Into All The World

I have started to write this post several times, but keep getting stuck on which of the amazing stories I should share with you all. I have met so many wonderful Bengali people with awesome stories over the past week. Perhaps I should start with the children. They are, after all, the reason why we are here.

I personally have sponsored a girl from the Patenga ADP, her name is Puja. I had a chance to meet her as well as the boys that my friend Vince & my friend Jacqui sponsored. I could tell you many many stories about these 3 sponsor children, but I won't.

No, I'd rather tell you about 2 other children who I was scheduled to visit. These children have been registered with World Vision, but do not have sponsors as of yet. I have promised to find sponsors for them. I had a chance to sit down with them and ask them some more questions about themselves and what they would want their future sponsors to know about them. Their answer? They wanted you to know that if you sponsored them, they would stay in school and continue their studies.

I almost started crying when I heard their sincere plea. Such a basic request that we take for granted in North America, to be able to attend school. Most children drop out of school at a very early age to go work in the garment factories for a mere 50 taka a day, That's equivalent to 75 cents Canadian, and most of them working 12-16 hrs a day/6 to 7 days a week! Most Bengali children & their families are so poor that the children are forced to work to help the family.

According to Unicef:

"In Bangladesh nearly 4.9 million children between the ages of 5 and 15 are involved in different types of work, many of them with little or no pay. Of the 301 occupations children are engaged in, 48 are categorized as hazardous. Many working children of both sexes have no access to education, with the result that they become trapped in low-skilled, low-paid work that further cements them into the cycle of poverty."

(http://www.unicef.org/bangladesh)

How can we break this cycle of poverty? It is so easy. By sponsoring a child, you are providing their family & their community everything they need to sustain themselves. Children do not need to drop out of school to go to work. They can get a good education and change their future.

Today we were visiting a community based program that assisted women who wanted to start their own businesses. This was a group started by women for women. As we were leaving, one of the mothers ran back to her house and then stopped our van as we were leaving to show us a photo of her son's sponsors back in Canada. The photo was from 2002, so her son had been a sponsor child for many years already. As she was showing us this photo, her son walked up to us as well. He was now a teenager and you could see that he was a well-educated, sophisticated young man. I could tell how proud this mother was of her son. I know without a doubt, that if it were not for the World Vision sponsorship, that family would not have been where they were today.

For $35, you can literally change lives. Can you afford it?