Despite the subfreezing weather, the lot behind Hill City Church was bustling, dozens of people waited in the cold for their turn to enter the 1,700 square-foot mobile exhibit space known as The Compassion Experience.
The Compassion Experience is a self-guided immersive tour that takes visitors through the lives of impoverished children—now beneficiaries of Compassion’s sponsorship program—using individual iPods and headphones and meticulously reconstructed sets to transport the viewer to crucial places from the children’s lives.
The exhibit stopped in Richmond last weekend, bringing the stories of Kiwi, Carlos, and Olive, three children from the Philippines, Guatemala and Uganda, respectively. Though the queue snaked through the lot, the visitors eventually found respite in the tent, space heaters churning in the deceptively large exhibit space. It was a Narnia effect. From the outside, the colorful pavilion looked barely big enough to house the crowd, but once inside, it opened to enough room for the three interactive exhibits, preceded by a waiting area lined with Compassion employees.
Many of the staff are volunteers from the Richmond community. One blue-shirted volunteer said that she had seen the event on Facebook, and couldn’t imagine turning down the opportunity to help. She handed visitors earbuds and iPods, preloaded with the audio and video required for the exhibit. In our case, we received a blue plastic bowl, the phone resting inside to amplify the sound.
First, I heard Kiwi’s story, a girl from the Philippines, and her recorded voice greeted me through the tiny speakers after I entered the first room. It is actually the voice of a child actor, used to tell the story of the real Kiwi, a girl who survived a life of poverty thanks to the intervention of Compassion International, a Christian child development organization founded in 1952 to fight against global poverty.
“Hello. My name is Keewani, but you can call me Kiwi. Everyone does.”
The room was small and cramped. Strewn with messy bedding and clutter, two chipped plaster walls and a lone IV stand. It was a recreation of the room where she was born, as a fourth child but the first to survive.
I followed Kiwi’s story from set to set, from home to the market to the classroom, and she spoke of hardships she had faced, and the salvation her family had found.
“Now we are a Christian family,” Kiwi said. “There is joy in our whole house for the first time.”
The church that they joined in the Philippines was running a Compassion program. Kiwi began to be sponsored by a man from Australia who helped her family afford food, education and medical care. With his help, Kiwi escaped a life of servitude overseas and went to college, realizing her dream of becoming a medical professional. It is a story of hope, one that ends with Kiwi graduated and married, sponsoring two Compassion children of her own.
Sponsorship is the goal of The Compassion Experience, said Compassion International marketing director, Steve Spriggs.
“We are constantly trying to advocate for children who live on less than two dollars a day, and finding new and creative ways to do that,” Spriggs said. “So the idea came up: what if we brought the developing world to an American audience and they could see it the best they could.”
Spriggs said that The Compassion Experience began five years ago with a single truck. Now they have eight trucks and travel across the United States to deliver their message. They tell the story of individual children who are now grown, reaching out to adults who once benefited from Compassion International and broke the cycle of poverty.
“It dwindled down into telling a five chapter story of someone’s life. Of how it started, of some of the enormous difficulties that they had to survive as a child, and the importance of other people getting involved in that story,” Spriggs said. “Compassion’s mission is to release children from poverty, not simply relieve them.”
World Bank estimates that 9.6 percent of the global population lives on less than $1.90 a day. According to Compassion International, in the areas Compassion serves, nearly one in five children die before the age of five, mostly from preventable causes.
At the end of the exhibit, the visitors have a chance to choose the profile of an at-risk child from a wall lined with paper brochures. By the time we got there, after reaching Kiwi’s happy ending, the room is full of families filling out the paperwork to sponsor a child.
Compassion partners with more than 6 thousand churches in 25 countries to deliver its child development program to over 1.8 million babies, children and young adults.
