Sponsoring Olman

I'm not completely sure where to start this story. For a while, we have been talking about wanting to help someone in the developing world, but didn't know of a good way to start. I had been saying that I would love to be able to help a child somewhere, but my thoughts on the subject were defined in only the vaguest of terms. Could we adopt a child to rescue him/her from crushing poverty? Could we find someone somehow to send some money to? How would we be sure that the money was even making it to the family, and how would we find someone?

Some time after Audrey and I discussed this, I came across a video (That I can no longer find, by the way) of children in the very poorest of circumstances, reading Matthew 25:35-40 one-by-one, finishing with "Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." It was a commercial for WorldVision, a charity that does child sponsorships. After I recovered (it was the kind of video designed to elicit a strong emotional response, and it succeeded), it dawned on me that sponsoring a child would be a GREAT way to help someone. We could send money to a family and have some kind of assurance that it was going to be used well, and the charity would be able to find families in need. We could even get to know the family, and keep in touch with them as our children grew up.

Being a man that lives in constant paranoia that I am going to be scammed by someone, however, I decided to research charities that do this kind of work and see which would be ripping me off the least. None of the big companies are terrible, but when I was looking at charitywatch.org to compare companies I found something interesting: Charity CEOs get paid a lot! Worldvision's president makes almost $500K a year, and almost all of their competitors had executives that made over $300K. I realize that the vast majority of the donations make it to the intended target, but the idea that some of my money is being siphoned to support a $35K-a-month executive salary turned me off.

Eventually we found a charity: Unbound, and their highest paid employee gets paid about half of the salary of the next lowest paid president of a child sponsorship charity ($143K to be specific). They also had the lowest percentage of donation used for administrative costs, and were sufficiently large and established to be trustworthy. I was honestly afraid for a while that there was not going to be a way to sponsor a child without getting ripped-off for the opportunity to do so.

One night Audrey and I decided to choose a child to help, and after some prayer, we chose Olman. His description on the website said that "The family's income is seasonal. His mother is the sole provider and her income is not enough to cover all the basic household needs. Sometimes, they do not have any food." He is 7 and lives in Costa Rica. We just recently got our packet from Unbound with Olman's picture and some more information about him, and we are going to be sending our first letter to him this week.

Nathan prays for Olman now when it is his turn to pray at night, and I am really hoping that we will be able to get to know him over the upcoming years. I am also hoping that we will be able to teach our children something important about poverty, while legitimately helping a young child that seems to be in desperate need of help. The video below pretty well sums up what we wanted to do for another human being. (it's the kind of heart-tugging video that made me choose to sponsor a child, so be warned).