October 15, 2014
WEDNESDAY
“They’ll be the future leaders of those countries and an education, being able to read and write is huge for those guys,”
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Barry Rae
B12
Barry Rae and his daughter Stacey Lang pose during a trip to Tanzania with the child Barry and his wife Pat sponsor.
Family finds value in child sponsorship By Jordan Baker editor@estevanmercury.ca
Barry and Pat Rae have three daughters, and in a way, always wanted a boy. Now they’ve had five. No, they don’t have eight children, but in 1995 the Estevan couple decided they wanted to sponsor kids in developing countries to help them afford an education along with school supplies, good nutrition and
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a hope for their future. In the nearly 20 years that followed, they have sponsored five young boys in Tanzania, Bangladesh and Georgia, a philanthropic experience that has enriched their family and, they hope, the kids they have helped foster. “They’ll be the future leaders of those countries and an education, being able to read and write is huge for those guys,” said Barry. “We were watching a
World Vision show on TV, and we have three girls, so it was something we had wanted to do for quite some time and just never did it,” said Pat. After the show ended, they called the organization and got involved. “ We s a i d b e c a u s e we had the three girls, we wanted to have a little boy because it’s almost like a brother for them. That’s why we’ve always had little boys
who we’ve sponsored.” She said it was an easy process, where they given some sponsorship options based on a few preferences. That’s how they first connected with a child in Tanzania. They have sponsored three different boys in that country since their first started 19 years ago. “World Vision, once they get established in that community, then once that community is self-sufficient
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them is done through the mail. “You get letters and updates on them, and you write letters. We have over the years written them letters,” said Pat, though she noted they don’t get to know each other really well during the term of the sponsorship. “You do find out a lot about them over the years, but do they find out much about you? Each child has four or five sponsors,” she added. Because these kids are funded by a number of people, the information travelling overseas is more of a one-way street. “But by going there and meeting the World Vision people who work there on the ground – who are local people, some of them were born and raised in the same communities where these children are –that gives you a good perspective of what’s actually going on there,” added Barry. “They are native to the country and seeing what they were doing in that particular community, they had a number of different projects.” The Rae family plans on continuing to sponsor kids and make regular trips to volunteer in some of the more impoverished areas of the world, while daughter Stacey, who is now a Lang, plans on sponsoring a child of her own.
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then they move on,” said Pat. They chose to connect with World Vision in part because of its mission and its faith-based structure. Along with sponsoring children through the organization, the family has taken a number of trips to various countries in Africa to volunteer at orphanages or take part in other programming. “I’ve been in Africa, taking my daughters over there one at a time since 2006. We were going there to work at an orphanage,” said Barry. While Barry took his daughters for most of the trips, Pat has attended to the continent once. Last year Barry took his oldest daughter Stacey to Tanzania, and as part of the trip they were able to take a 20-minute flight from where they were stationed to visit the boy they were currently sponsoring, a young boy named Ludovic. His mother gave birth days before the Estevanites arrived, and the boy was given the name Barry. The area where Ludovic lives is rural, where the main industry is agriculture-based and what they grow is primarily bananas. “They’re in a very lush spot there and food is very available,” noted Barry. Communicating with the children they sponsor when they are not visiting
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