'It has been a miracle': Veronica's story

Veronica, 30, is living her best life in Kenya’s bustling capital city of Nairobi – working, dreaming and caring for a beloved 6-month-old daughter. After finishing her degree in Public Relations and Corporate Communications in 2023, she’s looking forward to a career that allows her to help young people somehow.

“That is my passion, to see children smile,” she explains. “I want to share with people what I got.”

And what was that, exactly? If you ask her, Veronica will whip out a pile of yellowing letters, crumpled packages and cards – old correspondence from the sponsors who came into her life as strangers and ended up becoming family.

“Those are some of my precious things that I cannot throw away,” she says.

Veronica grew up in a remote farming community in Kitui County, where she “saw the reality of poverty,” she says.

Her father had passed away when she was a year old, leaving her mother to raise seven children on her own. Veronica was the baby of the family.

“I was the smallest, so I could see the suffering of the others of the group. Only now that I am an adult do I even understand how we were suffering,” Veronica says. There has been a great deal of social progress in the area since then, she says, but back then, life was insurmountably hard, with hunger a near-constant companion.

“We had nothing. My mother had to go to other people looking for wages so that she could feed us,” Veronica remembers. Intermittent droughts made the situation worse. “We did not have enough rain. We would get a small amount of food from the garden, but by the end of the month, that food would be finished. The small amount that we got, we shared.

“In primary school, I remember we didn’t have shoes. You just would wear your dress. Even during cold weather, you couldn’t afford a jacket.

“These were some of the things we were facing. It was really hard.”

Turning point: Veronica meets her sponsors

Then something unexpected happened. When she was in the second grade, Veronica remembers her mother taking one of her older sisters to the ChildFund (then Christian Children’s Fund) office in search of help. Her sister was too old to be enrolled in the program, so they enrolled Veronica instead.

It was a turning point for the family, connecting all the children to ChildFund education programs and nutrition services. Shortly after, Veronica began receiving her first letters from her new sponsors – Andreas and Daniela G., a couple living in Berlin, Germany, with their three children.

She remembers a feeling of awe that people in such a faraway place were taking the time to write to her. “We used to be taken to the office when the letters came. I so enjoyed writing to my sponsors, and them writing back to me. That’s why I’ve kept all these letters,” she says.

Her sponsors sent gifts, too. “I have never missed any of my celebrations. Birthdays, Christmas, Easter – they used to send gifts for all of them. It melted me.”

An old birthday card from Veronica’s sponsors.

The family came to rely on the small monetary contributions that Veronica’s sponsors would send from time to time. That extra support was a sigh of relief for a hardworking single mom and the children who depended on her.

“The small amount my sponsor would send, my mom would go to the shop and buy something we could eat,” Veronica says. “I knew very well that my sponsors would send something, and that what they sent would help us at home.”

Veronica has fond memories of the ChildFund activities she used to participate in as a young girl. “They would bring all the kids together, play games with us, have contests. During every season of our education, they would call us for a celebration, and afterward, we would go home with big bags of flour to make porridge that would feed us for one or two months.

“When our parents didn’t have anything else to feed us, that flour would help us.”

At one point, ChildFund Kenya even donated goats to select families in the program. In farming communities like the one where Veronica grew up, livestock are a valuable source of both income and nutrition that can multiply a family’s earnings over time.

Veronica’s family was chosen to receive a female goat. Each time the goat had babies – and there were many over the years! – their lives became more financially stable. “Every year, my mom would sell one or two of the goats to pay my school fees,” Veronica says.

With hunger a distant dream and her education moving forward at full speed, Veronica remembers being able to focus on the real work of childhood for the first time – playing, learning, growing. But one of the best parts of her sponsorship was beginning to understand just how big the world really was.

“We sponsored kids were very proud to say that we knew people from the U.S., Britain, Germany, everywhere,” she says. She would carry that pride forward into some of the most challenging days of her life.

From sponsorship to family

When Veronica was in high school, her mom passed away. The tragedy shook the family to its core. Veronica’s older brother had to sell all the goats so she could finish school. Yet in the midst of her grief, she knew she was still supported – and loved.

“Even after becoming an orphan, I have never felt like an orphan,” she says. “I felt like I had parents throughout. My sponsors never went more than two months without sending a letter. They made me feel like I had a life, even with all the hardship of knowing that I didn’t have enough. They made me feel like I was part of their family.”

After briefly losing touch with her sponsors upon graduating from the ChildFund program, Veronica reconnected with them in 2017. To her surprise and delight, the family arranged a trip to Kenya to finally meet her in person.

“They came to my house and saw my family,” Veronica smiles. Then the five of them went on an unforgettable trip to neighboring Tanzania, where they hiked up mountains, explored waterfalls and had the adventure of a lifetime.

Photos from Veronica’s 2017 trip to Tanzania with her sponsors and their family.

Today, Veronica still keeps in touch with her sponsors. They talk on the phone often and send special greetings for birthdays and holidays. In 2023, with their support, Veronica became the first person in her family to graduate from college. And when Veronica’s daughter was born, her sponsors celebrated with her from afar.

“I made my sponsors grandparents!” she smiles. “Every time they write to me now, they remind me I am part of their family.

“I have gotten everything that I have through being sponsored. If it was not for ChildFund and my sponsors, I wouldn’t have pursued my passions. I wouldn’t have a degree. I wouldn’t be knowing English, and I wouldn’t be able to tell my story to you now.

“I feel like I am very much privileged. It has been a miracle to my life” – one she wants to pass on to others. Veronica cares deeply about helping children thrive, especially in her home of Kitui County.

“Throughout my life, I have discovered that children face a lot of traumas,” she says – traumas exacerbated by the stresses of extreme poverty. She says corporal punishment was one challenge most children in her community faced growing up. Now, she wants to create safe spaces for children where they can find their voices and gain the self-confidence they need to succeed in life.

In fact, she hopes to become a child sponsor herself one day: “I will maybe sponsor two or three. I will double what I got from my sponsors."