Sponsor children

I have been sponsoring a child in India for about the last two years or so. Every six months I get a letter or a picture from her. The letter has obviously been translated by a World Vision staff member and I’ve often wondered what happens at the other end – Who does the translating? When do the children write their letters? Who tells them what to write? Who takes their photos? Where do they go to get their photo taken?

I was at work the other day and I was chatting to Masud (Amazing Smile), who was working on what looked like an interesting and colourful project. On closer inspection, I realised that he was translating some sponsor children’s letters from our village! I didn’t realise that we had a sponsorship program at my work, and all of a sudden I thought, “Wow! I didn’t know we were one of THOSE organisations.” It gave me a whole new perspective of where I’m living and working. Our program runs though ActionAid and the sponsor parents come from Italy. The sponsor children were recently given some small, colourful little folders and asked to write about their life and their school (which is what Masud was translating), as well as drawing a picture. Even seeing Masud’s handwriting, which is not at all accustomed to writing in English, brought back images of my translated letters that I had received from my own sponsor child.

Also, the other day a little girl came to our work. She was about 8 or 9 and she was wearing a lovely dress that, judging by the state it was in, was obviously the only one she owned. She had bare feet and her hair had been lightly oiled with coconut oil and combed very sensibly with a neat side part. I asked Masud who she was and he said that she was a sponsor child who had come to get her photo taken. I instantly had images of my own sponsor child come flooding into my mind, and I remembered the sensible side part that she too had been given, and her pretty dress. As I watched, my heart both smiled and broke as I saw this little girl being asked to stand up nice and straight while Masud took three shots of her, each with a different background. My mind suddenly raced to an imaginary (but very real, somewhere in Italy) home of her sponsor parent who, in the very near future will receive a lovely letter and photograph in the mail, and she will look at the photo and see the little girl with the temple (or the tree or the river) in the background. And the sponsor parent will probably wonder somewhere in the back of her mind, like I did, who took the photo and where, and who translated the letter and who told her what to write?

And where a single image was captured and sent across the other side of the world, I got to see what lay beyond that photo. And with that, my mind opened up a little more and my heart became a little richer. And I was very grateful.