Breaking poverty through education

Peterson, who wasn't in school last year.
 With Andrea, one of his school sponsors.

A recent Tweet by Brian Fikkart, one of the authors of When Helping Hurts, confirms what we have been talking about at Sanctuary Church: one of the best ways to break cycles of poverty is to get kids into school. In Haiti, we know dozens of children right in our neighborhood who are roaming the streets all day because there is no public school available, and their parents don't have money to pay for a private school. These kids who don't go to school are almost guaranteed to grow up perpetuating a cycle of poverty.

Fikkart refers to a New York Times opinion piece in which Nikolas Kristof writes, 

"One common thread, whether I’m reporting on poverty in New York City or in Sierra Leone, is that a good education tends to be the most reliable escalator out of poverty. Another common thread: whether in America or Africa, disadvantaged kids often don’t get a chance to board that escalator."

If you want to do something about the problem, a place to start is helping fund our school in Port-au-Prince by sponsoring a student. By "our" I mean Child Hope International, an orphanage-based mission with which I am very happily affiliated. Our school is currently hosting more than 30 children from the surrounding neighborhood, most of whom would not otherwise be going to school at all. Here's a link to the Student Sponsorship page.