Is Adoption the Only Way to Help?

What if adoption isn’t an option for you?

At SixSeeds, we are doing our part to get the word out about National Adoption Month by highlighting some people across the country who have adopt children from across the world.  But what if adoption isn’t an option for you? Are there other ways to help with orphans and destitute children around the globe?

That’s the question SixSeeds posed to one of our team members and WorldVision vice-president Steve Haas last week.  He didn’t just rattle off a list of projects and opportunities for people to consider, he reframed the whole question. Think about it, he said, “wouldn’t it be a wonderful world if there were no need for adoptions?” How can you work to create or change the conditions so that there are fewer orphans in the world? That’s the thrust of much of WorldVision’s work –building up communities by addressing their basic needs for water, health and hygiene, education, food security, and to enable them to handle more of their own needs.

Naturally, WorldVision isn’t advocating against adoption. But they want communities to to be able to sustain their children, WorldVision works to provide concrete assistance to enable them to care for their own.  For instance, they might build a water catchment basin to help farmers extend their growing season. Or they may provide farmers with hybrid seed corn to increase crop yield. In one African community where World Vision has worked, the village elders only let farmers use the hybrid corn in their fields–and take advantage of the higher yields and profits–if those farmers also helped to care for the orphans in their midst. In some cases, these orphans may have one surviving parent; in many cases, they at least have extended family that can help to raise them in the context of their own community.  According to Steve, communities that make the choice to provide for their own have seen birth rates drop, as the mentality changes from seeing needy children as a problem to considering them as true children of the community.

So what about us in the developed world, considering ways to help? WorldVision has plenty of concrete ideas. Two big ones are child sponsorship  and its newer Micro microlending service. In both cases, the funding you provide not only helps specific families in need, but “it creates the train tracks for other resources to come into the community.” That is, the infrastructure it provides lifts all the children in that community, and it helps to unlock other sources of funding for the community, including government grants. Both WorldVision’s Micro microlending program and its child sponsorship programs also help to create a relationship between givers and recipients–you’re not just giving cash to an abstraction, you can actually follow the lives of those you are helping, and even read in their own words the stories of the impact you are making. 

If we care about families, shouldn’t we also care about their immediate environment?  Steve shared the old Chinese proverb about a village that kept finding children being swept down the river that went past. As they saw a child, courageous town leaders would dive into the river to save a child, but it always seemed that as soon as they rescued one from the currents they’d soon see another child in trouble. Eventually someone looked way upstream near a hill and saw an evil strongman throwing kids into the river.  The villagers regrouped, banded together, tied up the strongman, and prevented any more kids from being thrown in the river.

Thinking about orphans, there are some obvious strongmen to go after – disease, malnutrition, lack of access to education, and so on. None of us who care about kids can sit on the sidelines – if we’re not diving in to the river, then we can find ways to help tie up the strong men. WorldVision – the second largest relief organization in the world, behind the United Nations – has blazed a lot of paths to the strongmen. Take a look around, and figure out what’s your job to do.