Yesterday I mentioned that many sponsors and donors support our project. It is wonderful to get their help and we are very thankful to them. Anybody who wants to help can give a donation of any amount. Another option is to sponsor the food for a day for the children. And the third option is to sponsor a child and thus sponsor his or her education, books and everything this child needs to learn in our school. The concept of these child sponsorships sounds easy – but the question is again and again how much we can do for our child sponsors. And how much we really have to do.
As we are only a small charity organization and want to give as much to the children as possible, we avoid big expenses that other, big charities can do. We don’t print a magazine and send it to our sponsors for example. Instead, you can read everything about us and our school on our website. We don’t sent mail by post either, which would cost us lots of postal charges because we have sponsors from all over the world. Instead, we send emails.
We give sponsors the possibility to send letters to the class in which they are sponsoring a child. We read out the letter to them and reply together. Our concept is not to tell the individual child it is sponsored so that no other child feels bad that he or she is not sponsored. They should have the feeling of being all equal. But we encourage all our sponsors to come here, to visit the Ashram, to sit with the children in the school and to really see the project they are supporting.
Additionally, because we are a small organization, we can have individual contact with every sponsor. While we don’t send out the ‘annual report’ that we have heard other organizations do, every of our sponsors is always welcome to send an email to inquire about the children and how they are. We have however one request: please don’t use this friendly correspondence to blackmail us!
Recently Ramona was in touch with a person who had a lot of questions about our project. As usual, Ramona was happy to reply and when she had explained that emails are always welcome, the person became a child sponsor, giving the first of the monthly donations.
Some time later, another mail came with a more personal question, about one of the blog posts I had written. Ramona also replied that email. Another answer came, with a row of questions to me, all about philosophical topics that need a certain time to reply properly – and which sometimes are best replied in another blog post. Moreover there were questions about this person’s private life and problems, too. When we did not send a reply within two days, simply because we were busy, the sponsor got upset and requested to know whether we were serious at all and if we really wanted him to keep on sponsoring a child.
You can imagine what kind of impression this gave us. Being busy with a business to run, a charity to look after and additionally a daughter of just a few months, we had not replied one of the many emails we get for two days – and a sponsor threatens to discontinue his sponsorship!
We told him in very nice words that we would only like to have support for the children if it comes from the heart. We told that we are always busy and try to do our best to reply all emails but that we might sometimes get late or forget one. This should however not be a reason to stop helping a child’s education!
We always love to help everyone who writes to us, be that a sponsor or not. But please, if you want to support a child, please do it from your heart and with your free wish and not with such a condition that makes us stressed and gives us pressure. We do our work from our heart, please also support with your heart.
Thank you.
Related posts
New Workbooks for our smallest School Children – 22 Oct 16
Glasses for our Children! – 20 Sep 16
Free Eye Checkup for the Children of our School – 31 Aug 16
Four Girls and two Boys – and five of them learning with us! – Our School Children – 29 Apr 16
Farewell Party at Ammaji’s for our Fifth Graders – 26 Apr 16
When the warm Lunch at School is the best part of the Day – Our School Children – 18 Mar 16
Another three-in-one Surgery for Monika – 14 Mar 16
A Half-Orphan searching for his Place – Our School Children – 11 Mar 16
I have a question. Even though a person may give for the wrong reasons, is it better for that child to go without a sponsor because that sponsor was doing it for the wrong reasons? Or is it better that although the sponsor is giving for wrong reasons as long as that child has support? This is just something that I’ve struggled with, and would like to have your opinion.