Should you sponsor a child?
Hi, welcome to Little Lessons.
This is another special Burma edition, and I'm sitting high up in my hotel in a room
that overlooks a good part of the former capital city of Yangon, here in Burma.
And this is a place where, at one time, [inaudible 00:00:23] family was very involved with a
child sponsorship program.
We had come here some 15 years ago, and began visiting the many Christian orphanages that
were showcased for us, and set up a child sponsorship program, and I guess we had almost
1,000 children sponsored at one time, and about 50 Christian orphanages, here in Yangon,
and other parts of Myanmar.
But after a few years, we began to realize that most of these kids had a living parent,
or parents.
And the reason that they were in orphanages was because their own parents had placed them
there.
Their parents were living in very far away, remote places.
Little tiny villages where people were eking out a living, and where there were no educational
opportunities for the kids, and so there was a whole system, kind of an industry, set up
here by churches and pastors and evangelists who would roam around and collect children
and gather them into quote-unquote orphanages, and then western Christians, and agencies
would come and their hearts would be touched by these beautiful little children, and their
stories of their orphanhood, alleged orphanhood, because well the places said, such and such
orphanage.
And so it began to cause us to question what we were doing, and eventually, we stopped
doing that.
We worked the program to kind of ween ourselves from it, and ween those orphanages from our
dependency, and began a program of endeavoring to place children who are in orphanages, back
with their families, or back with their relatives, in some cases, which we believe that's where
God intended them to be.
And while I've been here over the last few days, I've been visiting some of those kids
who've been reintegrated with families and relatives who, at one time, were stuffed into
orphanage dormitories where there were 80 kids.
It was kind of like the opening pages of Lord of the Flies, if you know what I mean.
And studies have shown, of course, that kids raised in institutional care are not prepared
to lead functional families, when they, themselves, are older.
And they often carry deep psychological and emotional scars with them, because they just
don't get the attention that kids need, and deserve, from a mom, and a dad, and a family
that is one unit.
We're seeing some success, and we're so thankful for those sponsors, child sponsors, who have
stayed with us, even though that their money is not going to an orphanage any longer, but
rather is being used by us to employ social workers, case workers who do very careful
assessments of the children, do family background searches, and in some cases, these kids don't
even know where they're from, and they've totally lost touch with their families.
And so we've been successful in reuniting some, and the trend is looking very good.
Our greatest challenge, however, is ... I should say are the Christians, and the many
Christian organizations that are literally pouring millions of dollars into the orphanage
industry here in Myanmar, also known as Burma.
And they're working against us, because, inadvertently, they're creating a demand for more orphanages,
and more children to populate those quote-unquote orphanages.
And so it's a vicious cycle that the only way to put an end to it is to stop the source
of the money, and then that stops the flow of children, because again, orphanage directors
are motivated, unfortunately, sometimes, by the profits that they can make.
There are family orphanage franchises, here in this city, that I ... If I told you about
all the details, it would make your blood boil, or make you weep.
And it's all being fueled by well-meaning Christians and organizations who come and
see these collections of children that are showcased in orphanages.
So I'm saying all this to say, and answering the question that we posed at the beginning
of this little lesson, should you sponsor a child?
Well, you need to ask, well what's the money going towards?
And a number of organizations do employ child sponsorship as a method, a great method, to
raise funding from caring people who want to help children, and the money is indeed
tied into, ultimately, touching the lives of kids who are suffering from poverty and
neglect, and so forth, but are in families, or at least somewhere, where some semblance
of a family.
So I would encourage you, don't sponsor any children who are living in orphanages if the
vision of the ministry that you're supporting is to perpetuate those orphanages.
That's not God's will.
God wants kids to be in families, and I've asked many orphanage directors, as we've tried
to persuade them over the years, what they would do.
What they would want for their kids, if both they and their spouse died.
Would you want your kids in an orphanage?
Or would you rather have them in a family?
A Christian family?
And they all say, without hesitation, "I'd much rather have my kids in a family, rather
than an orphanage."
And so I said, "Well why have you got an orphanage going here?
Why aren't you helping us to get kids back in families?"
And very few are ever able to admit that this is how they make their living, and it really
amounts to child exploitation, when you look at it from that standpoint.
When the motivation of the orphanage director is to keep it going so that they can continue
to line their pockets, that's not treating others as they want to be treated.
So there are some great ones here.
There are some good people.
There's good people everywhere, of course, and we have discovered some of them.
We're working with some of them, and by the time you see this video, we could've been
successful in getting hundreds of kids back with their families.
We're also offering some opportunities for poor families to prosper, through micro-credit,
and that combination is kind of a one-two punch to fight this problem at its source.
And it's a growing movement around the world.
Orphanages are a thing of the past, slowly are becoming a thing of the past.
They've become a thing of the past, pretty much so, in the developed world.
In the developing world, they're still a factor, but there is a trend, and so I encourage everybody,
get with the program, all right?
And it all starts with money and child sponsorship.
So I encourage you to sponsor as many kids as you can, if the programs that you're sponsoring
are really helping those kids to thrive in families, okay?
All right, that's all for today's little lesson from Burma.
Thanks for joining.
God bless you.