#84 letter writing

I am doing very badly with this one. I am not a good letter writer. I once volunteered to write letters to prisoners which was such a bad move. I hope the poor guy that got me as a correspondent wasn't relying on my letters for contact to the outside world since, they were so sparse I probably just made him feel more abandonned.
anyway, back to the sponsor child. I was watching Foreign Correndent last night and the reporter went to visit his World Vision sponsor child in Ethiopia to find that he and her family receive basically nothing of his money, they are struggling for food and she didnt even know she had a sponsor until he starting planning his trip there (he has sponsored her for 10 years or something). The fact that the family doesnt receive the money directly doesnt bother me. I worked for World Vision for some time and it was fairly clear that the money is intended to go to community projects like education and clean water provision etc rather than individuals but they use profiles and photos of individuals because thats what people here in richer countries need in order to get them to fork over money - connection to an individual - preferably a cute little kid. But that education projects were apparently being prioritised over food is a little worrying, and also that the child didnt know she was sponsored. I wonder then if its worth writing a letter to my sponsor child, and if they dont know they're sponsored then who's writing these letters back to me? of course I dont sponsor with World Vision because I don't like their religious aspect and dont want my money being spent on churches etc, but its probably safe to assume that all those sponsorship organisations operate in similar ways to each other. Of course to be fair, the reporter was definitely biased, was trying to make a good story and contradictory in that he made a big point about WV giving the kids a jacket and a pen when they're half starving, but then did the same thing himself by pretending to be all magnanimous giving them clip-on Koalas (and crappy quality ones too by the look of them). One of the poor hungry little chaps immediately tried to bite it as if it were edible.