Jo Kelley Schuster wanted to take a…

Jo Kelley Schuster wanted to take a journey of hope and restoration, one that would fill the painful void left when cancer killed her husband shortly after his 50th birthday.

With her two children grown and gone, Schuster was seeking a new relationship, one with a child. Contacting the Christian Children’s Fund was “one of the first things I did when I became a widow,” Schuster said.

For her, the Richmond, Va.-based organization evoked a lifetime of positive associations. Her family had sponsored a child through CCF in the 1950s. She and her husband had sponsored another child in the early 1970s. And a friend from church had talked effusively about sponsoring a CCF child in Mississippi.

“I had experience with this organization,” said Schuster, a substitute school teacher. “I never really checked them out.”

Schuster told CCF she wanted to sponsor a Native American child who lived within driving distance of her Iowa home. She was willing to commit to substantial personal involvement.

In February 1994, CCF told Schuster she had been assigned a 10-year-old named Anthony Wilson who lived on the Sioux Reservation in Lower Brule, S.D. The fund promised Schuster that her sponsorship would provide Anthony and his family with essentials such as food, clothing, medical care and healthy after-school play.

“We are particularly proud of one fact to which I would like to draw your special attention,” wrote Christian Children’s Fund President Margaret McCullough. “At least 80 percent of your monthly sponsorship contribution goes directly to programs assisting your sponsored child.”

That sounded like good stewardship to Jo Kelley Schuster.

A month after becoming Anthony’s sponsor, Schuster received her first letter from the boy. “Thank you for being my sponsor,” it began. “My best subject in school is math and reading. . . . Mom works as a change person in the casino . . . she is a solo parent.”

The letter from Anthony and the promises from CCF formed the foundation of the relationship that Schuster hoped to build. Among the many difficulties faced by Native American children on reservations, the fund explained, were soaring unemployment and serious levels of alcohol and drug abuse.

With that in mind, Schuster tried in her letters to make Anthony part of her life. When she took a trip, she sent the boy postcards describing what she had seen. She recounted one vacation to Six Flags amusement park and another to the Greek Islands. She included Anthony in her annual family letters and placed his photograph on a table alongside pictures of her children.

Anthony’s replies to Schuster mentioned that he played “center man” on a basketball team and that people thought he was tall for his age. He asked if she had seen a Chicago Bulls game and whether she had watched Scottie Pippen and Michael Jordan play.

Most of Anthony’s letters were upbeat, but a few were laced with sadness. “My mom spent Christmas with me,” one letter recalled, “but we didn’t have a tree.”

Though Schuster’s window onto Anthony’s life came mostly from his letters, CCF also promised her an annual child progress report. The single-page, fill-in-the-blank form raised only questions for Schuster.

Anthony’s marks in school were “real good,” CCF Lower Brule Project Director Bill Ziegler assured Schuster on the form. Under a heading for specific project activities that “have assisted your sponsored child and family,” Ziegler listed “Sioux Indian culture” and “Arts & crafts. Also– good in educational programs.”

In addition to her $21 monthly payments, Schuster sent the boy a University of Iowa sweat suit, basketball cards and $50 to buy basketball shoes.

Slowly, Schuster believed, a relationship was starting to take root. “A goal for the summer of 1996 was to go and see Anthony,” Schuster recalled. “There is no sense putting a little money in and never seeing what happens to it. That’s not being a good steward. . . . I thought if I could meet him we could have more of a relationship.”

CCF estimates that 250 to 300 sponsors visit their children each year, and many report positive, life-changing experiences.

“I really saw a lot more than I expected. It is incredible, the work they do,” said Joelina Alba, 35, who has visited her sponsored child in Brazil three times.

“They had a modest pharmacy but it was clean and neat, and I thought the medications were excellent,” said Barbara Weider, 61, a retired nurse who visited her two sponsored Guatemalan children last year.

Schuster followed CCF’s procedures for sponsor visits, giving the charity’s regional office advance notice of her intentions. She talked with Jacqueline Kennedy, the CCF official who oversees sponsor services for Anthony’s project from her office in Nebraska. Schuster said Kennedy told her that Ziegler, CCF’s project director, would not be available to greet her because of a family emergency. An assistant would meet her at the CCF office in Lower Brule.

When Schuster’s new husband, Bill, got off work on a Friday afternoon they piled into their car for the nearly 500-mile drive to South Dakota. They made it to Sioux Falls that night and booked a hotel room.

The sun shimmered off a lake near the reservation, and Schuster and her husband planned to take Anthony for a boat ride and a picnic on what promised to be a beautiful summer day. But when the Schusters reached the CCF project office, the door was locked. “This place looked like it was all boarded up,” Schuster recalled.

Maybe they were early, Schuster reasoned, or perhaps the fund’s staff worker assigned to meet them was running a bit behind schedule. But after more than an hour, it was clear no one was coming.

Worried and confused, Schuster and her husband set out to find Anthony. The morning turned into a dusty round robin of false leads.

Schuster and her husband found Anthony’s house, but the boy wasn’t there. When they headed to nearby Chamberlain in search of the project worker who was supposed to serve as their escort, she wasn’t home. When they returned to Anthony’s house, his young sister told them Anthony and his grandmother had gone to Chamberlain so the grandmother could do her laundry and get her hair done.

The Schusters returned to Chamberlain and knocked on doors at random. They went to every laundermat they could find and every beauty shop, leaving the number of their motel with anyone who would take it. But Anthony was nowhere to be found.

Exhausted and frustrated, the Schusters drove back to their room.

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Schuster had just put her feet up on the bed when the telephone rang. It was Anthony, imploring Schuster to return. She and her husband gathered themselves and headed back out to finally meet, face-to-face, the boy she had known only through letters and photographs.

When Anthony appeared on the front porch of his grandmother’s modest home, he was shy and hardly spoke, but Schuster was overjoyed.

Finally, she was making a connection.

Anthony thanked her for being his sponsor. His grandmother said he got the sweat suit, basketball cards and other gifts Schuster sent on her own, and they greatly appreciated these things.

According to his grandmother, however, Anthony had received essentially nothing from Schuster’s $21-a-month sponsorship payments. Nor did the boy know anything about the programs the Christian Children’s Fund had described to Schuster–the food pantry, school supplies, winter and summer sports or cultural song and dance programs.

From inside the house, Anthony’s grandmother retrieved the postcards Schuster had sent. On some of the cards, CCF workers had blacked out portions mentioning the specific locations of her trips. CCF says such deletions are meant to protect Schuster’s privacy and discourage begging from the child for additional gifts, but they left Schuster disillusioned.

“His grandmother said he cherished those postcards,” Schuster said. “But (he) couldn’t read much of them. I was thinking, `Wouldn’t it be cool for him to know what the Greek Islands were like.’ “

By now darkness was falling. Schuster and her husband were due back in Cedar Rapids the next day. After only 90 minutes, they said goodbye to the boy.

On the way back, Schuster wrote a letter to Ziegler, the local CCF director, explaining how her visit had fallen apart, and left it at Ziegler’s house. “We never heard a word from him,” Schuster said.

In response to questions from the Tribune, officials at CCF headquarters in Virginia said there had been a misunderstanding about when Schuster would visit, and a project worker assigned to meet the Schusters had thought they were to arrive the previous week.

The first thing Schuster did when she got home was cancel the authorization for the fund to charge $21 a month to her credit card. Then she wrote an account of her visit to CCF President McCullough.

Christian Children’s Fund responded with a form letter outlining the benefits of sponsoring a child on Anthony’s reservation.

In the end, Jo Kelley Schuster blamed herself. “I was so gullible,” she said. “I didn’t check it out. I guess I had really high hopes of getting to know this boy and developing a relationship with him.”

Perhaps more important, CCF didn’t tell Schuster or its other sponsors about the trouble it had been having with its child sponsorship projects on Native American reservations in South Dakota and Nebraska, where lawsuits have been filed alleging mismanagement and corruption.

A Christian Children’s Fund memo describes the Lower Brule project as “the most troubled area in the west,” plagued by weak programs, “poor local support and leadership.”

Five projects in the Nebraska-South Dakota area, including the Lower Brule program, were shut down in the spring of 1997 as part of a restructuring that CCF says will make its programs more efficient.

“I’ve got this thing for kids,”Schuster said. “My heart is right. I’m not trying to hurt anybody. I am really trying to help.”