Unfortunately we had to stop the support of two of the kids in Bangladesh we supported.

It is very difficult to stay well informed or even involved if you are not living in the same city or country as the children you support.

You always need local help. During our support of 3 children in Bangladesh we had great support by Maria Cristina Foundation (MCF).

Due to for us unknown reasons suddenly MCF decided that all those children which under MCF umbrella should change their school. The sponsors or at least we were not informed about that. We got the information only after most of the children were at the new school. Suddenly children we supportef stopped with the school. The old school didn’t want them any more (MCF children had special conditions as there were lots of them) and for the new school we had to run a special application procedure. We were asked to decided what to do. Should they go to the old or to the new school.

But how could we decide that? We don’t know any of these schools. Actually MCF should know this much better. They spent already 13 years with supporting those children and communities. They know lots of things about Dhaka and people living there.

It seemed to us that MCF was pushing the total responsibility for the children slowly to the sponsors.  But we as sponsors do not feel to be in the situation to take this kind of responsibility. That is what we needed charities for.

We hope that we will be able to manage and continue the support of Ridon.

At the end we stopped the cooperation with MCF completely. Besides the topic regarding the change of the school we were not able to see transparency of all incomes and costs of the foundation.  We were not able to see all details we wanted to see in the published reports. For example salaries of the MCF members like employees, project related donations, payments from the speaking events, travel costs, administration costs and much more details.

And finally the strategy of Maria Christina Foundation didn’t match any more with our ethical principles. For example we strongly believe that each and every person has the right to grow by education. But if charity and charity results are used to earn money we think that this money should flow back to the charity and should not be used to fulfill personal targets.