inside view into 'sponsoring a child'
Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 8:00AM I had a kind-of-annoying, kind-of-amusing experience today. I was supposed to accompany some NGO workers on a voter registration drive among the city's homeless population. There's an Indian law that says a person's residence is wherever they sleep... so technically, homeless people also have a residence. And voting is a primary way that people can prove that they continue to reside at a certain place. Having your name on a voter roll, and having an election card, is a powerful way of documenting your identity. Which in turn can lead to access to services like education and health care, as well as food and shelter provisions. So the sequence that Americans are used to is kind of turned on its head. You don't become a citizen and then vote... as a poor migrant, you vote to become a citizen. There is a lot more to say about this... I hope to write about it again soon.
But this has already been a lengthy digression because I did not actually do a voter registration drive today. It got rescheduled. Instead, I helped out in this NGO's Campaign and Advocacy office. The NGO--called Calcutta Samaritans-- is funded by ActionAid. And among other things, ActionAid runs one of those programs where Westerners sponsor children, and get biannual reports on that child's progress in school, family life, etc.
The money funds a "Nonformal Education Center" which is a place where the NGO workers take care of homeless kids and teach them a little. Its a really important service. The kids do learn stuff like writing their name and the English and Bengali alphabets. They also get to draw, hear and tell stories, and play a lot... wholesome devleopmental activities that are WAY better than the trouble they could get into on the streets. A lot of the boys that come to this place are 6-12 years old, work as rag pickers, incense sellers, or some other such thing, and find all sorts of things to inhale, sniff or smoke. They often have to go through a detox before they are enrolled at the education center.
And besides all that, the NGO spends a lot of energy teaching the kids and their families about their basic rights, how/where they can get subsidized food, hygiene instructions, and so on. So it seems to me like a wholly valuable program.
So now I am ready to describe my temporarily role in all this. Twice a year, the workers have to write these two paragraph "reports" on the child's progress, for the benefit of the sponsors. Its kind of an ordeal because few of them have fluent English skills, and also because a handful of people have to do 700 of these things. So since I was around, I helped out.
The kids draw a picture on one side of the paper. And on the other side, the NGO employees must write a description of the picture, and a general update. I sat down with one of them to do this... she didn't speak English and knew her kids inside and out. She would tell me about their home life, their hygiene skills, their social skills, whether or not they are learning the alphabet or just spending as much time as possible shooting things with a slingshot. And I would write little sentence-long summaries on the paper, to send to the sponsor. She was especially interested in letting the sponsor know how much work the NGO has done to educate the children about child trafficking, trying to get them to understand how to guard their own safety. And when a child was having trouble at home, or not really focusing on studies, we wrote that too.
After we wrote all these things for a few of the kids, her supervisor had a look. And she said, "This won't do." It turns out we weren't allowed to write anything negative. She said that the sponsors wouldn't want to hear all of those details, and especially instructed us not to use negative language like "problems" "kidnap" "drugs" and "trafficking." My partner argued with her for a little while... she really wanted to actually explain the kids' situations, and she was proud of the work she was doing with them. But in the end, she gave in.
And so we wrote these really generic paragraphs... "Your child enjoys drawing and story-telling. She recently took a school picnic to the Science Center." For each kid, we wrote that he/she is learning how to spell, regardless of whether or not it was true. One of the kids had recently gotten admitted to a boarding school, and wasn't in the Nonformal Education Center anymore... but that also was not a fact to be divulged to the sponsors, so we wrote that he was at the education center anyway.
And more trivially... I had to use up a certain amount of space writing about the kid's drawing on the other side of the paper. "Your child has drawn a picture of a potted plant. The flowers are red, green and orange." Every once in a while the picture was interesting and there was actually a back story to tell, but for the most part, it was these innane descriptions... and we had to fill up the whole 'description' space on the paper, because those are the bureaucratic rules of the NGO's funding agency. We couldn't use that space to say anything more informative about the kid... just the drawing.
I guess ActionAid has its rules for good reasons... they need some sort of starndardization and want to produce a good product for the sponsors. And they really are funding excellent work. From what I have seen so far, I think the sponsors' money is being put to good use. Its just... they are afraid of too much reality I guess. Maybe they think the sponsors will be skeptical of their work if they know that their child is fighting a drug addiction, or isn't focusing on learning because he's too busy earning money, or has behavioral problems. I wonder if that is an accurate perception or not... if I were a sponsor, I would want real details over rosy generalizations.
Reader Comments (2)
Glad you're doing well!
This is an amusing comment for a variety of reasons. But especially, I love the thought of 7 yr old Anna wanting to sponsor a child! So kind hearted.