Our correspondence team receives many gifts from sponsors for their sponsored children that can’t be sent to our country offices. If this happens to your gift, we will contact you to see if you’d like the gift returned or donated to a local Colorado Springs charity, Northern Churches Care.

And to help prevent that from happening to you, which items do you think can be sent to your sponsored child through the mail?

Ok, ok. It was a trick question. None of the items can be sent through the mail. Unfortunately, we receive about 300 items like these each month. Our correspondence team spends about eight hours each week sorting out these undeliverable items.

Last year, they were able to donate over 200 shoeboxes.

You can find a list of items that you CAN send to your child through the mail on compassion.com.

UPDATE: November 30, 2011 – Here’s an idea of the volume of items we receive that can’t be sent and which sponsors choose not to have returned.

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

Children living in poverty face daily challenges. However, through sponsorship you are providing children hope, love, the chance to succeed and the chance to know Christ.

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

 Compassion began to minister in the Dominican Republic around the year 1970. At present, we are working with a total of 168 implementing church partners and an equal number of child development centers.

Out of these development centers, Betel Student Center in the municipality of Consuelo in the eastern province of San Pedro de Macoris is one of the most recently opened centers with 69 sponsored children.

Recently, only 25 children at this center were sponsored. But the staff were amazed to see God’s provision of new sponsors for their children who live in the community of Barrio George.

Barrio George took its name from from Hurricane Georges, which hit the Island of Hispaniola in 1998 and left many dead and thousands of people homeless.

Many of the development center children and their families were among the homeless after this hurricane. A number of unfinished apartments, which were midway through construction, were provided to temporarily shelter these families. 

Poverty still affects the families, especially the children. This is why the Biblical Christian Church in Consuelo asked us to partner with them to start a child development center in this locality.

Now, whenever the people in Barrio George see the development center secretary, Raida, or the director, Patricia, in the streets they ask if their children have been sponsored yet.

At church, people ask for prayer that their children will be sponsored. Whenever a child receives a sponsor, they give thanks to the Lord for His provision.

Consuelo’s economy used to be based on the cultivation of sugar cane, but the industry deteriorated and closed in the 1990s, leaving many people unemployed. The community in which Raida and Patricia live has very few work sources; most men working locally are motorcycle-taxi drivers or vegetable-market vendors, while women wash and iron other people’s clothes for pay.

Other people work at the free-zone industries in San Pedro or move to the tourist city of Bavaro for jobs. These people must leave their children with a grandmother or an aunt. Formal jobs are rare for school teachers, city hall workers or government ministry workers.

In the community of Barrio George, children learn to read and write around the age of 8, which is why many sponsored children don’t normally write introductory letters themselves.

The Letter-writing Process

The letter-writing process starts in the country office, where a Sponsor and Donor Service associate receives the request for new-assignment letters through the Correspondence Tracking Application computer system. Through this system the field office learns that a new sponsor has been found for a child in the Dominican Republic.

Each Sponsor and Donor Service associate works with an average of 43 child development centers. The associate prints a list of requests for new-assignment letters for each child development center. Every Thursday, these and other documents are sent by courier to the centers. In the capital city, centers usually send a staff member to pick up their documents personally.

At the child development center, the secretary opens the documents and sorts the content. The request for new-assignment letters lets the secretary know which children have been newly sponsored. These children are called from their classrooms and given the good news – and encouraged to write an introductory letter to their new sponsor.

Typically, the secretary interviews the child to begin the letter-writing process. Some of the secretary’s common interview questions are about facts she already knows, such as the child’s family, with whom they live, if they are enjoying good health, their school grade, what they like to do, what they like to play, if they pray, if they want to ask a question of their sponsors, if they want their sponsors to pray for something specific, and so on.

From the child’s answers, the secretary drafts a letter in a notebook that is saved in the child’s office file.

When a child doesn’t yet know how to write, the secretary copies the letter from the child’s notebook onto the letter stationery, which is ultimately sent to the sponsor. Usually, the child signs the letter either with his or her name or a written mark, or by marking the letter with a fingerprint.

Often, the child will include a drawing, which is attached to the introductory letter.

If the child is able to write, he or she transcribes the letter content from the notebook onto the letter stationery.

In the case of an older child with more writing experience (usually about the age of 12), the child writes the original letter in his or her notebook and the secretary checks for corrections. Then the child writes the actual letter on the stationery that is to be sent to the sponsor.

After children have written to their sponsors, the letters are sent to the country office and received at the Documentation Reception and Distribution Center, where each piece of information is verified and registered. Then the children’s letters are forwarded to the corresponding Sponsor and Donor Service associates, who scan the bar code on each letter to verify that they have been received from the field.

The next step is translation. Sponsor and Donor Services pass the letter to the Translation associate, who calls the translators so they can pick up letters for translation.

Every translator is given seven days to complete a package of letters. Usually translators receive a new package of letters as they return the one they’ve just translated.

Letters then go back to their corresponding Sponsor and Donor Service associates, who prepare the letters for mailing to their destination countries. From the beginning to the end, the time needed to have child introductory letters written and shipped averages 15 days.

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

Here are his thoughts about a sponsor’s involvement in a child’s life.

Parental love is the first love a child receives. However, there are many children who are born orphans and many children whose parents desert them when they are still children.

Also, in many homes, parents end up fighting with each other and this leaves an impact on these little minds. The lives of the children become miserable when they don’t receive or experience love.

You play a major role in the development of children. You are instruments in the hands of God to demonstrate His care to children who don’t know what love is all about. When children receive no love at home, it’s common for them to seek from you the love they miss from their parents.

You help care for the all aspects of the welfare of the children — spiritual, educational, social, physical and financial. You help release children from poverty by giving them education and securing their life by helping bring them into local churches, thus raising them as good and responsible citizens of the society.

Not only that, your unceasing prayers for your sponsored children go a long way in granting the children a bright and prosperous future.

In developing countries like India, the role you play is extremely important. You are a great blessing to churches all over. Through you, churches grow. The church is able to go into places where once we were not able to. The church is able to influence the society.

The majority of churches in India are not in a position to raise funds. Most businesspeople and industrialists are not Christians. We rarely find them with a vision to help children. Hence, we depend on our brethren like you.

Even today, the Lord cries out with the same words that Isaiah heard, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”

You are the ones who have responded to this call with the words “Here am I.” You are the ones who have responded to God’s commission.

And sponsored children do have expectations of you because of this. Though the children definitely feel highly obliged to you for the financial help and gifts, they also expect something more.

The children love to read the letters you send. The letters are a source of inspiration, love and encouragement for them. The letters gives them a deep sense of joy to know that somebody, in some corner of the world, remembers them and cares for them.

Through your letters, children understand your emotions and ambitions. You guide and counsel your sponsored children through the letters.

Every child longs to see his or her sponsor, at least once in lifetime, to see the face of the person who resides in some distant part of the world, and who loves, without being seen, and cares, sometimes more than the parents.

You also desire to see your sponsored children, and many times you never get this opportunity. However, even if you are not able to see the child in this world, you should be able to see the child in heaven. This should be the burning desire in your heart.

In order that this becomes a reality, you must regularly pray for your sponsored children and their spiritual growth. In this way, you are able to influence not only the life of the child alone, but also the entire family and society. The sponsored child becomes a powerful agent in days to come, influencing the society and nation. The child begins to be an advocate for other children in the society.

Sponsoring children in need enables one to discover the joy that comes from blessing someone else’s life! We may not be able to transform the entire world, but we can surely make a notable difference in the life of our sponsored children! It would give us a sense of fulfillment, of satisfaction to restore the true joy of childhood to the children.

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

• Get the latest updates on the Haiti earthquake and it’s affect on Compassion and the children we serve.

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

Here’s one thing you need to consider when you ask yourself that question. It’s courtesy of Whittaker Woman and the blog trip to El Salvador.

Keep in mind, the girls speaking aren’t even her sponsored children.

If you can’t visit your children, and we understand that it’s not always possible, you need to know this. It’s an absolute truth. Your sponsored children want to hear from you!

Heather’s got it all down on her blog. You should see for yourself.

The thing they desired most for you to know is how important being a sponsor is.

You are important. You are their angels, you make a difference.

There was one thing that they pleaded with me to share, THEY WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU!

I asked them if they cared if it was written on a card or an email, their answer was ANYTHING.

They just want to hear from you. Every word you say to them is one of the most important things they ever hear. They treasure it, they soak it up, they read it over and over.

So from Gabriella, Jennifer, Beronica, Cindy, Claudia, Clara, Rosio, Carolina, Karan, please write your sponsor child.

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

I sat at my desk, stunned by the news. Alfan was such an adorable little boy! Full of life!

In his letters, he expressed his love for the picture we sent him of our family dog. He was excelling in school. He shared about all that he was learning about Jesus and talked about the church he attended.

I found myself very distracted the day we heard of his death. I wondered how his family is coping. I wondered what kind of ceremony they would have in Tanzania to remember such a precious child. I wondered if his family realized that his sponsor family was at a loss over what to do.

I stared at his picture. I thought, How do you say goodbye to a sponsored child? Then it hit me – this wasn’t just a hypothetical question, it was a reality in our lives.

And not just in my life, but in the lives of many other sponsors. On average, about five to 10 Compassion-assisted children die each week.

I still haven’t figured out a great way to mourn Alfan’s death. It still makes me sad. I’m still overwhelmed by the tragedy of the death of a child. However, I cling to hope! I cling to hope and joy that someday, Alfan and I will be reunited.

I anxiously await the day that Alfan and I will meet at the feet of our Savior, Jesus Christ. The day where we are both in heaven, embracing, and praising God for the beauty of binding our hearts together during our short times on Earth.

We should all cling to the promise of God from Isaiah 25:8a (NIV):

“He will swallow up death forever. The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces …”

Because when loss is involved, Christ is our only hope in the face of death.

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

And although you might not think that theories of international development have much to do with you, they certainly do.

We are compassionate and generous people, and when we hear about a need, we want to help! We want to do something! But our first reactions of how to help may not necessarily be the best ways in which we can help. So understanding how development happens is vital as we seek to do good in this world.

Here are a few things I’ve learned …

At Compassion we want to foster development, not dependence. We want to see long-term change so we don’t focus on shorter-term solutions, like food distributions. Instead, we focus on on equipping children and partners with the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes they need to take control of their own lives.

Ways we can foster development, not dependence are:

Allowing children and our partners to be active in shaping their futures, not passive receivers.

Childhood experiences teach children how they view themselves, and we can teach them to reflect on their experiences to learn how they can change their circumstances.

Limiting what is given away.

Even the poorest of the poor have much to give, such as time and energy. When we focus on just giving to the poor, we undermine what they already have to give rather than empowering them to seek solutions.

Do not do for others what they can do for themselves.

When we try to help a child or a family by doing something for them that they were capable of doing, it pulls the rug out from under them, in a way, sending a subtle message that they aren’t capable. Sweat equity is a great example — give people the opportunity to give what they’ve got to better their lives.

Focusing on partnership.

Relationships are two-way, not one-way. We aren’t the noble benefactors bending down to the helpless poor.

Our partners in the developing world have so much to offer. It’s not a relationship of givers and takers. We must treat and view them truly as partners, not as a means to an end. They aren’t just our outlet for a mission trip or a good story for our do-gooding release. They are people and partners.

Enable local ownership.

If you start a child development center in a community without a local understanding or vision, most likely it will fail. Local ownership is key in successful development.

Think of your own backyard. If a Belgian group came in and told you, “We really think you need to put in these new fancy water pumps, and we’re going to do it,” what would you think? (“Who are these weird Belgians and why are they telling me what to do?” is what I would think …)

Therefore, we have to develop initiatives jointly. Give communities an opportunity to have ownership by allowing them to be deeply involved in developing any engagement. They know their communities; they know their needs; they know their challenges.

So if you travel to see Compassion’s work, please go with an open heart, spend time finding out what our partners’ visions and dreams are. Maybe you want to help build toilets or a church building, but maybe that’s not what they need the most. Come alongside and partner with them. Be a part of their passion and vision for their communities.

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

Do you have 21 minutes? If so, you’ll be hard-pressed not to be impressed by this humble man.

Greg Nettle, senior pastor of Rivertree Christian Church, conducts the interview.

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