Not any old commercial

Tuesday was pretty darn eventful. By comparison, it seemed like we didn’t do a lot the next day. Whereas Tuesday we saw a lot of people, witnessed so many things that you could never have imagined going on in this century on this earth, Wednesday, for me, Val, Nate and Kari anyway, it was all about one boy.

A four-year-old boy named Mwazunga from Mombasa. It had taken him 12 hours by bus to arrive in Nairobi just to meet Kari. His shy smile was the sweetest thing I had ever seen; his dimples in his round brown cheeks were just so darn cute that there are just no words to describe them. He was precious.

This is one of the harder blogs I have written, believe it or not, because I really don’t want to sound like a commercial for the organization that brought Kari and Mwazunga together. So, I am just going to throw it out there, and if just one person reading this goes to the Compassion website to check out the kids who are waiting to be sponsored, I guess it is worth the risk of turning off the rest of you.

Back to Lifest for just a minute. At Lifest is where I first learned about Compassion, International. They are one of those groups who you send your monthly check to and they tell you it goes to support a child in need. They send you the information about your child and the two of you write letters back and forth. I know that there are a lot of charities doing this sort of thing, and I would hope that they are all legitimate, but how is anyone to know for sure?

One year at Lifest, Val and two of her friends, Jacqueline and Katie, talked me into taking the plunge and agreeing to sponsor one of these kids. Neela is 16 years old now and is from India. The first few pictures I received of her, she is a thin scared little girl. The last picture I got from Compassion showed a beautiful young woman. I cry when I look at her picture. 

Am I making such a difference in her life, with my monthly donation of $38 and my infrequent letters to her? I am not nearly that conceited. She knows that I pray for her and love her unconditionally, that I will always remember her no matter how many miles separate us and that we will probably never meet. But she’s turned into this lovely lady because she knows her Savior lives and has so much more in store for her, that the desperate poverty she lives in in India is not all that there is to life. She has hope, and if I had any part in that, well, I couldn’t have done it without an organization like Compassion.

So, if you go to http://www.compassion.com/ just to check it out, that would be excellent. Or certainly look into some of the other similar programs, such as World Vision or Save the Children. But I can tell you from first hand experience what Compassion is doing for Neela, Mwazunga and other children we met while in Africa.