February 3, 2009
(Click on photo to enlarge.)
By Kristen Shane
It was her eyes that captivated Judy Snobelen.
Big, brown, haunting eyes.
The Ripley-area woman saw them staring up at her from the face of a six-year-old Bangladeshi girl.
It had taken the girl a half-hour’s truck ride to get to Belabo, an area about a two-and-a-half hour’s drive east of Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka. There, she joined 800 other kids patiently waiting in line for their chance to receive a bed kit: a drawstring duffle bag stuffed with a thin mattress, pillow, bed sheet, rain coat, flip flops, school bag, water bottle, school supplies and new clothes.
Snobelen was one of a dozen volunteers with the Toronto-based charity Sleeping Children around the World, in Bangladesh to help distribute the bed kits to needy kids.
Snobelen met the girl with the dark eyes and short pixie haircut in a change room. The girl had just received her bed kit.
“It was bigger than her,” recalls Snobelen.
She was helping the girl put on a new dress from the kit, a yellow, green and blue flowered frock.
Through a translator, the girl later told Snobelen that her name is Shanta. Her father owned a small shop. Snobelen snapped a photo of father and daughter together just before they left with the kit.
“In Bangladesh, most of the parents of the kids receiving kits make $1 a day,” says Snobelen.
So it’s a treat to receive a free bed kit worth $35 Canadian.
“It’s just such a gift for them. If the shoe was on the other foot and somebody was giving here, it would be worth thousands (of dollars),” says Snobelen.
While donors from around the world give $35 for each kit, and local service groups such as Lions or Rotary clubs buy the supplies and select the poor children from schools in the recipient countries, Canadian volunteers such as Snobelen distribute the kits to the kids. Sleeping Children organizes a dozen or so trips a year, about one each month, sending teams of six to developing countries to give away the kits.
Snobelen’s two-week trip to Bangladesh in October was her fourth as a Sleeping Children volunteer. Since starting the volunteer work in 2004, she’s distributed kits to kids in India twice and Kenya once.
She first heard about Sleeping Children when a cousin used the group to donate a bed kit in memory of Snobelen’s grandfather, after his death several years ago.
In 2003, Snobelen started the orientation process to become a volunteer overseas.
“Sometimes, the time is right,” she explains. She rents her land near Ripley to her family’s farming business. She babysits her grandkids, but is otherwise retired. So she says she is fortunate enough to have the time and money to volunteer.
Sleeping Children spends all of the bed kit donor money it receives on the kits. Its Toronto headquarters is the former home of the group’s founders, Murray and Margaret Dryden, who donated the property to the charity after their deaths. The only paid staff member is funded through a trust set up by the Drydens, said Snobelen. The rest of the work is done by volunteers. They pay their own way to distribute the bed kits.
“We have the best job. We’re the lucky ones. We’re the ones who get to touch these kids,” says Snobelen, gazing her sparkly eyes at one of the photos she snapped of Shanta.
It feels good to give, and receive, the bed kits.
Snobelen sits at her kitchen table, looking outside a nearby window to snow-covered fields, and thinks about the long, humid distribution days in Bangladesh in which volunteers distributed a total of 9,000 bed kits.
The recipients were always excited, but could also be apprehensive because of the whirlwind of activity and white-faced foreigners giving out the kits, she says.
“It’s just such a gift for them to think that somebody else from another country would be giving to them.”
Donors from all over the world give to Sleeping Children. That’s why Snobelen was so surprised to see a few local names pop up in the stacks of paper labels that correspond with each bed kit.
Part of the Canadian volunteers’ job is also to take photos of each recipient with the contents of their kit. Sleeping Children sends each photo to the donor who paid for that kit to show that their money reached its destination.
At one of the five distribution points on her latest trip, Snobelen says, “I came across this label, it says: ‘Shirley Vogan, Happy Retirement.’”
Vogan is a teacher who used to work at Elgin Market Public School in Kincardine. Several of her colleagues at the school bought bed kits in her name when she retired.
Snobelen was also there when bed kits were given in the name of her granddaughters, Brooke and Annie Leppington. The girls raised money for Sleeping Children instead of accepting birthday presents at their most recent joint birthday party.
“It’s pretty neat when you see some that are close to home,” says Snobelen.
Her overseas experiences have taught her how lucky Canadian kids are.
“They have lots of food, lots of shelter, lots of material things,” she says. “But we see these kids over there, these families, living in an eight-by-ten shanty. There are not a lot of material things.”
It’s part of the reason why Sleeping Children focuses on poor kids in developing countries rather than Canada.
“There’s such a difference being poor in Canada and being poor in Bangladesh,” she says.
There’s often no welfare or other social safety nets to help people in developing countries.
Which brings Snobelen back to Shanta. She holds her hand to her heart and looks at a photo of the girl and her father.
“You’d just like to follow her home.”
