Expressing Need While Maintaining Dignity
How should we express the urgent needs of the children in our programs while maintaining their dignity?
Where’s the Poverty?
The presence of dignity doesn’t equal the absence of poverty.
Hope Breaks Into a Tortured Life
Sneha grew up in a poor farmer’s home. Her father could not afford to pay a dowry to marry off his two daughters, as is custom in much of India. There were already enough financial struggles at home. So Sneha assured her father she would marry whomever he chose for her after her sister married outside of their clan.
Sneha’s father got a proposal for her after a year. When the two families met over lunch at their home, it seemed to be the perfect match because no dowry was even asked for. They agreed, and Sneha got married.
But after one month, life started to change. Fights started at home. Sneha’s husband started accusing her of being unfaithful, even with her brother-in-law.
She thought it was his possessiveness of her that made him angry and verbally abusive. But when Sneha learnt about her husband’s abusive and suspicious nature from the neighbors, she was hurt. Sneha kept his behavior secret from her family, and she had no way out.
Sneha thought perhaps a child would end the tension in their marriage. After a year she conceived and gave birth to a beautiful little girl.
Things did not change as Sneha had expected. Her husband started abusing her even more because she had a girl instead of a boy. Gradually his verbal abuse turned into physical torture. He would burn the little baby’s tender skin with cigarettes. He would grab Sneha by the hair, and hit her in front of the neighbors. (more…)
Life in Rural Nicaragua
The roads are muddy with many puddles during the rainy season. During the summer it is very dry and dusty. Plantations are on each side of the road and a few houses here and there. People move on bikes, motorcycles, or horses, except for the very few who have a vehicle. Because of the climate changes, crops were lost and people need to find other ways to survive.
Life in Urban Nicaragua
Managua’s economy is based mainly on trade. It has suffered two devastating earthquakes over the course of the 20th century — in 1931 and again in 1972 — that destroyed the center of the city, which has not been rebuilt. Managua is the economic, political, cultural, commercial and industrial center of Nicaragua.
Street-Level Compassion, Street-Level Delivery in Haiti
I once read an article that cited a relief and development organization who said that they couldn’t rely on churches to do the work they needed to do in the third world. They claimed that the needed expertise and skill sets simply weren’t there. It made me scratch my head.
Rural Life in the Philippines
Due to poverty, many children drop out of school to work in sugarcane plantations. Here, they are exploited and forced to work long hours for meager pay. Negros Occidental has the highest magnitude of poor families in the country, mostly concentrated in rural areas. About 33 percent of the population lives on less than $1 a day.
Urban Life in the Philippines
Metro Manila, seen as a “land of opportunities,” has lured many people from different provinces to work and live here. About 35 percent of the families live in informal slum areas that are unfit for settlement, such as in low-lying flood plains, on riverbanks, near highways and railroads, and on dumpsites.
How Are Children Told That They Have Been Sponsored?
One-to-one sponsorship helps children across the globe write off poverty and begin living a lives of hope. And it begins when someone picks up a child packet and makes the commitment to sponsor a child. That’s when our sponsorship notification process gets rolling.
Your Sponsorship Brings Hope: A Report from El Salvador
A frequently asked question about child sponsorship is this: How does it make a difference? People want to know that their concern, their money and their intentions are safe in our hands. This video from El Salvador highlights one of thousands of similar stories that attest to the crucial difference your sponsorship can make in the life of a child!
Lessons From a Wonderful People
In Indian culture, patience is a virtue and its reward evident in its close-knit, loving families – both biological and spiritual. India has taught me is to never underestimate the value of a kind word.
My Sponsor Wiped My Mother’s Tears Away
I celebrate my sponsorship with Compassion because through the relationship with my sponsor, I caught the fire of hope. Sponsorship puts hope in the hearts of children and in return these children serve the rest of the world with that hope.
