Keira returned from Nepal prior to the country’s devastating earthquakes in April and May. We are pleased to report that no sponsored children were hurt in these disasters and that the sponsorship communities were relatively unscathed, with only minor damages in the areas.
By Kiera, World Vision Executive Assistant and Nepal Child Sponsor
Having worked for World Vision for four years; I thought I knew about the kind of impact World Vision has in the field. This was a pretty arrogant assumption. “Yeah this type of stuff goes on in these countries and I know how World Vision helps”. Then I go about doing my work hoping that it has some sort of impact somewhere along the chain to the field.
But actually going there and seeing it with my own eyes was … I don’t think it actually prepared me for what I saw. At times I was quite confronted and quite challenged but it changed my perception on a lot of issues.
It actually changed my spending habits and the way I do things now I’m back in Australia. I came back a different person, with different values and different expectations.
I have a seven-year-old sponsored child, her name is Purnima. We’ve been sponsoring children for a while now but she’s a relatively new sponsored child for us. Purnima lives in the Chisapani project in Western Nepal, where World Vision only recently started and where children are becoming sponsored. I chose her because she’s a month older than my eldest daughter. As they celebrate their birthdays relatively close together I thought it would be nice for them to correspond with each other.
Meeting Purnima was the highlight of my trip. We had a photo on the fridge at home, but actually meeting her in person made it all the more real – this is actually a real child in a real situation. I was honoured to be able to spend time with her and her family and through a translator get to know her; to talk about Australian wildlife, what her hopes and aspirations are and what she likes doing at school.
Seeing the similarities between my nearly seven-year-old and Purnima was just amazing; the similarities of children really do carry across all geography. Some of the things Purnima would say or do, I would constantly think “Aww, my daughters do that"