Tiny Tim and Little Robert

Thursday, December 10, 2015

Charles Dickens wrote his masterpiece, A Christmas Carol, to explore the real meaning behind Christmas at a time when a whole host of new traditions – including Christmas trees and cards – were being introduced.

Watching his contemporaries celebrating the season with present-buying, excessive food and increasing selfishness, he juxtaposed their attitude with the needs of society’s poorest children. Dickens had, himself, given up school in order to work as a child, and that experience seems to have influenced his life-long appeal for justice for children lost in abject poverty in Britain’s industrial revolution.

He becomes the ultimate “joyful giver” 

A Christmas Carol charts the progression of a careless, mean rich man, Ebenezer Scrooge, into a major donor happy to sponsor one child in particular, and generously endow the whole community. He becomes the ultimate “joyful giver” - “His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him ... it was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well if any man alive possessed the knowledge.”

The child who finally broke Scrooge’s heart, and gave him the desire to contribute to life in all its fullness and the will to make it so, was Tiny Tim Cratchit, the ill and crippled son of his employee Bob.

A vision of Tiny Tim, dead because Scrooge had not acted, devastates the old miser and provokes his deeply emotional repentance.

It’s a moving and ever-fresh tale of child poverty and the impact that one vulnerable child’s life can have on the heart of a potential supporter.

Rather fittingly, my final field visit in 2015 before Christmas was to visit a boy who reminds me a little of Tiny Tim. In Ngogwe Sub-County in Uganda I met Robert, 7, who had been kidnapped by people who wanted to take his blood and body parts for a witchcraft sacrifice, according to his family and local leaders.

Thanks to World Vision’s “Amber Alert” programme, local community volunteers had been trained in quick responses to child abductions, abuse and violence. The kidnap was spotted by a villager working in a nearby garden who raised the alarm.

Robert was rescued before his assailants could kill him. But a puncture wound to his spine left him partially paralysed.  Over the past year, World Vision has assisted in ensuring that Robert receives the surgeries and rehabilitation that he needs.

Robert is our seasonal reminder of why we do what we do.

Robert seems like an intelligent boy, but the shock of what happened has left him unable to speak. He and I played together for a while, and he was clearly keen to be in the centre of things. His grandmother, who looks after him, says he wants to go back to school, and with World Vision’s continued help and the support of his sponsor, I believe he’ll make it.

In the spirit of Dickens’s Tiny Tim, though, how terrible a vision it would be if there had been no-one there for little Robert. How awful if the abuse of children led to an early grave, rather than a life of hope. Robert is our seasonal reminder of why we do what we do.

Let’s go forward in 2016 to be a blessing to every child, and to let them be a blessing to sponsors and donors. Then, as Tiny Tim puts it, at the end of A Christmas Carol, “God bless us, every one.”

Kevin Jenkins is President and Chief Executive Officer of World Vision International

Learn more about how to sponsor a child with World Vision.