Christmas is a special time at Asia's Hope. Thanks to the generosity of our partnering churches, we are able to provide gifts, parties and special meals for every Asia's Hope child.
We work hard to ensure that all of the kids at Asia's Hope feel loved and supported by their home parents and also by their partnering churches. To the highest degree possible, we want to provide equivalent levels of care to every child and every home.
To help us balance generosity and fairness, we ask partnering churches to budget a certain amount of money each year to send to Asia's Hope for our national directors and home parents to plan parties, buy food and give gifts. Aside from being a lot of fun, this helps our home parents establish themselves as the proximal provider for the kids, which reinforces parental attachment to the children, most of whom have suffered significant early-life trauma by being separated from their first parents.
Some churches also send small gifts to further bless the kids. We ask them to follow these guidelines:
- Please keep the gifts small. Do not send gifts that are more than $15 in total value per child or are larger than can fit in a shoebox.
- Please keep the gifts simple. Do not send electronics, gifts that require batteries or gifts of cash. Do not send gifts that could be construed as violent or objectionable in any way (for instance, toy guns or Bratz dolls are not a good idea).
- Please reinforce the home parents. Do not refer to yourself as Mommy or Daddy, or use language that could diminish the role of the kids' "real" parents.
- Please reinforce the partnership between Asia's Hope and your church. Do not exchange personal contact information with the child or make any offers of financial or material support.
- Please ensure equality and appropriateness of the gifts. Churches should verify the contents of each item to ensure that the giver has understood and adhered to these guidelines. Letters should not be sealed and gifts should be delivered to the church unwrapped for review prior to sending overseas.
One way to ensure that these guidelines are followed is to collect and then to pack the gifts as a group. For instance, your church may ask everyone to bring a small, inexpensive gift -- stickers, hair ribbons, small toys -- to a "party," where the items can be evenly distributed into shoeboxes. The group can then wrap the gifts and bring them over with their next visiting team as a present from the whole church.
By working together, we can continue to provide a wonderful experience for each Asia's Hope kid this Christmas.