Always Picked Last (Extreme Poverty Style)
Imagine a world where you grow up with a mommy and a daddy and live in a nice warm house with your family.
You have your own bed, and sleep each night with a full belly. You go to school, and in the afternoon you go to sports practice on a green grassy lawn that is safely guarded from speeding cars and other dangers.
Imagine a world where your toys are bought from Wal-Mart, and you get a new Christmas, Easter and birthday outfit every year.
That’s not very hard to imagine … is it? Most of us grew up in that setting — or one very similar.
The situation that is hard to truly grasp is living in the circumstances the children in our sponsorship program live in.
We’ve seen the pictures; some of us have had the chance to see poverty firsthand. The reality the children in our sponsorship program live in is mostly the opposite of ours.
While some children are blessed with both parents still living, many live with other family members or older siblings. They eat one meal a day *maybe*, and play with toys that they find in the trash dumps outside their wood-walled, tin-roofed, one-room shanty.
So imagine how it brightens a child’s day when he or she goes to the child development center and receives a letter from you — the sponsor.
Now imagine a child who doesn’t have a sponsor. When all the children receive letters at the center, one never comes for this child.
This child, Carlos from Colombia, was registered into the sponsorship program in April, 2008, and has never — I repeat NEVER — had a sponsor.
What questions do you think run through his head when he attends the center during letter-writing and receiving time? What would run through your mind?
“Wait!” You say. “Doesn’t the sponsorship program still provide Carlos everything he needs? He is registered, after all.”
Let me see if I can explain. (more…)
Continue Reading ›My Best Day in Ministry: Fruits of Our Labor
Spiritually speaking, some of us plant seeds, some water, some are the sun, but we all get to taste the fruits of our labor sometimes.
Continue Reading ›To God Be the Glory
I’ve been so focused on the preparations for the 2009 Compassion Sunday campaign that I had NEXT YEAR’S goal in my head when I was reading a recent child sponsorship progress report. It dawned on me just this week that we actually SURPASSED the 2008 Goal of impacting the lives of 22,000 children through Compassion Sunday activities in calendar year 2008.
We are 3,000 sponsorships ahead of where we were at this point in the 2007 campaign! I know that this has been a monumental effort on your part. Your prayers have been heard and answered, and your faithfulness, as sponsors, continues to change lives around the world as well as right here at Compassion! You inspire us! It is such a privilege to serve you!
I firmly believe that the 2009 Compassion Sunday campaign holds great hope for substantial growth in order to confront the challenges of our current global economic climate. I look forward to coming together with you in 2009, to make a greater impact for children in poverty than we have ever done before.
With gratitude and continuing hope,
Greg Birgy
Compassion USA Director of Mobilization
It’s Almost Compassion Sunday!
It’s almost April 13 — the official date for Compassion Sunday (CS) — the largest sponsorship effort of the Advocates Network during the entire year. Our on-call workers are still feverishly working through stacks of material orders that are inches thick, and we’re fielding calls from sponsors wanting to place a last minute order or asking when their materials will arrive. There is a buzz around here. One of excitement and anticipation of what God plans to do through our sponsors, advocates and church partners on April 13.
This is my first Compassion Sunday. I mean, it’s my first Compassion Sunday to coordinate. I’ve heard about Compassion Sunday since I first started working for Compassion over four years ago. But this year, it’s my job to help make it happen.
What I wasn’t expecting when I started this job last June was that my first project was Compassion Sunday (CS). I’m thinking to myself, “but that’s not until next year!” I had a lot to learn.
86 work orders, which are work requests that needed to be submitted to get the CS materials designed, dozens of meetings, and hours of analyzing and preparing later, it was finally go-time. The letter asking people to host an event at their church was sent in early January. Our physical inventory of CS supplies had arrived, our tracking database was updated and we had more resources available for download on the web than ever before. I thought we had reached the time to sit back, relax, and…wait…wait for the flood gates to open and the orders to come, along with the inevitable craziness that comes with them.
But a few weeks ago, we were all buzzing along with business as usual. It was time to submit over 1,000 pending material orders in our order system for the fulfillment team to begin processing, and this is when I realized we would soon run out of buttons calling others to “Join Me” in the fight against poverty.
I contacted procurement to ask for an early reorder on the buttons. They placed the order for 7,500 more buttons, and we sat back to wait (and pray) that they arrived before we ran out.
I’m expecting the buttons to arrive in just a few days, and then I learn that we have under 300 buttons in inventory and will run out that day — three days before the buttons are supposed to arrive. I pick up the phone again and call procurement.
“Is there anything we can do to rush the order to arrive sooner than Monday?” I ask.
“It’s doubtful, but I will call and ask,” comes the reply.
While I am waiting, I get an email from an on-call worker that we have over 7,500 buttons in inventory. WHAT?!
It turns out the buttons had shipped early and had arrived while I was planning for an outage and strategizing for Plan B. What an amazing God we serve! He knew our need before we even uttered it, went before us and took care of our needs. God loves us and he loves what we do here at Compassion — and He always takes care of us in our time of need.
Amanda Ceren is a project specialist for the Advocates Network. She helps fight poverty by providing advocates with materials to connect a child in need with a loving sponsor.
