a feeding frenzy.

Remember when I told you about my new job? I’ve been doing it for several months now and so I feel like I’ve gotten a pretty good grip on things. Well … as good a grip as one can have on a job that depends entirely on world events. And oh my word, the world has been eventful lately, hasn’t it?

One of the first things I do each day when I get to work is open up six world news websites. I browse each site for headlines about our 24 field countries to get an idea of what kind of crises I might be reporting that week.

When I’m reading through the headlines, I sometimes get the surreal feeling that I’m getting a tiny glimpse into God’s view of this world. For a few moments, my perspective shifts from my self-centered, ego-centric worldview to one where we are simply a severely broken and hurting creation in desperate need of redemption.

Right now in the United States, we are practically smothered with political ads and news reports about the faltering economy, but really these “issues” pale in comparison to what’s going on in the rest of the world.

Besides the global food crisis (which you’ve probably heard about by now) here’s an idea of what our staff and children on the other side of the globe are currently facing:

• Thailand and Bolivia are both dealing with political unrest and violent protests of the current government.
• Haiti and the Dominican Republic are struggling to recover from four successive hurricanes.
• The Philippines has faced violent political conflict.
• India is in the midst of serious and deadly religious conflicts between Hindus and Christians.
• Burkina Faso has recently had heavy rains and flooding throughout the country.
• Bangladesh is dealing with continual flooding.

I’m sure there will be more bullet points to add tomorrow. It’s difficult to read the same kinds of headlines day after day, reporting over and over the non-stop fighting, corruption and scandal happening in every corner of the globe. But more than depressing me, it makes me angry. I know who is ultimately responsible for the evil in this world, and I hate him. But I also know it will end someday, and I know how it will end.

And this is what keeps me going.

I used to work on the web team, which meant that writing for the blog was part of my actual job description. But God made it clear to me that He had other plans, and now a month later, here I am working on the International Communications team. Basically, my new job is to be the communication link between our field countries (where the kids live) and the partner countries (where the sponsors live) when a crisis occurs.

A crisis is anything from a natural disaster like a hurricane or an earthquake, to a man-made one like civil unrest or war. It might be a bus accident, or a building collapsing, or a shooting, or a volcanic eruption … any event that affects a group of children in our programs. Because of the volatile nature of the developing countries where we work, crises occur frequently.

Unless you are Super-sponsor and check out the crisis update page daily, you probably are unaware of the wide variety of dangers our children face. I know I was. Even as an employee, it’s hard for me to keep up with all the events occurring around the world. It just seems like an unending list of prayer requests.

And it’s been easy for me to be more or less ignorant.

Except now the crisis reports are coming to my inbox. I’m the first one to find out if dengue fever is killing the kids in our program. I get the news if one of our projects has been looted and destroyed. I’m the person who first hears of children dying in a flood or a mudslide. When a crisis occurs, it’s my job to get accurate information to you as quickly as possible.

It’s a huge responsibility. Even as I write this, I’m overwhelmed by the responsibility God has placed on me and the trust that you place in me (and all of us who work for Compassion.) I take this responsibility seriously.

For the sake of the children we serve, I hope my job is extremely unexciting … boring even. The way the world has been lately, though, I have a feeling things will just get worse.

While this new position is emotionally heavy, I have hope because I am confident that none of this is outside of God’s control. He is not surprised by the crises. Only saddened, at times, by our response. We as Compassion employees, and you as sponsors, have been specifically appointed to be miracle-workers for children in poverty all over the world.

What a calling, huh?