Sponsors seek face-to-face contact with needy children
“It was surreal. It was like a dream,” says Anna Sklar, on finally meeting the boy her family sponsors through World Vision Canada. She visited his small, remote village in the Dominican Republic in June 2013 with four other members of All Nations Church in Sudbury, Ontario, where her husband is the pastor.
“Once you’re actually there, it’s never what you think it’ll be like. He was very shy, but his family was very talkative and smiling. I think all of us were a bit overwhelmed.”
Barry Slauenwhite, the president of Compassion Canada, can relate to that. When he first joined the ministry 30 years ago, he resolved to learn first-hand about living conditions in the developing world—and so traveled to Haiti.
“I couldn’t believe how much that changed me—changed my worldview, changed my thinking,” he says. “I came back thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if others could see this?’”
In 1986, as an experiment, Slauenwhite offered Compassion’s sponsors a tour of Haiti at the sponsors’ own expense. “I expected to get maybe six or 10 people. We had 39 respond,” he says. “I had to close it at that, because I couldn’t get a bus big enough to hold anymore.”
Key component
Today, the opportunity for Canadians to go and meet face-to-face the children they support financially is a key component of many international Christian aid organizations.
“A visit takes the relationship to the next level,” says Diane Kelly, World Vision Canada’s coordinator of sponsor visits. “You can see and smell and feel for a day part of the experience that your child is going through.”
“Sometimes it feels they’re just a photo on the fridge, somebody you get a letter from once in a while, who doesn’t seem to be a part of your life very much,” says Sklar. “We really wanted our boy to be a very real part of our lives. So this visit made it very real.”
But not all organizations are alike in the way they offer and promote sponsor visits.
Compassion, for example, claims to be unique in actively encouraging sponsors to visit their children. In 2012, it helped over 1,500 of its Canadian sponsors—and over 8,000 sponsors worldwide—to finally get to meet them.
“That’s a typical year for us now,” says Slauenwhite. “It’s really become a very, very strategic investment and part of what we do to help our sponsors get a better grasp of the real world and the world their child lives in.”
World Vision, on the other hand, does not offer specific sponsor visits. But it does help arrange visits for people who plan to travel in or near the country where their sponsored child resides.
“We have a lot of folks from other countries who know they’re going back for a visit, and so they’ll ask to sponsor a child particularly in the state or the province that they’re from with the intention of visiting that child some day,” says Kelly. “So when they go back, it’s like a big homecoming.”
In 2012, World Vision Canada arranged 275 individual sponsor visits in 40 different countries. Its church engagement team also organizes about four to six trips a year for churches—such as All Nations in Sudbury—that sponsor several children in a particular area.
Learning experiences
Partners International, which also seeks Canadian sponsors for children overseas, is different yet again. It offers a developing-world learning experience called Discovery Trips for potential longer-term investors in the ministry. Sponsors wanting to see their child would be plugged into a trip that is going to the area where he or she lives.
“When you expose people who tend to be thinkers, tend to be philanthropic, tend to want to know,” says president Brent Mitchell, “this really moves them along the journey of feeling competent to be highly engaged and contributors into what we’re doing.”
“We get a very good response,” he adds. “Typically on average, people that were giving to us, after going on this trip, increase their giving by 300 per cent.”
Samaritan’s Purse Canada does not have a child sponsorship program, but when possible, it does try to accommodate people wishing to travel with the shoeboxes collected under Operation Christmas Child to some of the boxes’ final destinations.
“If they sign up for a missions team trip and shoebox distribution is part of the itinerary, they’ll have a chance to do that,” says spokesman Jeff Adams.
There is “a great wish” on the part of many Canadians to do this, he adds. But with 662,000 boxes to be distributed annually, and with about 90 per cent of the work handled by in-country church partners and staff members, it is just not practical or efficient to involve teams of outsiders. And so only about 200 people get to make the trip each year.
“Most of them say it was the thrill of a lifetime. To follow the process down the line so that you end up seeing the child that gets the box—the excitement, the joy, kids jumping up and down—it’s a huge highlight,” says Adams. “We want to do more of it in future.”
Clear boundaries
Yet despite the different approaches, these ministries operate according to many of the same ethical principles and protocols. The special nature of the sponsor-child relationship and the need to protect the integrity of the Christians who brought them together requires that clear boundaries be laid down—and adhered to.
“We have to be very careful that we orientate our sponsors as to what not to say, what not to promise,” says Slauenwhite. “This isn’t just a tourist dropping in, saying hi to a child, giving them a hug, and going home. There always has to be a staff person present.”
“We had to fill out a lot of forms before we went, and do police checks,” says Sklar. “And you can only go in every couple of years. They don’t let you go in all the time.”
Both the sponsor and the child’s family are counselled well in advance of the visit on how to conduct themselves and what to expect. Sponsors are advised to bring appropriate gifts for family members and not just the child. Also, the visits generally last no more than a few hours—time to talk, look around the community, and share gifts and a meal.
“We don’t want to sensationalize this child,” says Mitchell. “This child, after the sponsor leaves, has to continue in that context with all the other children. A protracted visit sets that child apart and creates tension.”
“Once in a while,” says Kelly, “a sponsor might say something inappropriate, and it’s dealt with right there that day. But that’s very, very rare.”
Big benefits
Another common stipulation is that the sponsors are entirely responsible for covering the costs of their visit. But the common experience too is that the benefits for all involved far outweigh the money spent.
The agencies gain when sponsors return home and become strong advocates among their family and friends and in their church of the need for more child sponsors while they take on more children themselves. But their visit can often have a far greater impact on the people they met however briefly so far away.
“The feedback we get consistently is it really elevates their sense of self-worth and identity,” says Slauenwhite. “We have seen many times a family actually come to faith in Christ during the meeting in their home.
“Just seeing and grasping the love of Christ that is shown in these sponsors and the effort that they have taken to come that far to meet them and to love them, it’s a pretty powerful equation.”
Do you agree? Do sponsor child visits provide more benefit than simply pledging finances? Leave us a reply in the comments below.
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