Extending a Helping Hand Across the Globe : Charity: Thanks to PLAN International, needy children around the world have food, an education and a worthy home to call their own.

The room is tiny, its walls unpainted, the floor a slab of uneven concrete. Windowless, doorless and furnished only with a mattress on the floor, it resembles more a dark cell than a child’s room.

But it is Nassim Gregory Cabezas Angulo’s very own bedroom, and somehow, somewhere, together with the precious few things he owns, the 8-year-old has managed to stash away all the letters that every few months make their slow journey from the United States all the way to this house in Cali, Colombia.

There are dozens of letters--seven years worth--dating back to when Nassim Gregory was just a year old. They speak about Christmases and snow, a perfect young couple and small blond children who will grow up far from this unpaved, muddy street and this house that up to a couple of years ago had no bathroom, a mud floor and a zinc roof that would cave in every time it rained.

But the letters, and the money they brought, have helped Nassim Gregory’s family make this home much better than it used to be and given him something to look forward to.

Nassim Gregory is an international “foster child,” one of 21,000 in Cali alone who has been “adopted” by a pen-pal foster parent affiliated with PLAN International, a global nonprofit agency that links close to a million needy children around the world with donors in eight countries.

It all starts with a check for $26.24, written out in a comfortable home somewhere far away. It ends with school supplies, a teacher, materials to rebuild a house or perhaps the means to feed a child here in Aguablanca, a sprawling slum on the outskirts of Colombia’s second-largest city.

The sponsor is one of more than 75,000 who write similar checks in the United States. The child is one of close to 100,000 sponsored by Childreach, the U.S. member agency of PLAN, which claims to be the oldest and largest non-sectarian child sponsorship organization in the country.

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You have no doubt seen the ads for Childreach and similar agencies. Typically, a sad-looking child stares pleadingly from a black and white photograph. The words below explain how, for about 70 cents a day, you can change this child’s life, and provide the health, education or clothing he or she desperately needs.

It is an appealing prospect. In California, 12,000 sponsors are affiliated with Childreach, doling out monthly checks that find their way to the Childreach agency in the country where the sponsor child lives and eventually, say the agencies, to the child’s community.

For Nassim Gregory and his family, that sponsorship has indeed transformed their lives.

“Thanks to PLAN, we improved our home, which was very important, because we didn’t have worthy housing,” says Nassim’s mother, Rosario Angulo, a 44-year-old community leader who has used PLAN’s support to its fullest. According to PLAN standards, a “worthy” house must have at least two bedrooms, one bathroom, electricity and plumbing. The Angulos’ house had only electricity, stolen from neighboring barrios, when she and her family first moved to the area.

“When we started,” she explains as she gives a tour of her small home and introduces her three children, “every time it rained, the water would come up to our waists.”

It’s quite different now. Although the house is little more than a hovel by U.S. standards, it now boasts three bedrooms (even if they are tiny and barely furnished). Angulo’s pride and joy is a big refrigerator that sits squarely in the middle of the main room. She bought it recently with a loan from PLAN and uses it during weekends to sell sodas to the neighbors and supplement her husband’s meager income as a construction worker.

Although PLAN’s goal is to improve the child’s environment using the monthly stipend sent by sponsors overseas, for many children, tangible proof of their donor’s existence doesn’t lie in essential home repairs or school supplies but in the occasional letters and photos that remind them that someone very far away thinks about them from time to time.

Nassim Gregory, letters and pictures in hand, listens quietly as his mother speaks. A sunny second-grader, he doesn’t fully understand the extent of his sponsors’ help. As far as he’s concerned, they send him letters and sometimes pictures, and once in a while, even a gift, like the computer books he got last year. The books, in English, are useless to Nassim Gregory, who speaks only Spanish. But at least he gets something in the mail.

Several blocks away, in a house that still does not qualify as “worthy” (it lacks a bathroom and has a mud floor), 10-year-old Adriana Mendez wishes she were so lucky.

“I send him letters and pictures,” she says of her sponsor of five years. “But he has never written us back. I even write him in English,” she says proudly. But not even that seems to do the trick.

The lack of correspondence is a problem, especially because Childreach places significant emphasis on the relationship between child and sponsor.

“Our philosophy is that if every person reached out to one child the world would be a better place,” says Julie Gelfand, public relations consultant for Childreach. “And it is extremely important for the children to feel that connection. But we wrestle with letter writing a lot. Many Americans see the need, and feel the tug in their heartstrings, but they don’t write. And frankly we don’t want to alienate people who want to help but don’t want to go the extra mile.”

When a child and a sponsor are paired up, both parties are asked to write an introductory letter describing themselves, their families and their interests. From that point on, the child is required to write and send pictures once a year. If the sponsor writes, the child has to write back or else the affiliation is terminated. If the sponsor doesn’t write, that’s just tough luck.

Janeth Mendez, Adriana’s mother, is upset about the lack of correspondence and the fact that in the past two years, she’s derived no tangible benefits from her sponsor.

“I used their health services twice, and once they gave me money to pay an overdue school bill,” she says. Other than that, she hasn’t heard from Childreach.

Problem is, unknown to Mendez, Childreach has radically changed its approach in the past few years.

“Before, donor contributions would be handed directly to the children’s family. There was a lot of direct assistance,” explains Paul Bodie, the Dutch director of PLAN’s office in Cali. “Now we support community-organized groups and organizations that implement different projects destined to improve the environment where the child lives.”

The change is part of a now-established trend among international aid agencies to help people help themselves, an approach that has proven to be more effective in the long run than the paternalistic practice of doling handouts, which provides only temporary relief and creates a dependency on the donor.

Childreach and PLAN, specifically, pool donor contributions and use them to implement long-lasting community-based programs.

In this way, families might not get individual school supplies, but an entire neighborhood could get a school.

And Mendez, who wants a better house, could get one if she got together with neighbors and submitted a home-improvement proposal to PLAN.

All in all, says Bodie, his office gets approximately $3 million in donated funds every year, which go to finance 200 to 250 projects proposed by people in the community. Fully 80% of every donated dollar, says Bodie, goes to the families served.

The idea, says field worker Aristobolo Garavino, is to leave something behind, “so when PLAN leaves, people will have learned to write a proposal, to negotiate and to work together. Obviously, there are people who don’t accept that and would rather get a handout.”

Garavino and Bodie acknowledge that they have a lot of work to do as far as teaching people about new PLAN policies and in some cases even informing them about it. This involves letting all recipient families know that they will no longer get direct aid, and giving them the option to drop out of PLAN if they wish. So far, says Bodie, no one has chosen to do so. On the other end, Childreach ads in the United States have partially changed their focus and explain--in fine print--that money goes toward community development programs that ultimately benefit the child.

And while people like Mendez still need further guidance from PLAN fieldworkers, others, like Rosario Angulo, are already taking full advantage of the new program.

“Some people don’t have the time, or don’t know how to work with the community. But I can. I feel I’ve gotten ahead. I feel I have new wealth since PLAN is here and I hope to keep growing,” she says.

In fact, says Bodie, PLAN has done so well in Angulo’s neighborhood, that it will soon move out of the area, standard procedure when certain goals and needs are met.

That is precisely the reason behind the closure of PLAN’s office in Bogota, Colombia’s capital, several years ago. This, however, hasn’t deterred Suzane Elzas, a Los Angeles resident, from keeping in touch with the girl she started to sponsor 23 years ago.

“My husband and I sponsored seven to nine children around the world. But hers was the first real success story we had,” says Elzas, who just came back from her fourth visit to her former foster child, now 32 years old.

“We got into a very special relationship with the family . . . and now she is married and has pulled herself out of poverty.” The secret of the success, adds Elzas, was not only PLAN, but the fact that her foster child wanted to get ahead.

“I always said I didn’t believe in charity. . . . I always said, ‘Don’t give fish to people, teach them how to fish.’ And she really got the message.”

Elzas got the message too. After meeting her foster child the first time, she decided to learn Spanish and enrolled at UCLA, earning her bachelor’s degree at the age of 53.

“Without that girl I would have never done that,” she says. “It’s not a question of money but of human relations. [By doing something like this,] you realize you’re not the center of the world. And I am thankful for that. Now she [my foster child] tells me: ‘You are like me. You seized the opportunity.’ ”