Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.
- Leo Buscaglia


Monday, September 3, 2012

Writing to a Child

     A month or two ago I wrote a post about beginning to sponsor a child through the organization Compassion International.  This is a truly remarkable organization that is currently sponsoring over 1.2 million children in 25 different countries!  Following that post, I received a number of messages from readers who told me they've been sponsoring one or more children for some time.  How cool is that?  The child I'm sponsoring is an 8 year-old boy in Uganda whose name is Kigonya.  Kigonya is one of five children in his family and he lives in a small farming village.  Today, I wrote my first letter to him.
     Compassion makes it incredibly easy to correspond with your child.  Right on their website, they have a tool that can be used to send a letter.  They have several template designs you can choose from, and then you write the letter and submit it.  They provide the translation and see that it gets to the right person.  You can even upload pictures to be included (which I did!).  
     Now that I've gotten this started, I'm eager to continue to write to Kigonya and see him grow up.  Perhaps I'll even get to meet him one day, just as my son Ben got to meet the child he sponsored in Rwanda (here's a link to a blog Ben wrote about that visit).
     I'm continually amazed at the ways in which the world gets smaller and we can connect with (and help out) people who are literally across the world from us.  

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