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…)

A middle-aged woman was riding her motorbike roaming the streets of Nongki village. Everything about her appearance looked ordinary and did not illicit any suspicions. She looked around. Suddenly, her eyes fixed on one small house near a barren farmland.

The woman drove to the house and greeted the young girl who was sitting at the front of the house alone. She asked the young girl questions that are typically asked among the people in this area.

“Do you want a new cell phone?” “Do you want to live in a bigger and nicer house?”

The young girl was surprised by the lady’s questions and remained silent.

“If you are interested in these things, I can give them all to you. All you have to do is come work with me. You will earn a lot of money so that you can have pretty clothes to wear and you will have a nice car to drive. It is a very easy job. C’mon. Trust me and come with me.”

“No, thank you,” replied the young girl, Supattra, a 14-year-old Compassion-assisted child. This situation is repeated over and over. (more…)

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.