Tag: Central America

Lifting the Burden of the Family By One

I spend a fair amount of time educating people about Compassion and what we do and how we are different. I love the process, and I love helping tie all the loose-ended questions together for people. It’s pretty simple to explain what we are all all about and proceed from there…

We do child development in developing countries facilitated by the local church. We don’t use missionaries and every child is guaranteed to be taught the gospel. Whether they accept the Gospel is up to them. We work with the poorest of the poor to change the community inside out…starting with the kids and moving into the family….

That last part is where the puzzle starts to make sense for people.

At Compassion, we build communities inside out…start with the kids and the work moves and extends into the family. Change a child’s life, change a family’s life, change the community.

Because we work with the local church, the church now has an equipping tool to reach families in ways they never could before by directly helping these little children.

You know…they get medical attention, meals, school clothes if needed, education and the Gospel. They are also taught vocational skills along with a little micro-industry from time to time.

It’s all pretty powerful when you see it in action. Not to mention the amazing impact writing letters has on these children and for you as a sponsor.

Then comes this question: Well, then how does it help the family? Oh, well…I’m glad you asked! These are just two examples.

1. If the Compassion child development center is teaching the kids the importance of drinking clean water, then sometimes you will see Compassion staff pass this education on to the family: “We are giving your child clean drinking water and we want to make sure this continues at home. Here’s how to do this….”
2. Another way is while these children are learning to read and write, chances are mom, dad, and other brothers or sisters don’t know how to read and write either. I’ve met several families over the years where their children have come home and taught the rest of the family how to read and write.

At the very end of the discussion with people, I can usually pinpoint when the big picture comes together.

They start talking about how they understand how helping one child helps the whole family by providing so much for their children and how cool it is to see the church literally grow in that community because so many are now accepting Christ into their lives, and then I follow up with this statement…You know, it lifts the burden of the family by one child.

At this point they get it. The light goes off and it all comes together. It’s something I came up with as my own little way of processing through the big picture. And then one day I was on a trip to El Salvador….

I walked into the home of one of our sponsored children in El Salvador with some of our artists in tow. We sat down with the family in this small 10 x 10 room where a family of five lived, slept, and ate.

Some of our group started asking questions. A little ways into the conversation, I asked the mother of the household, “how has your child being in the Compassion program helped your family?”

You know what she said? I have never heard this on a trip before.

She said, “It lifts the burden of our family by one child.”

Here’s my question for you. What does this mean to you? What would this look like in your own life if someone else had lifted the burden of your family by one child?

Something to Get Excited About

Meet Jeffry. He lives in Nicaragua. He is our one millionth registered child.

A registered child is different than a sponsored child in that the registered child doesn’t have a sponsor . . . yet. Once the registered child gets a sponsor, that child is a sponsored child. Makes sense, right?

The registered children are the ones whose pictures you see on the sponsor a child page at compassion.com and in the child packets at concerts and other events, such as Compassion Sunday.

The registered children are the children who are waiting to be chosen by a sponsor and who the Unsponsored Children’s Fund assists until that sponsor comes along.

The Unsponsored Children’s Fund bridges the gap between registration and sponsorship. It allows the registered child to have all the same benefits as the sponsored child.

We don’t have one million children waiting for sponsors. Jeffry is the one millionth child concurrently registered. More than 850,000 of those children already have sponsors. And since Compassion began in 1952, nearly two million children have been part of our programs.

That’s a little context for this post that Mark Hanlon, Compassion’s senior vice president of sponsor and donor development, submitted from Nicaragua yesterday.

It was like so many other Compassion child home visits I’d done before (and in my 28 years at Compassion, I’ve done a few!), but this one seemed to hold a bit of extra anticipation and excitement for me.

I happened to be in Nicaragua two weeks after we had registered our millionth child for the very first time. It turns out that this millionth child is a little 3-year-old boy in Nicaragua.

The office staff there was so excited, and they set up a home visit for me to meet little Jeffry.

It was kind of strange because Jeffry had no idea what a historic milestone he is in the history of Compassion.

In fact, when I got there with several of the Compassion Nicaragua staff and some of the center staff, he was totally overwhelmed. Too much attention by too many grown-ups all at once – and he did what many normal little 3-year olds do – he covered up his eyes with his hands (a la “see no evil”) and pretended we weren’t there!

When his grandmother (who is his caregiver since his mother now lives in the U.S. and couldn’t take him with her) tried to get him to take his hands away from his face, he ran away crying.

That was OK. We shifted our focus to the grandmother and asked her questions about the impact of having Jeffry registered in the program at the church.

She talked about the hope and a future she had for Jeffry to get through high-school and maybe even go to university.

She expressed concern over his health and the health of her husband who has diabetes.

She talked about the challenges of supporting a household of 17 adults and children in her dirt floor, cinder block structure in the heart of economically challenged Managua.

Her husband (the diabetic) and her three sons work hard as day laborers – when there is work – and they have terrible difficulty in making ends meet. She wanted better for her little grandson, Jeffry.

Then it struck me that this visit indeed was like most other visits I’d done. Parents (and grandparents) worldwide want the same thing for their children – a better future than what they have.

It didn’t matter one bit to Jeffry or his grandmother that he is Compassion’s millionth child. What did matter is that they now have some hope.

And now, I really was excited to be there! Not because I got to meet the millionth child in his home, but because I got to see something that Compassion gets to be a part of with the local church every day. Releasing a motherless child, living in extreme poverty, living with 16 other people, from poverty in Jesus’ name.

Now that’s something to get excited about!