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Gopinath’s
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Note: For the past five years, our family has sponsored Gopinath through the Christian Foundation for Children and Aging (CFCA). The purpose of CFCA, according to organization literature, is to “create a worldwide community of compassion through personal outreach.” The highest priority is a one-on-one sponsorship of children, youth and aging persons to help them achieve their desired potential, live with dignity and partake fully in their communities.
In our campaign travels, we continually urge Americans to consider cutting back on their lifestyles and helping more in the Third World. We have found CFCA, and organizations like them, to be excellent conduits to do that. What’s more, common sense says that the more we help -- the closer we will all be as a world. --Joe
Gopinath lives in India.
When we started sponsoring him through CFCA, he was about 12 years old. He is now 17 and a senior in high school.
In a recent letter (our family and Gopinath correspond regularly), he said he was preparing for “government examinations.” If he does well, he wrote that he is planning to enter medical college.
Something his poverty racked country needs considerably more of, doctors.
Gopinath also wrote that he continues to play soccer with his friends as much as he can. And he regularly does extra-curricular things with the CFCA staff.
During a recent holiday, for instance, the CFCA coordinator took Gopinath, and several other youth, on an excursion to visit a Catholic Shrine.
Gopinath often talks about his Catholic faith in his letters. It is apparent that it has become quite important to him.
CFCA has become important, if not a life line, to him as well.
He wrote that CFCA provided money to buy clothes at Christmas and pay his school fees. He also wrote that he receives CFCA money for family expenses and some of this money also paid for medical bills when he was recently sick.
Our family reads these letters with interest. And our kids refer to Gopinath as their “older brother.”
We, in turn, write Gopinath letters back. With these correspondences, we also send pictures and drawings.
Gopinath has, indeed, become family. We pray for him often.
As the Catholic faith is important to Gopinath, the Catholic faith is important to us. And part of that faith calls us into a deeper relationship with those less fortunate.
The Third World is teeming with those who are less fortunate, I recently told Channel 10 News in Albany, Georgia. (Just prior, we had toured Habitat for Humanity’s Third World mock “Slum Village” in Americus, Georgia.)
The poverty depicted here is staggering.
And we believe the response to this shouldn’t in any way be about how “blessed” we are in America by comparison.
The response should be: to help.
--Joe
