Compassion is more than just a sponsorship program that helps break the cycle of poverty. It is about a relationship between a registered child and his or her sponsor. The lives of a young boy, Vitoon, and his sponsor, Richard, will never be the same since they got to know each other.

Vitoon is a Leadership Development Program student in Thailand. He is in his third year at Rajabhat Chiang Mai University, majoring in English education.

Vitoon was born into a hill tribe called Karen. Vitoon’s house is in Chiang Mai, but it’s located in the high mountains, a five-hour drive from the city.

When Vitoon was in 10th grade, his sponsor stopped sponsoring him and Vitoon prayed to God for his new sponsor. That was when Richard came into his life.

“Richard sends me a bunch of letters and that’s why we have a great relationship. In his first few letters, Richard told me that he was 82 years old, he had two cats and he did not have a family. I felt so sorry for him. He was quite old and he lived alone. No one would help take care of him. So I began to pray for my sponsor.”

Through the letters, Vitoon could feel love and care from Richard.

“Do keep me informed in your studies, your success and even difficulties. I pray to God to help you, protect you and bless you, Vitoon, the most precious in my life.”

From the love Vitoon experienced from Richard, he found himself with a new family member whom he soon called Grandpa.

“Grandpa always encourages me to focus on studying so I will have good grades and I will have a better life.”

Grandpa Richard inspired this Karen tribal boy to have a dream to enroll in our Leadership Development Program so he could pursue a university education.

“I am so proud of you, Vitoon,” Richard wrote to him, ”but you will have to study hard and long hours to succeed again, but I know you can succeed.”

Vitoon’s parents are farmers who work hard just to make ends meet. They do not earn enough to support him through university.

When Vitoon knew that he was accepted as a Leadership Development Program student, he was happy but also sad.

“The child development center director told me when I entered the program, Grandpa might not be my sponsor because the financial support was much higher for university students. But Grandpa informed me that he wanted to continue sponsoring me. I was very happy and grateful to have him as my sponsor. He wanted to help me, even though we have never met.”

Not only has Vitoon found new family, but so has Richard.

“I do not have a family any longer so I am happy to be a part of your family. Vitoon, you are like a fine, intelligent, studious grandson to me, making me useful again doing what God teaches us: help one other. You are a big help to me. You give meaning to my life so I want to give you a better life.”

At the age of 84, Richard had to move to a retirement village where there are people who can assist him. He had to leave his cats and his familiar life behind, so the only thing he had left was his sponsored child. Richard longs to receive letters from his “grandson.”

“Last Tuesday was a very exciting day for me. In my daily mail was a large white envelop. I hurried back to my small room to see what was in the oversized envelope. I was very excited but as soon as I saw the content, I was even much more exited. Four beautiful colored photos of you spilled out.”

Letters for Richard are more than just pieces of paper; they are treasures that are priceless.

“Very dear Grandson, what a blessing you are to me. Today I found a long and interesting letter from you in your clear and beautiful handwriting. I was so excited and happy I kissed your letter many times before even opening it. I had waited for that letter for a long time.

“I have kept all your letters as treasures, so if I do not find one in my mailbox, I go to my three-ring binder and read again an old letter from you. That gives me much pleasure. I feel we are still in touch one with the other.

“Every thought you express to me changes a dull, cloudy day into a beautiful day full of sunshine.”

There was one letter that made Vitoon cry and he committed to praying to God consistently. He learned that his beloved grandpa Richard was faced with health problems. Richard cannot walk without a walking aid, and he has lost his hearing as well as the sight in his right eye. Sometimes Richard spends several days writing his long letters because he can use his one good eye only for short periods. 

Every time Vitoon writes a letter to Richard, he feels like he is sharing his life with his own grandpa rather than writing a letter to his sponsor. Vitoon loves telling Richard about his family, updating him on his life, and finding good messages to make his grandpa feel happy. Sometimes Vitoon sends photos along with long letters.

Richard loves Vitoon so much that he supports Vitoon through his spiritual life and academic study.

“I want to buy my grandson a fine, new guitar that must be selected from a good music store with the help of Compassion who will bill me for the full cost of the guitar you want. Choose the best one you see and your proud and loving grandpa will gladly pay for it. My first gift to my grandson.”

Vitoon uses his musical talent along with his guitar in a worship band that he leads for Sunday service. He is proud and enjoys playing his guitar so much that he writes to his grandpa many times to tell him. Vitoon also has a computer notebook that he received from his beloved sponsor. Richard wants Vitoon to use it to do research and reports for his studies. Vitoon is one of the few leadership students who has such a privileged relationship.

As a leadership student, Vitoon wants to develop himself to be a leader who has an impact on others. The Leadership Development Program has equipped and helped him to change from a shy boy to a confident man who can lead worship or games in front of people. This program also trains Vitoon to have a broader perspective, teaching him to listen, obey and fellow Jesus’ commands.

Vitoon has a desire to be a teacher in the mountains. He wants to dedicate himself to teaching young children in the same way he learns from Richard to live for others. He knows that children who live in remote areas have the same abilities as children in the city but they lack the opportunities to gain knowledge.

Vitoon wants to be the person who gives those children that chance, just as Richard gives to him.

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Ten-year-old Suppakit walks in the oppressive 100-degree heat along a narrow dirt path. His feet are cut up and blistered from frequently journeying on this path. Every day he travels on this trail just to get water from the Sop Moei River. He has to constantly be on guard and aware of his surroundings. The closer he gets to the river, the closer he is to his former home town in Burma, the place where his family fled.

Suppakit and his family are a part of the Karen tribal group, which is a minority group in Burma. Because the Burmese government oppresses numerous ethnic groups, his family lived in extremely difficult circumstances and eventually fled to Thailand. Now Suppakit’s family is recognized as a Burmese refugee family with limited rights in Thailand.

After the family settled down in Thailand, they built a basic house made from thatched bamboo and covered with leaves. The house appears to be unstable, but it is a common type of housing style throughout the village. But it hardly protects Suppakit and his family from the harsh weather, including strong winds and rain during the monsoon season.

“During the winter it is very cold here, and I have only a small, thin blanket to cover myself. Sometimes when it gets unbearably cold, I give my blanket to my little brother to keep him warm, and I make a fire and sit around it to get warm instead.”

The bamboo house is divided into two parts, a balcony and a bedroom. The house is no larger than 169 square feet. At night, the entire family, consisting of eight members, sleeps together on one old, thin fabric with torn pillows. Every night Supakit hangs an old, torn mosquito net over his mattress. There is no electricity. He uses a candle as a light during the night.

Suppakit bathes in the river because there is no bathroom in the house. It lacks running water. The only water source is the river. It is Supakit’s responsibility to carry water from the river to his home for the family’s daily use.

One of the many limitations of Burmese refugees in Thailand is not being able to own property. This means they can only option work as hired laborers. Hired laborers receive a wage of less than $3 per day, if they get the opportunity to work.

The typical meal for Suppakit’s family is rice, boiled vegetables and chili paste. They hardly ever get the chance to eat meat because it is a luxury they can rarely afford.

One evening Suppakit’s father, the family’s only breadwinner, was seriously injured when he stepped on a land mine near the border while collecting vegetables for the family. He lost one of his legs.

Soon after, Suppakit’s mother was diagnosed with cancer. She was admitted to the hospital in the local refugee camp. Suppakit did not see his parents for two years because his father left to take care of his sick wife at the hospital. While his parents were gone, Suppakit stayed with his grandparents.

Suppakit could not go to the refugee hospital because he did not have enough money, and being a refugee with no legal rights, he was afraid the soldiers would seize him if he traveled outside of his village of Nong Bua. Nong Bua is located in a very remote area, and is about an eight-hour drive from the city of Tak.

In Nong Bua village, many refugees are in the same situation as Suppakit. But in this small village, a church is dedicated to helping these families.

Most of the Karen Burmese refugees in Nong Bua are from a Buddhist background. They also have strong animist beliefs. They have a village headman who says he communicates with the natural and ancestral spirits on their behalf.

“In Nong Bua village, more than 70 percent of the villagers are Burmese refugees. The Sob Moei River divides the two countries. However, the distance isn’t great as it takes only five minutes to reach one country to the other. Most of the villagers are illiterate and they are living in very poor conditions. We want to do something to help them to have a better life,” explains Sudthida, a staff member at Nong Bua Church Child Development Center.

A few months after the child development center opened, Suppakit’s father took his son to the church and asked the staff to accept his son into the sponsorship program because he wanted his son to receive the help, guidance and education that he was unable to provide.

Nared Charoensriwanit, a Partnership Facilitator who works with the church, says,

“The church has plans to help refugee families like Suppakit in two ways. In the short term, the church provides them basic needs, such as food and necessary items that they use daily. Besides that, the center supports the infrastructure for building a house and distributes tools like knives, spades or shovels that are used in farmland.

“For the long term, the church will support and give knowledge to children on educational and vocational skills. We will emphasize agriculture, such as feeding domestic animals or growing crops.”

Sopa Marturongsa-nguan, the center director, adds,

“We hope to see those refugee children applying the knowledge and skills that they have learned to earn income when they grow up. We will teach them languages such as Burmese, Karen, Thai and English. As they live along the border, the language will be very useful to them to make a living.”

On week days, Suppakit attends a school near his village. The quality of education in remote areas is quite poor. The students in the classroom greatly outnumber the one teacher assigned to teach them. Also, the school lacks resources and materials.

In contrast to his life at school, at the development center Suppakit receives one-on-one attention from staff members and he gains much useful knowledge, encouragement and inspiration.

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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.

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Bee still recalls the letters he received from his sponsor from Canada. The letters always encouraged him to keep on studying and stressed the significance of education.

The support and letters of encouragement from his sponsor enabled Bee to break free from the chains of poverty.

Now Bee has been blessed with the opportunity to serve the Lord in ministry.

Bee’s life was radically transformed because of his sponsorship, and he now gladly serves as a bridge between sponsors and children.

He hopes that each sponsor can make a difference in a child’s life in the same way that his sponsor dramatically transformed his.

A typical day for Bee starts at 6:30. He wakes up and spends about an hour getting ready for the day.

At 7:30 he leaves the quiet and tranquility of his room and heads to his busy and activity-filled job at Compassion.

Every morning Bee starts work with a time of devotions with fellow staff from 8 to 8:40.

Then he begins work. Bee juggles many tasks as a PF.

“The main responsibility for a partnership facilitator can be broken down into four parts.

“The first part is to complete routine work such as monitoring the project budget and program, planning for travel, strategy planning, organizing and arranging team and office meetings, as well as following up on letters and memos.

“The second is to equip church partners to have the potential and capacity to work with children effectively.

“The third is to equip myself. I have to learn and study new things in order to support and help the projects.

“The fourth part is to participate in office activities.”

“PFs typically work with 12 church partners on various projects, but I have 13 development centers to work on.

“Every month I travel to different sites for two to three weeks at a time. I spend about two days supporting and facilitating a child development center.”

As a PF, Bee must make a conscientious effort to always be humble and patient because he works directly with staff members from different backgrounds, listening to their problems and assisting the staff members in finding solutions to them.

The many different languages spoken in Thailand often creates communication barriers. More than half of Compassion Thailand’s church partners are run by various ethnic minority groups, commonly known as hill tribe people, located predominantly in the mountainous rural areas of Thailand.

Often, the hill tribe staff members cannot speak Thai fluently. In spite of this, Bee is always very willing to be a part of helping local churches accomplish their goals, such as developing children’s ministries.

“When I was a child I always dreamed to work with or to get involved with the church. I saw the Compassion staff conducting activities or taking photos of children at the project where I was a registered Compassion child. I observed the courage, joy and happiness they displayed in their willingness to help needy children like me have a better life.”

Bee was registered with Compassion when he was a student in the second grade. His parents were poor farmers who could not afford to support Bee’s education, so they took Bee to a hostel center and enrolled him there.

The center aided and supported him in many areas of his life. It provided Bee an accommodation for when he studied at school, food to eat, as well as a school to attend. This compassionate support led Bee to God’s kingdom.

“The center changed my life completely. I had a chance to receive an education while most of my friends at home had to quit school and start working at a very young age due to the cycle of poverty they could not escape. The unfortunate effects of poverty motivated me to return and help children who are in need like I was.”

Upon graduating from university, Bee received his first job at Compassion. He traveled to various Compassion-assisted child development centers to take pictures and document the registered child information. He did this for two years.

Then one day, God opened the door for him to have the opportunity to work in the area he dreamed of, that of being a Partnership Facilitator.

Being a PF has fulfilled Bee’s deep longing to release the Karen people, one of the largest ethnic minority groups in Thailand, from poverty. Having been born into a Karen family, Bee has a strong burden and desire to work with and help the Karen people.

“I have a vision to break the chain of poverty that is binding the Karen people. I want them to be given the weapon of education to fight back. There are so many young people desperately wanting an education, but due to lack of finances, they are forced to leave school and work to earn money for their families at a young age.

“I want to see the Karen youth have the opportunity to study and to break free from the chains of poverty that are holding them back from reaching their goals. I strongly believe in the power of education.”

In order to successfully support these children, support from sponsors is crucial. Bee works wholeheartedly to connect sponsors with their sponsored children.

“After I receive a request for a sponsor visit via mail from the Tour and Visit Specialist, I establish contact with the center to get information about this child. Most sponsors wish to know the best date for which they can come to visit their sponsored child, how many siblings their child has, and whether the center is able to provide prepared food for them during the visit.

“A few days later the center will reply back with the requested information. I then report back to the Tour and Visit specialist within five days. This is only for an individual sponsor’s visit.

“However, if it is a group of sponsors who wish to visit, a lot of preparation work must be completed beforehand. I recently helped to organize a group of 18 people from our Australia advocacy team who came to visit us.

“I first began by informing the various center coordinators about the tour’s expectations, the length of their stay, the kind of information the group wanted to receive, as well as the locations they felt inspired to visit.

“After, I went to the center to finish the final preparations.

“For the AU advocacy team, I asked the center staff to present their church history and ministry. I also asked the center to make an appointment with the child’s parents for the team to visit, including giving them a new experience to participate in the center’s activities.”

The AU advocacy team’s visit was very successful and is an example of a visit that went smoothly. However, not all visits go according to plan.

Establishing contact with center coordinators can be a difficult task. Some centers are located in very remote mountainous areas where there is no telephone or Internet access. The staff members from these remote centers can only contact PFs once a week when they go down to the closest town to run necessary errands or the send the letters.

For urgent cases, PFs will contact the center staff members who have telephone and Internet access and are located closer to the remoter center areas to deliver information to the remote sites. This system of relay messaging obviously results in delays.

Another problem is the cultural differences between the visiting sponsors and that of the local culture.

For example, some westerners who come to visit express their love and care through physical displays of affection such as hugging or holding hands. However, most Thai people prefer to show their affection by smiling rather than through direct physical contact.

Despite the PFs’ best efforts, some challenges inevitably occur in the Tour and Visit process. Occasionally, some sponsors have visited their sponsored child without informing the local field office.

In order to protect the children, it is the responsibility of PFs and Tours and Visits Specialists to handle these kinds of situations by asking the center staff to prohibit sponsors from meeting with their child until after they have received contact from the field office as well as a briefing on Compassion’s guidelines and policies concerning sponsor and child visitations.

There is one story of a sponsor family and their sponsored child that always makes Bee smile.

“I remember one time some sponsors came to visit their sponsored child. This child was not healthy because he was suffering from asthma. He often had to skip school and could not play sports with his friends, which caused him to feel lonely and depressed at times.

“Once his sponsors met him, I could instantly see and feel that there was a special connection between them. The sponsors showed their love to the child and kept saying how much they loved him, and how much the child meant to them.

“Before they left, they prayed for their child and for his family. After that, the child and his sponsors developed a very close relationship and kept in touch through letters.

“The sponsors encouraged and helped their child by sending him gifts. I saw a dramatic transformation in the life of this child. This young boy had changed dramatically. He was not only physically healthier and happier, but also happier inside. You could see the joy in him radiating from within.”

After a busy and chaotic day, Bee often works off the day’s stress by running in order to clear and quiet his mind. He always carries his cell phone during his runs in case a church member calls.

When Bee finishes his run, he often enjoys dinner with friends. After dinner, he usually comes back to his room and plays the guitar, practicing to play on Sunday during his church’s worship service.

Bee is very passionate about playing the guitar and he even plays in a band called Ignition that he and some other Compassion staff members have formed. They often play worship music for the center children as well as perform in events that are affiliated with Compassion.

On weekends when Bee is not traveling to a center, he can be found resting, hanging out with his close friends, and working out in the evenings.

On Sunday, he attends a church where he serves the Lord by leading worship during the service.

After an activity-filled Sunday morning and afternoon, Bee usually tries to rest in order to regain the energy he needs for the upcoming week, so that by Monday he is ready to serve wholeheartedly in the ministry he has been called to.

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