Yesterday, I received the daily blog entry from Compassion, which
directed me to a YouTube video called "who is your hero?" It was a short
video, a minute or so, of children being asked who their hero was. "Superman?
Miley Cyrus? Justin Bieber?" and the kids laughing and answering "my
sponsor," one child after another. Now I have to wonder if the kids had ever
heard of their choices...(and the questioner pronounced it "Miley Cyrius")...and
it was a cute video for sponsors to see and make them feel good.
But while I was on the Compassion YouTube page, I watched several
other videos, made while sponsors made visits to their sponsored children, and other
videos about the life changes that come about through the Compassion program.
One of the first I watched was this gentleman visiting his child in Uganda.
It was an awkward meeting, where the girl was placed in his lap and he began to
give her gifts, which she didn't seem to know what to do with. I wasn't sure that
the meeting was as joyous for her as it was for him, though a later video showed them all
walking to her house away from the Compassion project.
In contrast was this video, Meeting Hector, where sponsor and
child were overjoyed to see each other and could not stop hugging each other. Or this one of a woman from America
meeting her sponsored child in Swaziland, the affection of them both for each other so
plain on both of their faces as they couldn't stop smiling or hugging each other.
A sad video
was this gentleman's meeting of his child, Emmanuel, in Bolivia. Emmanuel is one of
7 children of the same mother and 7 different fathers. He had the same sad, detached
look that I see on the face of my sponsored child, Theresa in Ghana, as I wonder if I will
ever see her smile. Emmanuel sat in his sponsor's lap and was very shy but he
brought his sponsor to tears when he was asked what he liked best about Compassion and he
replied that he liked going to church and when he was asked what he liked about going to
church he said, tears streaming down his face, "nobody hits me there." As
the translator translated, the mother, sitting to the side of the sponsor nursing another
child, began to cry and said that she didn't want to be the way she was, but that
sometimes she couldn't help herself.
It was so terribly raw, unexpected, and tragic and you could see the
kind of impact that Compassion has in the lives of families, trying to make things better
for them. By the end of the video, the Emmanuel was crying, his mother was crying,
the sponsor was crying and unable to find the words, and I was crying watching them all.
It's the kind of video that makes you wonder what happens to these
children as they go through the Compassion program and age out.
Cathy Green from Australia sponsored Rafonzel for 15 years and in this video meets herfor
the first time, after she completed a degree in mass communications. She had made a
plaque for her sponsor, thanking her for the years of her sponsorship, and included the
medal she won when she graduated magne cum laude.
Juan David Dominguez Galvez's journey from age 5 to adulthood was
covered in this video, where he
talks about the change Compassion had made in his life. He is now studying to be a
physician.
Margaret
Makhota, from Uganda, became a sponsored child at age 12. She lived in a poor
village and went through the Compassion program, and its leadership program, graduated
from university and is now a Uganda Senator.
This video
moved me because it shows how a family reacts when they learn that their child has been
admitted to the Compassion program, and made me see first hand how grateful the families
are, and how they realize they now have hope for their child.
Children's dreams
are big and through Compassion many of them are able to realize those dreams.
1 comment:
In all the years I have heard about the various funds for children, until you wrote this I had never heard about the children's success. It was one of the reasons I was always suspicious of the funds.
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