Promoting Child Sponsorship
This is a little post to promote World Vision Australia and World VisionNew Zealand. I feel it is very important to give some publicity to World Vision, who are trying to help children in many parts of the world to get a better life through the Child Sponsorship programme.
Today is the 2nd August, my own daughter’s birthday, as it happens. Last night, the 1st August 2010, there screened on telly a programme called “Lucy Lawless – Five Days in Bangladesh”. For those of you who do not know, Lucy Lawless is a New Zealand actress who got famous through her stunning performance, taking the leading role, in ‘ Zena, Warrior Princess’ a few years back.
Lucy interviewed children from different families around Bangladesh, and gave us an insight into just how difficult many families’ lives are in Bangladesh.
We often hear about poverty in India, Africa, and other parts of the world through advertisements such as those put on telly by World Vision. ‘Sponsor a child’, they tell us.
Well, there are many critics of World Vision, and sometimes you wonder just how much of the money donated to World Vision really gets to the people who need it.
This programme left no doubt in my mind as to the efficacy of the World Vision Sponsorship Programme. The efforts of World Vision Australia (or was it New Zealand – Zena is a Kiwi) are obviously helping hugely.
Prior to visiting her sponsored child and his family, Lucy visited families which were so poor that some of their young children had to go out to work each day to help feed the family. We saw many children working in a brick factory who were carrying huge piles of bricks on their heads all day long. These children were extremely skillful: one had to admire the ease and the speed, and the dexterity with which they packed those bricks onto their thick turbans. How could they manage to run with them, without any toppling off?
Lucy was struck down with tears whilst holding a small crippled child who could not walk, and whose hand was maimed and rotting.
We are just so fortunate in New Zealand, and in the Western World. Of course there will be exceptions, but leaving children to suffer without medical treatment and having our young children put to work to put food on the table are almost unheard of in Australia and New Zealand. We have health care and doctors to help children with ailments like this poor wee boy had. Our health system does its best to take care of children with disabilities or health conditions. Our children don’t have to go out to beg or to work at the age of six or seven, when they should be at school. We are appalled at the idea of Child labour.
One of the boys who had to work also got time to get some schooling for a few hours each day. His family did not receive any child sponsorship money and his family was very poor. His poor mother said she was ashamed that he had to go to work, but she couldn’t help the situation, as she had other children to look after. Her boy gladly went to work, and was very grateful for the little opportunity he had to get some education. His great ambition was to become a teacher when he grew up, because he wanted to help the children.
The family to whom Lucy’s sponsored boy belonged were such a contrast to the other families which Lucy visited, where there was no child sponsorship help. This family was well fed, healthy and happy, and lived in a proper house, all because of the help which had been given via the child sponsorship programme.
It was interesting to note, though, that this child did not have the philanthropic aspirations of the very poor boy who wanted, with all his heart, to become a teacher ‘to help the children‘: the sponsored boy who had had the easier life wanted to go to university to become an accountant.
There should be no need for anybody anywhere in the world to suffer hunger, sickness and poor living standards. Food, good water, medical treatment, schooling, a house to live in, are basic human rights which the world can afford to give to all.
