Help To Make a Better World, Sponsor a Child
I have been seeing those sponsor a child ads on TV, since I was a kid, which, after all these years, makes them easy to tune out. I consider myself a good person, and I try to continue involved in my community, but sponsoring a child was just not something on my radar until a couple of months ago. I was home sick, watching daytime television when among those children’s charity ads showed up. For some reason, that time I viewed it and really paid attention. Did they really mean what they said? Was the economy the children in the ad lived in so depressed that I could feed one of them for less than a dollar a day?
I was disappointed with myself for never being curious about this earlier, and I straightaway called the sponsor a child organization to get some further information.
They confirmed what the ad said, and even had some information available to prove it. They addressed me to a UNICEF development website which discussed cost of living, per capita income and economic depression in a few of the most depressed countries in the world. I thought about what $30 dollars a month meant to me, and realized it wasn’t much. I may expend $30 on dinner out, easily, and then go see a movie, get drinks and so forth. The cost of sponsoring a child was significantly less than the cost of my typical Friday night out; it seemed kind of greedy and callous not to sponsor a child under those conditions.
About an hour after I first saw the advertisement, I had signed up to sponsor a child in sub-Saharan Africa. They sent me a packet in the mail that I got about four days later. It had a personalized biography of the child whom I was sponsoring. He was about eight years old, and lived in a small village that had only recently gained access to clean water. He was kind of a cute kid, and the packet even included a handwritten letter from him. Although the sponsor a child program didn’t allow me to write him a letter, the organization said that I would continue to receive updates about how he was doing for as long as I am continuing my sponsorship. I thought the personalized updates were a smart move for the child sponsorship charity; they really make me aware that I am helping a particular kid out, and encourage me to get even more involved.
