Today I stood in the middle of a neighborhood unlike any other I have ever seen. In a mountainside community in Bogota, Colombia, people who have lost their homes have sought refuge by building makeshift houses out of whatever material they could find. Broken bricks, shards of glass, rotting boards and pieces of scrap metal were all melded together to make living spaces.

First, I visited the Lopez family. They are a family of five living in a two room shack with no running water and limited use of gas for cooking. Their floor was made of rotting boards stretched over a large hole in the dirt. When I stood on it I could feel the wood bow beneath my weight and I feared their house might literally collapse around me.

Christian, their fourteen year old son, is enrolled in the Compassion child development program. For the last six years he has had a sponsor who writes to him and sends plenty of pictures from her life in the snowy eastern United States.

His face lit up and he beamed with pride as he talked about her and showed me the special place he and his family display her letters and pictures.

“It makes me feel good when she writes to me,” he said in Spanish.

When I asked Christian what he wanted to be when he grew up his answer was immediate: a professional soldier. In the bright eyes of this boy who knows nothing but poverty I saw something I recognized: hope.

Someone had instilled in Christian the power to dream. I caught a glimpse of something written in his sponsor’s handwriting hanging on the wall:

“God has wonderful plans for you, Christian. You will do great things.”

He believed every word.

My second visit was to the Via Tella family. The first thing I noticed when I arrived was the kid’s faces. Their cheeks were burned and blistered from the harsh sun and the blustery wind. These children, who have to bathe and use the bathroom outside, have no protection from the elements.

Alejandra, the five-year-old daughter of a single mother, has been on the waiting list to receive a Compassion sponsor for two years. Nobody has bothered to instill the power to dream into her young and fragile heart. There were fewer smiles in this house and more blank stares. The oldest daughter, a 12 year old, was quiet and withdrawn. She had already seen enough harsh realities to know life wouldn’t be easy for her.

One family had hope. The other didn’t.

I left these homes to have lunch with my team wrestling with the reality of what I saw. Can a sponsor really make that big of a difference in the life of a child? Are words sent with love from the other side of the world really that powerful?

Before I had time to answer those questions Leonardo, one of our translators, pulled up a chair and began to tell me his story.

“I wasn’t a Christian when I first started working for Compassion,” he said in English almost as good as my own. “I became a Christian by translating letters between children and their sponsors. As they would quote verses back and forth and as sponsors encouraged children to believe God had good plans for them, I could hear Jesus calling to me. He was calling me to be His disciple.”

For once I was speechless. I let him go on without interruption until I heard the entire beautiful story. When he was finished I knew.

One letter can make a difference.

Sometimes one letter is at all it takes to make a little boy dream of a bright future. And, sometimes, one letter is all it takes for a lost soul to realize his or her need for a Savior. One sponsor, one letter, can literally begin to change the world by impacting the life of a child.  

You can write your first letter today.

Tags: changing the world, child sponsorship, Compassion International, giving hope

This entry was posted on Monday, August 16th, 2010 at 8:54 pm and is filed under Colombia Trip, Compassion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.