KILLING HER SOFTLY..WITH YOUR $ONG!

A picture was taken morning of Saturday 17 October 2006. It showed a 12 year young African girl walking to a child support centre about 4 kilometers from her home.

For energy spent, she can only hope to get a standard breakfast and square lunch for the day alone. Year upon year, this once a week routine is religiously followed. To a child who has parents at home none estranged but happily married, the term 'child support' is a misnomer. As years wear on, the child starts to question why she or her family is the poor one around while others appear to thrive in 'comparative' opulence.

By age 15 however, she'll have met other children whose parents are enrolled on different kinds of donor funded structures administered inclusively (whole family support) as opposed to her singular attendant version. Aid donors to Africa are a ‘plenty. Basically there are two main types of programs favored for child support. These are 'subsidy programs' and 'enhancement projects'. Child subsidy is common if not exclusive to orphaned children. It is referred to as child support because of similarity to the monthly stipend ordered by Courts-of-Law in child custody dispute rulings. Aid is channeled to registered children through facilitators. This is a check against irresponsible guardians/parents misappropriating donor funds.

Neighborhood outreach facilitation ‘is supposed’ to guarantee both sponsor and child's interests. The end result is duplicity of cell administrator centres. Since depravity is universal - whether one has parents or not - a fraternity is built within each cell to dismiss any stigma attendant to orphans. Subsidy cells are thus not ‘rehabilitation’ centres for they generally target children of ability with one sponsor per child.

Family opportunity enhancement projects claim an inverse approach. They target both child and parental uplifting into better standards of living. HIV/AIDS support projects have been extremely successful in Kenya and other African countries. The ideal is to get the family unit to discuss and appraise its predicament with optimism so as to lead as much a productive life as would be any actor in any nuclear family. These projects are popular - especially with corporate donors - because they use revolving funds. Small repayable loans are disbursed to such family while professionals of diverse fields offer free management and industrial skills to the affected cell (families) group. The difference between the two systems becomes evident.

The former caters almost exclusively for child subsidy while the other is more of a parent cell entity. Since funds repaid enhance the credibility of a particular family in the donor's eye, subsequent requests are approved. While elder children in this system take advantage of free skill certification, the subsidy system has no place for siblings. As parents on the opportunity version are freed from the yoke of poverty as they build on savings, their little ones are released to their elements, that is, to play, sing and celebrate their juvenile days as is their place in nature.

The girl (above) is on a child support system not a family opportunity project. She has a certified sponsor way out in Canada. Her family can not, that is, are not supposed to contact the sponsor directly even if they were to come across his/her address discreetly. Child support is about benefactors pooling donor funds while a local facilitator decides on the form of subsidy for each child. This bureaucracy is only broken by a few sponsors who take upon themselves to fly into the beneficially’s locality to appraise the child's status before further commitment can be preferred for another decade. Child support is treated as a life long vow.

Few sponsors however ever make that vital visit. In the computer age however, a lot is bound to change. If children thought to be orphans are graduating to trace their biological parents through DNA profiling, this superficial 'iron curtain' is no longer a communication barrier to sponsor/family/child search. There are sponsors who believe that no African child can wiggle out of destitution on a donor/facilitator trickle. Most enroll to the system to guarantee the child a comfortable shield - or so they believe - through infancy and formative years. The more discerning have a ceiling age where they literally seek out the family or child and that despite - not in spite - of the facilitator tradition. These sponsors state clearly that their motives are more than just humanitarian. As the local slogan goes, a decision has to be made whether one is only 'putting days into a child's life or putting life into each child's day'.

There must thus be a point in a child's life when such sponsor seeks to understand the social economic handicaps that attend to the child. While losses of parents’ employment, death or chronic sickness are common facets, others like long incarceration of one spouse could be unique to that family. These are handicaps that opportunity enhancement project managers try to ascertain before deciding what fund placement or cell group a family should be classified. They take into account the family may have been solely reliant on the incapacitated spouse. Projects targeting single mothers shortlist on this cue.

The child subsidy system is not foolproof any more. Where parents might choose to remain loyal to the old 'no- direct-contact' rule, every juvenile on the register sooner than later outgrows his/her innocence. With a click on a search engine, they can now trace their sponsors to wail about tribulations both real and imagined. Where the search fails to yield results, most will despair into the world of pen pal compromise in hope of uplifting themselves through maturity and independence. While a lot of sponsor funds may have been spent on white collar diplomas, this only adds one younger jobseeker to the crowded national grid. In Africa, this is complicated by the fact that there are no unemployment welfare structures. A child of talent perhaps remains the only one who can pull herself - and parents - out of their situational abyss.

For example, when Kenya's award winning athletes - who come mostly from very poor backgrounds - return home from Europe with Grand Prix earnings, their response as to expenditure has become classic: 'to build my mother a decent home'. Opportunity enhancement projects try to make this 'decent home' pre-amble the foundation of their objectives. Latent talent in the family is extrapolated into an intricate motivation force to anchor diversification of production and earnings per head per season. In fact, the family is isolated and treated as a viable singular 'nation' whose industrial thrift can be crafted on that compacted nature. Children on the support system are not so lucky. Most are later abandoned into informal employment.

Untutored to survive in a competitive world where cartels rule supreme and inhibitive city By-Laws disavow itinerant hawking, they find themselves bundled out of city bounds like Pythagoras.

Pythagoras was the great mathematician who told citizens of Crotona that one could tell how primitive (sadistic) a people they were by simply watching how they treated their animals. This dictum - later made famous by Mahatma Gandhi - rubbed the city-state residents the wrong way. Pythagoras and his followers were thrown out the city and banished. Their meeting place was burned down. The way we treat those in need is equally a measure of how progressive a people we are given that children are much more than domesticated or wild animals. To serve or exploit becomes the signature to this well known modern ‘save the child’ song.

To sponsor an African girl child in either of the two systems involves more than enrolling empathy to the subscriber pool. A good number of sponsors seek out their beneficiaries at age 17 - 19 when the girls are either entering trade college or tutorial universities. Sponsors are sure to get first hand assessment of a child's ability and experiences straight from the horse's mouth. Contact at age 22 could prove too late.

A sponsor whose last communication states that a girl did not make it to university but was given computer courses would assume that job placement in 'primitive' Africa would be automatic. To meet the same wanton girl and understand that 'Word Processor' and 'Excel' tabulation skills are not enough to get such job would be an eye opener. Child support systems do not provide facilities for children to start off their lives into craft or thrift.

For those in the know, meeting, hearing and understanding a child's reservations, experiences and failed aspirations - if visit is left too late - can be heartbreaking. Comparing photographs of the same smiling happy child posed in front of strategically planted flowers with absolutely no tell-tale backgrounds, a sponsor may surmise that she might have in fact contributed more to the child's exploitation.

The call to sponsor has thus to be played out more as a parallel virtue than a need to be seen to be doing something out there in Africa. Visiting is not therefore propelled by the need to verify expenditure for spilt milk but ascertain corrective measures to refine the status of a child who is then big enough to face the world on her own terms. That is why Lizzy - the 12 year old pictured above - was surprised to receive her occasional sponsor mail only to read that her Canadian benefactors would be visiting Africa and Kenya this fall 2006. Her parents, ever so cautious lest such tour be purely official or aborted - decided to downplay it. Nonetheless, when the Canadian couple wrote they were to visit a Kenyan locality yet watch the expectant eyes of a curious child, action beckoned.

Though the father had always known the sponsor's address prior to this mail, the parents had respected the 'no-direct-contact' modicum as required by the sponsor-administrator-child bureaucracy. During that period, Lizzy's family had been kicked out of their residence in lieu of unpaid rent. Lizzy had thus come to know what it means to sleep out in the cold and witnessed every item of their household inventory including utensils seized for the rent man’s hammer. Sponsors are not told such kind of things.

When they later hear them from a grown child only to learn that house rent a month could be as low as $30 (Thirty only), regret could turn emotional. There is one known factor that prevails among European sponsors. Those that visit subsidy centres -and assuming that American and Canadians are European migrant Diaspora - have a forbidding character of taking to chronological detail. Sponsor confidence or disillusionment comes head to head with local facilitator competence. Unlike mute photographs of an innocent child, the now grown 'colleen' waif stands right there to be seen.

Since the sponsor knows how much she has been giving per month to his/her beneficially, they come with set expectations. For Christian sponsors, the spiritual and academic critique dominates. The social amenity status however causes many a nasty moments. The 'couldn't something have been done and communicated to us' types of queries become embarrassing echoes. Parents of the child seen for the first time - remember no photos of parents are sent the sponsor - can also paint a pathetic picture. A local facilitator must always be prepared to host a sponsor within this inquiry censor.

A sponsor who is satisfied with the child’s pace sits in content. Disillusioned, they collapse into guilt remorse with unspoken apologies to no one in particular. Africans marvel at this character of Europeans - white people to be specific - of always wanting to operate within a locus of absolute truths. It is nothing to do with accountability more a culture.

Where the sponsor has this information through the child’s formative years, a different game plan could be arranged through the same facilitators or from without. That is why sponsors who come to learn of parent's former professional backgrounds - unless it be criminal or someone tries to paint it so - rarely visit to argue out accountability. They may already have made up their minds to continue with the sponsor/child program by the rules yet engage the parents in a completely new arrangement independent of the sponsor support system.

Committed European sponsors act for a cause not fad. Christian sponsors likewise do not visit to seek answers but to prefer better solutions. They act to redeem, even so as they were themselves redeemed in a spiritual sense. The chronological approach to visitor's query starts with asking why the child was enrolled in the first place. As the saying goes, one does not build a dyke without consulting the tide Almanac.

For Lizzy, it could prove difficult for any administrator to explain. Only parents - not even guardians - can qualify the trigger details that may have bankrolled a child into abject status. Lizzy's father likes to state that girls like Lizzy are mostly products of social apartheid. In tribal centric Africa, value is thought to be inherent only in that tribe's structures, a totally herenvolkist (chosen race) attitude.

Children of the tribe are expected to vow themselves to these values. Any liberal deviant who trades modernity against traditional wisdom throws a dry fleece to contest with the keepers of the tribe’s dignity. Marriage from without the tribe is one such deviation. Any couple that may have married across the tribal confine is thought to have contaminated the social gel that envelopes the family's hereditary function. Such deviant couple is usually ostracized by the extended family.

Family support systems are denied as if to prove a point to other would be deviants. Sponsors may find this difficult to comprehend until they pay the child a visit. Lizzy's parents' original crime was to have married across this tribal moat.

When Lizzy or her elder siblings visit their paternal or maternal ancestral homes, the contrast is all too evident. They begin to see the world in opaque light. Sponsors are thought to be kind but rich people out there somewhere while their grand parents are actually rich people in the neighborhood.


When they question their parents on this, all their parents can say is 'thank God you were born into this world. Had we acted otherwise and flowed with the tribal tempo, you would never have been born'.

That is not a difficult philosophy for a 12 year old who is the third born in a family of five. Walking the 4 (four) kilometers to a subsidy centre thus becomes no more a life line than it could have been worse not to be enrolled. At least, Lizzy gets to meet children who are in worse tribulations.

Well, Lizzy will eventually come to know that Africans say 'never to curse a day until the sun goes down'. She has however been taught never to curse God's day for there is always tomorrow’s promise to supersede today's disfavor.

For other African girls caught up in this 'subsidy twister' yet never have a chance to meet their sponsors, another African saying that 'it takes a village to bring up a child' can prove far fetched. They will continue walking the extra mile into distant horizons of disillusioned maturity. Most will continue sleeping on the floor, drop out of school even when the sponsors are made to believe that school tuition is free - it is not - and still have to wonder where the days meal will come from.

Sooner than later, such girls must abscond the 'support system' to seek ‘better villagers’ from yonder to spring to their aid in a more direct and meaningful way. The sponsor will be no wiser for it only takes a child to miss three consecutive roll-calls to be deleted from the register.

Let every sponsor learn to dig into the real causes of a child's life's shortcomings. Induced poverty is one of the most prevalent causes of child neglect - if not depravity – in Africa. Resolution can never be achieved by social empathy. Economic dynamics must apply within a boardroom ethic.

Ask Lizzy - sponsors' visit or not - ten years from now.