My book explains how giving changes donors in positive ways just as it can change the world.

Giving changed me when I was just 7 years old.

In honor of making my first communion, my parents began sponsoring a little girl who lived in Cambodia. We put a picture of her on an end table in our family room. I looked at that picture so many times and so closely that I can still see it perfectly in my mind. She was my age, in first grade, wearing a white blouse that was part of her school uniform. I noticed the collar of her blouse was frayed and just a little bit dirty or stained, but it looked perfectly starched as though great care had gone into making that blouse as presentable as possible. She had a beautiful unsmiling face with dark eyes and black hair cut in a traditional bob. I tried to imagine what her life was like. My family moved from Ohio to Michigan when I was in 5th grade, and I don’t remember her picture being on an end table in that house. I don’t remember her being part of our lives after that move.

What I’ve learned since is that the Khmer Rouge had taken siege of Cambodia and aid organizations were forced to leave. World Vision, which had a child sponsorship program in Cambodia at that time, was forced out in 1975. I wonder now what must have happened to that little girl. Had she become a refugee as so many Cambodians did? My brother is married to a Cambodian woman whose family fled the Khmer Rouge on foot to a refugee camp in Thailand, but not before her father was killed and her uncle died of starvation, and not before she spent time in a child labor camp where she was separated from her family, worked in fields from dawn to dusk, and participated in “re-education” - a common practice of the Khmer Rouge, which believed that the notion of “family” was contrary to the good of the state. Was this the fate of the little girl in the picture? Or, had my family’s sponsorship somehow helped spare her? My parents sent me a powerful message when I was 7. We are fortunate. Others are much less fortunate. We can help make their lives better, so we should do what we can. That message and the little girl in that picture have influenced my entire life.