Mikku

This is Mikku, who's just been assigned to us as our new sponsor child. He's about five, and comes from the Patna district of the province of Bihar in India, in the top north-east corner of the triangle of the country, on the Ganges and not so far from Nepal. His family are Dalits, untouchables, though he looks quite cuddly to me. Bihar was the birthplace mof Buddhism, and of Gandhi's satyagraha movement; many of the people have long had to move and migrate to find work, and their lives while doing so have not always been easy. It is a fertile region and the food is largely vegetarian and sounds very good, except perhaps for very poor people like Mikku's family who mostly eat rice and onions.

Mikku replaces Raju, who lives in Rajasthan, who we've sponsored for the last eight years and who must be about 13 by now. Rajasthan is over the north west side of the country. My geography and general knowledge of India is not instictively very good; I've looked up about these places, which is educational to me.

Child sponsorship, and charitable giving in general, is fraught with problems, of course. On the one hand are all the questions, doubts and objections that can be raised about it and its general usefulness, ideologically, politically, practically and morally; is one doing a good thing for the wrong reasons, or a bad thing for the right ones? How much is all about guilt, ego, consumerism? Is it just a sop and a sticking plaster? How much goes to the people it's meant for, and how much should people employed by charities expect to receive from it? etc etc. On the other hand are the increasingly aggressive marketing and fundraising techniques of the charities themselves; one of the reasons we're glad we do it is because it enables us to say with a clear conscience that we give regularly and, according to our means, fairly generously, to a development charity and don't wish to commit ourselves further.

We started doing it at a time when I was feeling a lack of involvement and connection with the wider world, and it was one of a number of things, both looked for and unlooked for, which did help to remedy this state of mind, so, yes, it was done to make me feel better. Which doesn't mean it didn't do any good to anyone else. We've never really doubted its being worthwhile, though it soon became clear that the involvement with the individual sponsored child is necessarily very small. In effect, you make a regular donation to the charity, who work all over the world, to do with as they see fit, and in exchange, they keep you updated about their work in general and one local project in particular, with a token photo and some details about a child in that project, who you have some correspondence with, though this too is really a token matter. There is no question of sending gifts other than cards and letters, which are received and shared at school, to the child, as this is unfair to the other children and invidious, and may even put your sponsor child at risk, and you cannot communicate directly, as it is inadvisable to divulge your personal name and address in case unscrupulous people obtain and make use of it.

Raju's writing and drawing seemed to progress very little in eight years; even allowing for the limitations of poverty and schooling, it seemed to me that his natural development and basic cognitive levels should really have reflected a little more change. The news about him always seemed the same, he had good health and vision (fine), he had been to his cousin's wedding, he liked sweets and football ... we began to suspect that the paper and crayons were given out to all the kids of whatever age to scribble on and a formula of words written on the back by the teacher or community worker, or that perhaps it was just a chore for both the children and adults concerned cutting into otherwise valuable time. That's OK, doubtless they had better things to do than gratify the patronising vanity of sentimental guilty westerners whose consumerist urges drove them to want to buy a bit of the Third World (do we call it that any more?) along with everything else they've got to make them feel good, and who stupidly insist on individual human interest to make everything palatable. I wrote from time to time, sent drawings and simple accounts and descriptions of home matters I thought might be of universal appeal, then after a while only a card at New Year.

However, we believe that the charity - ActionAid, does a good job in general, and we did enjoy receiving the newsletter from the community project - Prayas - in India, which was short, simply produced and informative. The accounts of the efforts of the Dalit and tribal peoples, especially the women, to improve their own lot and obtain justice were impressive and heartening. I've found these really more interesting than the magazine from the UK about the activities, campaigns and fundraising of people there for the charity, which, idle introvert and not-a-joiner that I am, always left me rather cold and feeling slightly tired.

So, now ActionAid feels able to hand over the running of the Rajasthan project to the community groups involved, many of the schools and healthcare centres are now government managed, so their, and our, involvement there is at an end. This would seem to be a good thing.

And now we have a photo of and a letter about Mikku. He looks a bright enough little button and goes to a nursery class in the village, but there is no health centre, and his parents have neither land nor livestock - Raju's family at least had a couple of goats and, I think, a cow, and a garden for vegetables. He has drawn around the first letter of the Hindi alphabet, and a picture of a banana, because he likes them very much. Something about small boys' fondness for bananas always seems endearing to me. Unfortunately he's crayoned it in yellow on pink paper so it won't scan very well. He also likes pink flowers and the colour yellow, and playing with goats, all of which I sympathise with.

So, to say hello, I've made a collage with pink flowers, yellow, and a banana. Having become rapidly accustomed to electronic communication, there is something slightly miraculous about making a shiny print, putting it in an envelope with a stamp and a series of increasingly delimiting specifications of physical locations: country, province, city, road..., of its travelling over the surface of the earth to be, we hope, finally opened, taken out, looked at and touched, probably with incomprehension, by a group of tiny children in a village in Bihar. It all seems rather unlikely and precarious, rather like giving to charity, an act of faith and hope.