The Tribune’s sponsored children in Africa did not fit the streotypes or even understanding the concept of being sponsored. For these two boys, the images presented to their sponsors didn’t match the reality of their lives.
SPONSORED? NEWS TO HIM
Salvador Nhabangua does more than teach lessons in the crowded, open-air classrooms of the village school in Zongoene, Mozambique. He writes letters to America.
Flashing a broad smile, the 44-year-old teacher cheerfully admits he composes most of the letters that purport to come from children in his classroom, who are among the 216 sponsored through Save the Children Federation Inc. in this farming community overlooking the Limpopo River.
Nhabangua takes pride in the task. Unfortunately, he doesn’t always take the time to discuss the letters with the children before he writes them. He says that an SCF staffer pays him $5 to $10 a month on an informal basis to write the notes.
Consider the case of Leonelio J. Tamele, a wide-eyed 9-year-old boy in Nhabangua’s class whom a Tribune reporter agreed to sponsor for a year by sending SCF a $240 check in June 1995.
Although Leonelio’s sponsorship ended the following June, SCF allows lapsed sponsors a grace period of six months. In November 1996 the reporter received a regretful letter from SCF President Charles MacCormack concluding that “I can only assume that you have decided not to continue being a sponsor.”
MacCormack’s letter was the sponsor’s last communication from Save the Children–but not the last from Leonelio J. Tamele, from whom an unexpected letter arrived the following month, bearing a Mozambique postmark and a pair of colorful stamps.
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“My Dear,” it said, “I will thank-you so much if you can send me a school bag.”
When the reporter asked SCF headquarters in Westport, Conn., why his erstwhile sponsored child had sent a request for a school bag to his home address, the charity’s response ignored the fact that Leonelio was no longer sponsored.
An SCF sponsorship representative explained that although it was the organization’s policy that children “should not ask for things,” when the request concerned “something more or less educational . . . the field office does not always have the child delete it.”
Save the Children assured the former sponsor that “we will certainly contact the Mozambique office and let them know you are disturbed by this.”
A few months later a second letter arrived from Leonelio, again asking for help with “school materials.”
Only after Tribune reporters visited Leonelio and his parents here in May 1997 did the explanation for the letters become clear. They had not been written by Leonelio, it turned out.
Nor had Leonelio or his parents ever clearly understood he had been sponsored through Save the Children. Although Leonelio remembered receiving a birthday card from America, he said he hadn’t understood it was from his Tribune sponsor.
Salvador Nhabangua admitted writing the letter asking for a book bag, but only at the request of Leonelio’s mother. But neither Leonelio nor his parents recalled making such a request.
According to Gary Shaye, vice president of international programs at SCF headquarters, teachers should write letters for students only when the children are too young to write themselves. At 9, Leonelio seemed capable of writing his own note.
SCF officials say the charity’s safeguards failed in Leonelio’s case, primarily because SCF’s records in Mozambique were never amended to show that Leonelio’s sponsor had stopped sending money.
“When I started in September (1996), I found outdated files. Things were mixed up,” said Titos Langa, Save the Children’s local sponsorship chief. “All sponsorship files were sent to Maputo (Mozambique’s capital) in 1996. Please don’t ask me why. I also am surprised.”
`HARD WORKER’ HAS GONE FISHING.
One might say two little boys named Abilio Marquel live in 24 de Julho, Mozambique, a southeast African farming town where the Limpopo River drains into the Indian Ocean.
One is the 11-year-old child whom Save the Children Federation Inc. described after a Tribune editor in 1995 responded to SCF’s appeal to open his heart to “a child who urgently needs you.”
In its correspondence, SCF said Abilio was an industrious boy who fetched water for his mother, gathered firewood and did numerous other chores during a “daily struggle for survival” in a nation just emerging from two decades of civil war.
The second Abilio is the boy two Tribune reporters found nearly two years later, when they traveled to this hamlet named for the 24th of July, the day the government nationalized housing in the 1970s.
Sulky and spoiled, the real Abilio proved to be a 13-year-old grammar school dropout from a relatively well-to-do family who spent most of his time fishing with his buddies or lounging around the 10-by-15 foot hut he built for himself while his mother and four siblings lived crammed in a similar dwelling.
When a Save the Children photographer showed up in 24 de Julho in early 1995, Abilio and his family had just returned to the village after years as war refugees.
The oldest son in a family of eight, Abilio was enrolled in school. His father, Antonio Jose Marquel, 43, works in a South African mine and regularly sends home money that elevates the family’s economic status; Abilio’s family once owned one of only four cars in this town of 7,000.
The picture snapped by the photographer went into a dossier in SCF’s far-off Connecticut headquarters. Soon after sending SCF $240 to cover the cost of a one-year sponsorship, the Tribune editor received a copy of the photo and a letter introducing him to a “lovely, quiet and hard-working boy.”
“Like most Mozambican children,” the letter said, “Abilio helps with the household chores, such as carrying firewood, fetching water, doing the laundry and cleaning the family compound. She (sic) enjoys soccer.”
The Abilio described by his 39-year-old mother, Ana Buque, hardly matched the child portrayed by Save the Children.
Not only had Abilio dropped out of school, he had ignored the pleas of his mother, father and teacher to return. Abilio didn’t fetch water or do the laundry, traditionally a girl’s job in Mozambique. Instead, he and his friends spent much of their time roaming the countryside or traipsing off to a fishing hole.
“I’m really suffering, because I don’t want him to just go fishing,” Abilio’s mother said.
She and her son agreed that their family had received few benefits during Abilio’s one-year sponsorship, and none that hadn’t been available to them before the sponsorship began.
With U.S. government funding, SCF refurbished the local health clinic and organized the rebuilding of a six-bed maternity ward where Abilio’s mother gave birth to two of her children.
Under a community health program also financed mostly by American taxpayers, Save the Children trained nurses and birth attendants, and donated gasoline money and refrigerators to assist a Mozambican government immunization project. Abilio and his sister were too old for childhood immunizations, but their younger siblings were vaccinated.
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Although the school Abilio attended before he dropped out was rebuilt by SCF with money from the U.S. government, students at the school did receive pencils and notebooks from Save the Children.
Abilio, however, was not among them. Carlos Manuel Tamele, the school principal, said he reserved the donated school supplies for the neediest children.
“He is not poor,” Tamale explained.
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About this special report
Between 1992 and 1996, Americans donated more than $850 million to four of the largest and best-known child sponsorship organizations: Save the Children, the Christian Children’s Fund, Children International and Childreach. That money was sent on faith that it would reach an African village, a Pacific island or a Latin American slum and, in the language of the Christian Children’s Fund, “work a miracle” in the life of the little girl or boy whose photographs and letters are the sponsor’s only evidence of the child’s existence. To determine whether such faith is warranted, in 1995 Tribune reporters and editors began sponsoring these 12 children through four organizations without any mention of their Tribune affiliation. Last May, with no assistance from the four sponsorship organizations, Tribune reporters set out to learn how the lives of the sponsored children had been affected. Part One of this special report recounts what the Tribune learned about two of those organizations, Save the Children and Childreach. Part Two, which appears next week, examines Children International and the Christian Children’s Fund.