The Difficulties of Child Sponsorship

“You can't really understand another person's experience until you've walked a mile in their shoes.” -Mary T. Lathrap

Q: WHY DID MY SPONSORED CHILD LEAVE THE PROGRAM EARLY?

Due to the difficult situations, our children find themselves in, it is not uncommon for a child to have to unexpectedly pick up and move with his/her family. While this early departure doesn’t happen often, it does come with the nature of where and who we work with, vulnerable children.

Sponsorship of vulnerable children is at the core of who Divine Care Ministries is. Ever since its inception in the late 90s, DCM has been about taking care of vulnerable children. At that time, there were many complete orphans and many more vulnerable children in Uganda. Support for the children was tailored to meet each child’s specific needs. A common story was for a husband to become infected with AIDS and pass the disease on to his wife.  He would normally die first leaving the wife sick and without means of support. When she was no longer able to help the child, then full care would be provided. The children would be placed in boarding schools, they would be provided with uniforms, books, and food and their school fees would be paid. AIDS had left many mothers with no skills to earn a living trying to raise their children alone. Our sponsorship program has been a wonderful help to hundreds of children throughout the years and it is extremely gratifying to see these children succeeding in life today.

When we first started our sponsorship program, we felt that an American sponsoring a child in Uganda would have the blessing of seeing the child develop and also understand more about a culture that is very different from his/hers. As you know, sponsorship dollars provide most of the support to pay the day-to-day expenses of the ministry. Sponsorship pays not only for food, clothing, tuition, and school fees for your sponsored child but also pays the salaries of teachers, social workers, gardeners, dorm matrons, and security, and funds all of the day-to-day community development programs we do along with, evangelism/church planting training, etc.

I have learned many lessons about sponsorship since I began serving with the ministry. Initially, I thought, as did our ministry leaders, that we should be helping the most desperate of children. Sometimes children were living with relatives who were not providing for them properly. Sometimes there was no adult in the home and children were being raised by other children. Sometimes the parent or guardian was irresponsible or perhaps an alcoholic, drug addict, or mentally ill. Any of these situations could be horrible for the child. Often these problems could quickly turn into a crisis and the families might react with no notification to the ministry office or school. Sponsorship of very vulnerable children often was not such a good experience for the sponsor.

Additionally, some children were from Muslim families, and once a relative found out that the child was attending a Christian school the relative would decide that indeed he could provide more support for the child than he originally offered. This child would be taken out of school and moved to another. Sometimes the family or child was living with relatives and over time they wore out their welcome and had to move. Sometimes the family had a cow and because the rains did not come when expected they had to move to find food for the cow. Sometimes the family could no longer afford the rent and would have to find another place to live. All of these situations, and more, have happened to our children since we began caring for them. I could never have anticipated all of these aforementioned reasons. Over the years, I have learned however that there are many other children who live in more stable situations and make for a much better experience for the sponsor. By sponsoring these children your sponsorship dollars provide for more than the cost of caring for one primary school child. This allows us to bring many of the more vulnerable children into the program. I appreciate your understanding of this difficulty and apologize to sponsors whose children have temporarily or permanently left the program.

If you have another question about our sponsorship program that we didn’t cover in our Sponsor Resource Hub, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our Sponsorship Coordinator, Joanna. We are so grateful for your support! Together we make a difference!

-Dr. Rick Rogers, U.S. Director

Dr. Rick & Pastor Peter visiting two very special sons in their lives Jan. 2022.