Happy Friday to you!
This post is installment 3 of "I love Tanzania." I've shared with you that meeting my sponsored child was a life changing event and how the lives and faces of the children touched my heart...well this post is about our home visits.
While on the Tanzania trip I was able to visit 5 homes. These are the homes of some of the children that are part of Compassion's projects. The purpose for the home visits seems to be multi faceted. One thing we would try to do is hear what being a part of Compassion has meant to the family and meet other relatives living in the home. Another aspect was the opportunity we had to encourage the families and pray for them. One of the strongest purposes is so that we can get to know more about living in poverty. Our group of sponsors stayed in a pretty comfy hotel with plenty of food and water and space for everything we brought along...part of going on a Compassion trip is learning as much as possible about poverty and the best way to do that is to see it with our own eyes.
Within these home visits we were told we could ask anything but something about that felt too invasive to me. I wanted to be polite and not embarrass them in anyway but there were others in my various visit groups that didn't hold back. I think all of our questions were still very appropriate but it seemed to change the dynamic of the visit for me from "meeting a family" to "researching a family". To spite any of the apprehensions I had about sitting in these homes and talking with the families and not wanting them to feel like they were on display- I truly loved this aspect of the sponsor tour.
Not every home visit was a happy one. In one of the homes we learned that the mother was sick with HIV and afraid for her child's future after she was gone, in another home it seemed there were too many mouths to feed and not enough food (which I know is the case in so many other homes). On another visit we were happy to learn that in a community where men can and do take several wives that the young sponsored boy in that home had already determined he would only have one wife. Another visit brought a marriage proposal or at least the question of when I might return because the father in that family wanted to marry me off to someone in his tribe.
These were totally an eye opening experience...here's a few (actually a bunch) of photos from our home visits. The thread that wove through each of these visits and never changed was the fact that all of these families graciously invited us into their lives and homes and offered so much of themselves to a group of people they knew nothing about.
While on the Tanzania trip I was able to visit 5 homes. These are the homes of some of the children that are part of Compassion's projects. The purpose for the home visits seems to be multi faceted. One thing we would try to do is hear what being a part of Compassion has meant to the family and meet other relatives living in the home. Another aspect was the opportunity we had to encourage the families and pray for them. One of the strongest purposes is so that we can get to know more about living in poverty. Our group of sponsors stayed in a pretty comfy hotel with plenty of food and water and space for everything we brought along...part of going on a Compassion trip is learning as much as possible about poverty and the best way to do that is to see it with our own eyes.
Within these home visits we were told we could ask anything but something about that felt too invasive to me. I wanted to be polite and not embarrass them in anyway but there were others in my various visit groups that didn't hold back. I think all of our questions were still very appropriate but it seemed to change the dynamic of the visit for me from "meeting a family" to "researching a family". To spite any of the apprehensions I had about sitting in these homes and talking with the families and not wanting them to feel like they were on display- I truly loved this aspect of the sponsor tour.
Not every home visit was a happy one. In one of the homes we learned that the mother was sick with HIV and afraid for her child's future after she was gone, in another home it seemed there were too many mouths to feed and not enough food (which I know is the case in so many other homes). On another visit we were happy to learn that in a community where men can and do take several wives that the young sponsored boy in that home had already determined he would only have one wife. Another visit brought a marriage proposal or at least the question of when I might return because the father in that family wanted to marry me off to someone in his tribe.
These were totally an eye opening experience...here's a few (actually a bunch) of photos from our home visits. The thread that wove through each of these visits and never changed was the fact that all of these families graciously invited us into their lives and homes and offered so much of themselves to a group of people they knew nothing about.
Enjoy the photos.
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