Elizabeth from Zambia.

Meet Elizabeth. She's five years old and lives in or near Lusaka, Zambia. I decided to sponsor Elizabeth after I couldn't stop thinking about her. I'd check the CI website to see if she'd been sponsored yet, but she was always still there. Then, finally, last Friday I decided that Elizabeth had waited long enough. I sponsored her! One of the reasons I decided to sponsor Elizabeth is that her ID number indicates that she's only recently been enrolled in the program. The fact that she only has one photo, dated 4/10/10, backs this up. She probably hasn't been sponsored before. I wanted to sponsor her even more when I realized that, until someone sponsored her, she wouldn't be benefitting from the CI program. (Children don't lose benefits if they lose a sponsor, but they don't receive benefits when they are enrolled until someone signs up to sponsor them.)

Another major reason I wanted to sponsor Elizabeth was that she lives with a "Guardian". I've seen plenty of kids on the CI site listed as living with relatives, but Elizabeth was the only one I'd seen listed as having a Guardian. This brings up a personal point for me: I often choose to sponsor children who are orphans or who don't live with their parents for whatever reason, because my own mother grew up in an orphanage. In the late 1940s, when my mother was young, her father abandoned the family, and my grandmother couldn't afford to support herself and her two young children, even after she found a job as a housekeeper in a nursing home. She had to place my mother and my uncle in an orphanage so they could be taken care of. (Later, they went to live with other relatives and still later they were reunited with their mother, who visited and wrote to them while they were in the orphanage.) So the fact that Elizabeth was under the care of a guardian made me more inclined to sponsor her.

Both of Elizabeth's parents are deceased, and she either has no siblings, or they don't live with her and her guardian. The household has a monthly income of $70, which is a little more than the incomes of some of the other Zambian children's families, but is still crushingly poor. The home she lives in is made of brick, with a concrete floor and a cardboard roof. Cooking is done on a coal stove, electricity is available, and a community faucet and latrine are used.

Now, if that wasn't a sad enough situation, listen to this. Elizabeth's family cannot afford to send her to school, so she doesn't attend. Upon learning this, I immediately sent an email to CI stating that I was VERY interested in finding out how much it would cost to get Elizabeth enrolled in school, and that I would pay that amount to ensure that she gets an education. The good thing is, she's only five, so she won't be very far behind even if she can't begin school until the start of the Zambian school year in January. As far as I am concerned, that is my first priority as far as Special Needs Gifts go. All of my other sponsored children do attend school, so getting Elizabeth an education is going to be the first thing I put my money towards.