Katie Becomes a Mommy, Times 5

Katie becomes a mommy. Five times over. And this is just the start.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading Kisses from Katie: A Story of Relentless Love and Redemption by Katie Davis and Beth Clark. Katie is living in rural Uganda, serving as a missionary. One thing has led to another, like they always do, and Katie finds herself adopting three girls, and then two more.

This is part of the tragedy of too much of central and southern Africa. Wracked by civil war, disease, high mortality rates due to AIDS and other factors we would find alien anywhere in the United States, children too numerous to count have been forced to become adults. Too many children have to care for younger siblings. Too many have to care for sick parents.

With the first three Katie adopts, their parents are dead or gone and their grandmother can barely find enough food for herself. And so a 9-year-old cares for her younger sisters, and the 5-year-old has to work in the fields to find food.

For more than a decade, we sponsored a little boy in Kenya through World Vision, until the development goals were achieved and the community moved to self-sufficiency.

We didn’t just send a monthly check; we followed Andera John’s life. He lived with an intact family in western Kenya. Our sponsorship meant he could go to school, and we received regular report cards. Sometimes we sent extra gifts, and over time his family bought two milk cows (one for the family and one to provide income by selling the milk to others), a goat, clothes, school uniforms and other things they needed. We have a picture of Andera John and his brother holding the leads for the two cows while his older sister stands in the background with a new sweater – one that was hers and not a hand-me-down. Our cost was small indeed, but it helped propel the family’s fortunes.

Right now through our church, we’re in the process of sponsoring another boy in Kenya and a girl in India. Lots of churches have programs like this, sometimes worked through the missions ministry, and organizations like World Vision and Compassion International have more children for sponsorships than sponsoring families can be found.

It’s not the same as officially adopting and raising five little girls, but a very small contribution can have a huge impact.

Related:

Compassion International’s web site

World Vision’s web site


To see more posts on this chapter of Kisses from Katie, please visit Jason Stasyszen's site, Connecting to Impact. 

For the least of these

Two people whose blogs I follow are Ann Voskamp and Shaun Groves. Ann is the bestselling author of One Thousand Gifts; she and her husband David farm in Ontario, Canada. She’s also a contributing editor at The High Calling, and I was able to meet her in person last year at Laity Lodge. Shaun is a recording artist based in Nashville.

Ann and Shaun are part of a team for Compassion International helping to publicize the need for sponsoring children. They travel to some rather exotic places – not exactly the places you or I would normally go for a vacation, even a working vacation. Shaun has traveled to Ethiopia and East India for Compassion, and he and Ann have previously been in South America.

For the past several days, they’ve been  in Ecuador. Not Quito, the capital city, mind you, but out in the areas near and in small towns and  the Amazon jungle.

Ann even convinced her husband to come along for this trip, despite his worries for the farm back home. He was particularly concerned, she writes, about the pigs being taken care of, and what should he find when they’re visiting a small farmer in Ecuador but pigs.

She and Shaun have been posting for the past several days, and posting both photos and videos.

Shaun has been posting about a little boy named Jivinson, who keeps a memento on the wall of his house from his heroes – a letter from the couple who sponsor him; how a church – suffering persecution and occasional violence – began to grow; and several photo essays, including one, “Ecuadorian for Home,” that will give you some sense of how too many people of the world live – and these are among some of the more fortunate ones.

Ann has been writing about a 15-year-old boy named Jonathan, whose story will break your heart and fill it with hope; taking pictures she calls “portraits in need;” and a young girl named Lidia.

This week, I started listening to a music CD by Shaun entitled “Third World Symphony,” which is helping support Compassion. (I bought the CD because I’m iPod-impaired.) You can listen to what Shaun and Ann have been writing about in their travels, translated into songs sung from the soul.

Here is “All is Grace,” one of the songs from Shaun’s CD, inspired by Ann’s book One Thousand Gifts:

For more than a decade, until the organization’s project was completed earlier this year, we sponsored a little boy in Kenya. You can’t imagine the joy of receiving letters from a little boy in a remote village whose life has been profoundly changed because you cared enough to give the equivalent of a dollar a day.

We will shortly be sponsoring two children – another boy in Kenya a girl in an orphanage in India. Read Ann’s and Shaun’s blogs, and please consider sponsoring a child.

You can’t imagine the blessing.

Please Help Haiti

The situation in Haiti following the earthquake continues to worsen. Please consider giving financial support to organizations that are providing relief. Two that I would recommend are World Vision and Compassion International. Both have extensive experience in helping children and providing diasaster relief.

God helps those who help themselves.
-- Benjamin Franklin

God helps those who are helpless.
-- The Bible