How to sponsor an orphan?

Most of the children we help have both their parents but sometimes unfortunately they do not. Circa one of ten kid we help is an orphan from one parent and one on a hundred is an orphan from both parents.

Without sponsorship or help from a charity, orphans will most certainly have to work or beg. Left alone orphans will suffer from a lack of food or sickness. They are at high risk of being taken advantage of or abused.

Helping orphans is not our main focus but it does not mean we view it as less critical when we have the opportunity to help them. If you are sponsoring an orphan through Children of the Mekong, you will give him/her a chance of getting a childhood, an education and a roof where to sleep at night.

Children of the Mekong aims to help all kind of children in need of help – poor children, orphans and children with disabilities. Our greatest satisfaction is to see children blossom thanks to the help they have been provided through our charity.

Desperate times can call for desperate measures. Some parents are so eager to give a chance in life to their kids that they believe their children will have more opportunities in an orphanage where the kid will get an education than with them without education.

A study from Save the Children highlights the fact that between 80-90% of children in orphanages have at least one living parent. The charity observed that the majority of children are not being placed in orphanages because they are being abused or homeless.

Poverty and/or a lack of access to education are the reasons why they are placed in an orphanage. Furthermore, this article and the one from The Bucharest Early Intervention Project shows that “growing up in orphanages leads to profound deficits and delays in cognitive and social-emotional development and greater risks of psychiatric disorders. On average, for every three months that a child was in an institution, he or she lost one month of development compared to a child in foster care.”

If it can be avoided at Children of the Mekong we believe that a child should not be separated from his parents to be educated. Our primary aim is to keep families united and help them with the education of their children.

Sometimes it means the child will go to boarding school, but at least the bound between the family and the child is not be broken.

H’Kat has been fatherless since she was 3 years old. She lives with her mother, her stepfather and her two sisters in a small wooden house. One of her brothers went to Dong Nai in the Southeast of the country to find work, and the other one lives with his grandmother.

The family owns 2,000 sqm of rice fields and has difficulty harvesting 10 bags of rice each year due to the poor quality of the land. The family also owns 2,000 sqm of land on which they cultivate cassava and manage to harvest between 20 and 30 bags per year. As a result, the family earns around 3 million VND per year (c.£99).

H’Kat’s family is facing dire straits. The family had to borrow 10 million VND (c. £330) in order to repay an old debt, to buy fertilizer for crops and buy rice as their rice harvest is not enough to feed them all year long.

H’Kat is saddened by her family’s struggles yet she remains a courageous and hopeful young girl. She wants to pursue her education so she will be able to help her family in the future.

By sponsoring H’Kat you would assure her serene and secured schooling. Your contribution will also be precious moral support and will dramatically improve her living conditions so as her family’s.