Introducing Nadia Akter

We'd like to introduce you to Nadia Akter.
Nadia is our first sponsor child through World Vision. We received her information today. She will be six years old on October 25th. She lives with her aunt in Bangladesh in a World Vision Project Village called Gazipur.

After receiving Nadia's information, we decided to sponsor a boy as well. We didn't choose any particular country this time, so it will be a surprise when we receive his information.

We've been wanting to sponsor a child or two for a long time, but never signed up. In the last weeks, we've each separately had World Vision brought once again to our minds.

In my quiet time several weeks ago, I was reading in the little book "A Heart Like His" by Mike & Amy Nappa. Here is one of the short stories in this book:

Compassion by Dr. Harold J. Sala
World War II was winding down when Bob Pierce visited a mission school and orphanage run by a group of German sisters near the Tibetan border. While he was there, Pierce noticed a little girl hunched at the bottom of the cold, stone steps. The little girl was obviously undernourished and lacked proper clothing for the cold climate. The child could not have been more than nine or ten, yet her gaunt little face and coal-black eyes reflected as much suffering as some endure in a lifetime.
Deeply concerned, Pierce asked one of the sisters about her. "Oh," she replied, "she comes and sits there every day. She wants to come to school, but we have no room."
The reply did not satisfy him, so he said, "Surely one child won't make that much difference. If she wants to come so badly, could you not make room for just one more?"
The sister turned to Pierce and said, "We have made room for 'just one more' time and time again. We have already four times the number of children we were originally prepared to care for. We have stretched our food as far as it will go. I myself am feeding three others our of my rice bowl, as are all the other sisters. If we do not draw the line somewhere, there will not be enough rice to keep the children we already have alive. We simply cannot take one more child!"
The brutal reality of the situation hit home, but Pierce did not want to accept it. "That is crazy, ridiculous!" he said. "A child cannot come asking for help and be turned away at the door. Why isn't something being done?"
Without saying anything, the sister walked over and swooped the little girl up in her arms. Walking over to Pierce, she deposited the girl in his strong arms and said, "What are you going to do about it?"
That incident led to the founding of World Vision - an organization that has helped feed and clothe thousands of boys and girls. Pierce did what I think you would have done. He dug into his own pocket and gave the sister enough money to buy rice for the little girl...

Gerhard had been reading about World Vision for the past weeks as well. When we were having dinner at David's a couple of weeks ago, David brought up the topic, so we gathered around his computer checking out the differences between signing up through the US, England or Germany. We didn't sign up that evening, but we knew we wanted to. Over the next days, the daily grind distracted us, but during lunch one day, the topic came up again, but we didn't put it off another minute and signed up right away. World Vision is a very interesting program and we trust that Nadia and the boy they will assign us will benefit greatly even from such a small amount.