What Happened When I Visited My World Vision Sponsor Child

June 12, 2014 by jeverheart

 

In February I was able to travel with Agape International Missions to Cambodia to learn about their work fighting human trafficking. I have two sponsor children in Cambodia through World Vision, so I decided to go a day early and meet the child who lives in close proximity to Phnom Penh. It’s not like I’m in Cambodia every day, so I wanted to try and make the most of the opportunity. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the meeting, but I was excited.

My sponsor child’s name is Sokea and she is six years old. She is the youngest of 5 siblings. She lives with both of her parents in a small village where most people work small subsistence farms and grow rice for a living. On the day of my visit, I took a tuk tuk early in the morning to World Vision Cambodia’s headquarters in Phnom Penh. The office building was clean and modern and was surrounded by the offices of other foreign NGO’s, of which there are plenty all over Cambodia. To World Vision’s credit, I didn’t see one single Westerner in the office. All the staff were Cambodian, which I think is great. I got a little tour and saw the mail center where all the letters and packages come from sponsors in the States. Then I drove with the Cambodian man who directs the program in Sokea’s village out into the province to start the visit.

One of the wealthier homes in the village. The owners could afford to paint it.

Sokea’s mother and uncle came to meet me that day. Her mother and uncle were very polite and chatty, even though I speak like 5 Cambodian words and they speak zero English. We smiled and gestured and felt generally awkward but cheerful, as it often goes with cross cultural encounters. Sokea, on the other hand, wasn’t having any of it. She was TERRIFIED of me. She probably hadn’t seen too many white women in her dusty little village, and it’s a bit overwhelming for a six year old to be told that a “barang” is flying from America just to meet her. She was NOT impressed. She would look at me only if I wasn’t looking at her, and she absolutely refused to say one word as long as I was around. You would have thought I had three heads and smelled of rotten meat. Her mom tried to get her to smile or laugh or do anything but look petrified, but nope, she was not to be cajoled into conversation. I showed her pictures on my phone of my two kids and my dogs and she looked but didn’t crack a smile. I brought her a little bag of gifts, a couple outfits and some small toys, but she wouldn’t touch any of it. It actually went so badly that it was comical!

They made her stand next to me. She didn’t want to.

I could have been disappointed that she wasn’t more interested in me, but seriously, she’s six! What would I expect? How awkward is it that someone says to her, “Hey, there’s a white lady in America that pays for you to go to school and she’s flying all the way to Cambodia just to meet you!” I think it would be extremely selfish and indicative of everything that’s wrong with humanitarian work for me to be disappointed in her response. It’s not about me having a warm, fuzzy experience with a poor brown child and getting that perfect photo op for my Facebook page. It’s about continuing to send the $35 a month so that she can go to school whether I ever meet her or not.

Later on during my trip to Cambodia, I met another American woman whose church partners with a church in Kenya to sponsor kids. She leads trips to Kenya so that sponsors from her church can meet their kids. She said that many of the visits go exactly as mine did and people who come with the expectation of hugging and loving their sponsor children are often disappointed. She has even had people stop sponsoring as a result of their interaction with the child not meeting their expectations. That floored me! Sponsoring is not about providing the donor with a happy memory of their time in PovertyLand. It’s about saving and transforming lives. How sad that we would go into it for selfish reasons.

Anyway, after our painful (for her) visit, we went to meet with the village elders so that they could show me the work they’ve done in the community. World Vision partners with the leaders of any village they work in so that the locals lead and feel proud of the work that is accomplished in their community. The cash may be foreign but the initiative and innovation is all local.

One of the biggest problems in Sokea’s village before WV began their work was sanitation. People in her village don’t have flushing toilets. They have squatty potties that are sometimes just a hole in the ground. When they’re out working in the rice paddies, they pop a squat and take care of business. Human waste was running off into the lake where they get their drinking water and the villagers, especially children, were constantly getting sick. One of WV’s first projects was to dam up part of the lake to create a reservoir of drinking water that would remain clean. I toured the dam and the chief elder explained how they learned to build and maintain it.

Me and the village elder at the reservoir

We also visited the village rice bank. All the villagers contribute part of their harvest to the bank so that if a family’s crop fails, they can be fed from the bank. It ensures that no one starves and it contributes to a greater sense of cooperation and goodwill among the community.

All the elders were very proud of their village and what they had accomplished. They told me they liked where they lived because the rice paddies were green and verdant during the rainy season and they had a beautiful view of a mountain in the distance. They asked about my village (ha ha) and I told them I was close to the mountains too, and that my family liked to walk in the woods. Even though we’re from vastly different social contexts,  we found that our appreciation of nature was one thing we had in common.

If you have a sponsor child with an organization that allows visits, I would encourage you to go. I would caution you not to expect a “Kodak Moment” experience, but a chance instead to see how your money really does transform communities. Often incredibly simple interventions save lives. Children were dying of diarrhea in Sokea’s village before they built the dam. My visit made me an even more committed donor, despite not getting the perfect picture for my Facebook page.