How Does My Letter Get To My Sponsored Child?

Every year in the build up to Christmas we get a lot of questions about why we need things sent in so early. We've previously covered the process a letter or card goes through when it gets to World Vision HQ here in Milton Keynes, but we thought we'd dig deeper into the process today.

Last year, Reka travelled to Bolivia and, in the process, tracked one sponsor's letter from writing to reading. Here's that's letter's story:

In the U.K.

I write to the two children I sponsor and try to remember to send them a birthday and Christmas card each year, but I've never been sure what actually happens to the letters and cards once I post them, so I’ve decided to find out.

When I visted Bolivia last year, I visited a sponsored child called Juan Carlos who is 9 years old. His sponsor, Carlos, wrote him a letter along with a card for his 9th birthday a few weeks ago:

It's almost 8,000 miles from the UK to Juan Carlos's community up in the Andes in Bolivia and I wanted to see how long it took for the letter to undertake its epic journey.

Carlos posted his birthday card to our head office, based in Milton Keynes. We receive a steady stream of post every morning, but this gets much heavier around Christmas, as you all send your Christmas cards back for your sponsored children who are always thrilled to receive them.

Once the post has been sorted, letters from sponsors are taken up to our dedicated Income Processing team, who reside during what we have affectionately nick-named ‘The Grotto’.

The team open the envelopes and remove any enclosed donations to process them for the field office. They identify which one of our communities the letter needs to go to and they place it in the right community-coded box.

Once a box is full, it is packed up and sent away by courier to the National Office of the country, in this case, Bolivia.

In Bolivia

I always thought that our letters actually go to the National Office but that's not always the case.

The office in Bolivia receives about 100,000 items of correspondence each year from 11 different countries and they simply cannot cope with the volume of letters. For this reason, they have an arrangement with the national post office of Bolivia which means that all the letters and parcels get delivered to the post office depot in La Paz.

There is a dedicated team in the post office, who only deals with World Vision post. When they receive the letters and parcels, they sort them and send them onto the relevant local office.

The local office that serves the World Vision UK communities is based in the city of Oruro. Angel (pictured below) showed me the post from UK sponsors that arrived on the day I visited:

When the post arrives at the local office, the sponsorship team open the letters and parcels, translate them to Spanish, and sort them into batches for the sponsored children in each Area Development Programme (ADP):

Our sponsorship facilitators collect these letters once or twice a week and take them to the ADP office which, for the ADP I visited, is 3 hours away on a very bumpy dirt road, high up in the mountains.

The facilitators divide up the individual ADP communities between themselves and deliver the letters to sponsored children on a daily basis. Most of them wake up around 5 am, so they can meet the families before they leave their homes for school, or in the case of the parents, for the field.

It is often a long and difficult journey that can take up to three hours by car, motorbike or bicycle, and sometimes even on foot.

During the rainy season, rivers flood and cut communities off. Our enthusiastic staff still try to reach the sponsored children by pushing their motorbike across the flooded river.

Once the letter has been given to the children, they are encouraged to respond when they can. Our sponsorship staff find this process very rewarding as they always get a big smile from the children who absolutely love receiving letters and cards.

Juan Carlos is no different; he was really pleased to receive his birthday card from his sponsor:

It was fascinating to see the process that every single letter has to go through to reach your sponsored children - I found they can take up to 6 weeks to get through all of these stages.

Please be patient with us as it truly is a mission to get your correspondence to your sponsored children but we do everything we can to make it happen as fast as possible.

To see children like Juan Carlos so happy because he received a card is worth all the hard work that goes into it and I would encourage everyone to write to your sponsored children as they really love hearing from you.