Milagro was a 5-month-old baby girl. Her mother, Veronica, was fighting the darkness of a home without electricity with the cheapest alternative she had — a candle. Veronica was taking care of little Milagro just as any other mother anywhere in the world would.

For just a blink of an eye, Milagro was left unattended, and the worst scenario happened. The candle fell on Milagro’s cradle and the blankets caught fire.

Just like her name, it was a miracle that she survived at such a young age. Milagro lost her right arm, and part of her face and body had deep burns. It was a traumatic event for the baby and the mother.

Veronica comes from a very poor, but united family. Because of the very scarce resources she had, she was forced to move from one place to another, always looking for the cheapest alternative to rent a room. She says that it was God that led her to go to a new neighborhood named Plan del Pino, in Ciudad Delgado, a municipality of San Salvador city.

“Everything that happens, if you are a Christian, is to your benefit according to God’s plan.”

Because of her special needs, Milagro never went to school, nor had friends. Fear of rejection and pity for her girl led Veronica to raise her daughter in a bubble. She thought Milagro would never be normal. To Veronica, she was “special.”

At 7 years old, Milagro enrolled in our Child Sponsorship Program. She found many things at the center that she would never have found anywhere else. But above all, she found hope. She also found people who would care for her in unimaginable ways.

“Milagro has a twin sister,” says Maria, Milagro’s tutor since she entered the program. “The grandmother gave the other girl away when they were born,” she adds, hoping that this would clarify the situation of poverty that the family has endured for years.

“When Milagro entered the program, she had a very low self-esteem. She would say that any day she would die, and that the people pity her because she did not have an arm.” She used to wear her hair on the face because she was ashamed of the marks on her cheeks.

The tutor and the center director were committed to improve the family’s situation. The love that the church staff had for Milagro was so obvious that Milagro started to see in Brother Alvaro, the director, the father she never had.

“When you show Milagro you care and give her a caress, she would stick to you like a band-aid,” says Maria.

The church staff that because of the poverty, Milagro’s family moved from one place to another frequently. They also realized that the mother was in need of much help, materially and spiritually.

“I told her I would hire her as my assistant, and her payment would be food,” says Maria.

This was the strategy she chose to keep mother and child interested in the program.

“They would have breakfast and lunch here every day, and she would help me as my assistant, helping here at the program.”

Veronica and Milagro were having three meals a day at the center, thanks to the help Veronica provided at church. The surplus of the food they cooked for the children would go into a bag for Veronica’s family every day. The church did not stop there.

“We went to talk to the principal at a Christian school,” recalls Maria. “The principal got upset when he heard about the attitude of the public school. He also made the commitment to help in all ways possible.” 

The only problem was that the Christian school had fees, and Milagro’s family was too poor to pay $9 a month for that private education.

It was then that the provision came.

A sponsorship.

“She got a sponsor from Korea. We cannot even say the name because we do not know how to pronounce it,” Maria says with a smile.

The sponsor sent a gift to help the girl get a prosthetic arm. With the gift, the staff began to make arrangements to get Milagro an arm. To their surprise, they found a technician that made them at a special price and committed to help with adjustments and repairs at no cost.

“We were able to pay for the arm, the enrollment fee, and two months of tuition, as well as for the books and supplies for Milagro,” says  Maria. The rest of the monthly $9 fees were covered through the Compassion program, with authorization of the church partner facilitator.

Milagro began to attend first grade. She has learned to write, and now writes her own letters to her sponsor. She is now 9 and will be accepted into the public school, since there is proof now that she is as able to learn as well as any other child.

“We still have to work on her self-esteem. But we see she has improved,” says Maria.

Milagro now has a brighter future and now she prays and wishes to have a picture of her sponsor. Her biggest dream is, however, to one day meet in person that Korean man that God used to impact her life.

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

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

God is the author of the BIG story, the story of His great love and redemption. And we’re all a part of that big story. But we each have our own stories to write, and I believe that God invites us to joyfully and playfully join Him in the creative process of writing our parts.

Sometimes our thinking binds us to a deterministic view of the world, like we are mere pawns in a chess game. But I believe we are active agents in the story.

In his book, Holy Play – The Joyful Adventure of Unleashing Your Diving Purpose, Baptist preacher and author Kirk Byron Jones says,

“What if, more than anything else, God wants you to experience the joy of searching out and choosing your purpose in life among a vast assortment of opportunities? What if there isn’t a detailed plan for your life but an open outline and an invitation from God to you to creatively and deliberately fill in the spaces? What if God’s ultimate dream for your life is that you live and play your best dreams?”

Fifty-seven years ago God spoke to a man. Amid the droning engines of an airplane, God asked that man, “What are you going to do?”

The faces of Korean children, the feather weight of their small bodies in his arms, and the gentleness of their voices filled Everett Swanson’s mind.

On that plane an idea was born. A simple vision for a faithful, godly response to God’s question became a seed for an unimaginable movement of God’s people. Compassion.

Fifty-seven years later God continues to speak to His people, calling us to serve the global movement for children in poverty. A global movement we call Compassion.

What are we going to do?

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

My husband just celebrated his birthday. He’s 41.

Or maybe 39.

Or did he just turn the big 4-0?

I’m not being coy. We really don’t know his age. Like millions of children around the world, my husband was born into a life of poverty.

There are no records of his birth. He never knew his parents, although he understood from an early age that he was a G.I. baby. His size marked him a hapa, a Euro-Asian mixed-race child, a particularly negative thing in Asian countries where purity of race is a matter of pride and worth.

From his earliest memories, he was an orphan. He lived primarily on the streets, except for times he was taken in by “foster families,” where he was little more than an outcast mongrel and slave.

He was often hungry, usually cold, sometimes abused, always alone.

Sounds pretty hopeless, doesn’t it?

But something happened to change the story. A small thing, really.

Someone noticed him.

That someone was a Korean woman. Shunned by her Buddhist family because she had become a Christian, she noticed Corey one day outside her parent’s home.

Recognizing him as a child of an American soldier, she alerted an orphanage in the area that was run by an American organization. He was taken to the orphanage — more correctly, two men lured him with a bag of candy and threw him into the back seat of a car, which might explain his lifelong abhorrence of sweets — where he was given clothes and food and eventually adopted by an American family.

At the age of 8. Or maybe 7. It’s not really important, as long as he’s older than I am.

Today, my husband is an executive at a company that works with nonprofits. He teaches Bible study classes, studies Greek and has a wicked sense of humor. He is both one of the smartest people I’ve ever met as well as one of the most talented.

Most important to me, he is the father of our three children and my lifelong companion and love.

And, as you might imagine, he has quite the passion for orphans and the poor.

I sometimes wonder about that Korean woman. I doubt she knows the impact she’s had on me, my children and the hundreds of other people Corey has touched.

If she hadn’t reported his existence to that American orphanage, Corey would most likely have died of disease or malnutrition before he was a teenager.

Even if he had lived, there was no future for him in Korea. As a half-breed without paternal bloodlines, he was considered a gutter rat, without worth or identity.

But because she saw him, the story turned. Such a simple act, but it changed everything.

Sometimes, when we look at the ocean of poverty and need, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.

“What can I do in the face of such hugeness?” we wonder. “What good would my pebble do in such a vast sea of suffering?”

But here’s the amazing thing about pebbles dropped in the water — they create ripples.
All you have to do is notice. See one child. Just one. Then act. Sponsor that child. Throw your pebble into the ocean.

God will take care of the ripples. You never know how far they might reach.

Kelly @ Love Well is a writer, mother, wife and pebble thrower. She’s passionate about the ripples created by child sponsorship and delights to introduce people to Compassion. She also loves her coffee. Her life ambition is to laugh often, live purposefully and love well. When she has a few free seconds, she blogs at www.lovewell.blogspot.com.

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