Bearing Fruit

Revisiting Kids Hope Ethiopia’s Gardening Program

When Luis Bourdet and I traveled to Africa earlier this summer, we found ourselves, as always, deeply impressed by the programs and centers we visited and the hard-working people who run them.   The beginning of gardening work at Kids Hope. A five-acre compound that schools, houses, and nurtures the disadvantaged children of rural Ethiopia is supported by the child sponsorship organization, Canadian Humanitarian. In the area outside of Shashamane, life is both easier […]

A Songbird in El Salvador

A young student at the Marillac School gets the chance to show off her talents

In El Salvador, children have two choices: try as hard as they can to stay in school or submit to the constant pressure to join neighborhood gangs. Organized crime is rife in El Salvador, and recruitment starts at an early age, when kids are at their most vulnerable. Often, their parents are working and the children are home alone—that’s when gang culture starts to come knocking, angling for loyalty and increasing their numbers.

Music to a Child’s Ears

The Band that’s Saving Children in Guatemala City

In 1964, Jeanne Clarke Wood traveled to Guatemala and met 95 impoverished children, all struggling bravely through the harshest of circumstances. She founded Children Incorporated so that she could make an impact on those who need help the most — poor, often abandoned or orphaned children in countries without government services to provide even the basic necessities of life. The organization now supports eight separate programs in Guatemala, which Children Incorporated’s Director of International Programs, […]

Stocked Up for Now

Why we keep our Back to School Fund open all year round

Most parents are familiar with the ubiquitous school-supply shopping list: two boxes of crayons, nine jumbo pink erasers, 47 glue sticks, one box of tissues, three boxes of markers. But when your children run out of pencils halfway through the year, you just buy more. When the backpack inevitably falls apart by January, you buy a new one. One of our sponsored children creates a thank-you card for his sponsor. In […]

Msamaria

A Lesson in Self-Sustainability

The average American doesn’t have to think much about how he will provide an education to his children. Our public school system provides many of our children with an education courtesy of tax dollars, and we’ve grown to take it for granted. In Kenya, however, school is a privilege, not a right. If you can pay to send your children to school, they go. If not, then they’re almost certainly looking at a bleak future […]

A Bright Spot in Taraka

The Materi School for Girls

It’s Sunday, and the students of the Materi School for Girls are still in uniform, singing songs in the shade or studying in the grass. Everyone seems to be resting, even the cows and pigs that the school raises for milk and meat, and even the large soccer field nearby. When Brother John Konzka founded the Materi School in a village called Taraka, he envisioned a place where young Kenyan girls could access the world […]