The full circle of Fate

A young girl in Cameroon sits at a wobbly wooden desk in the front of a classroom, her bare feet dangling above the ground. She hopes to get a pair of shoes on Christmas, but she’d rather the money be spent on her tuition. She doesn’t want to get kicked out of school again. When the fees can’t be paid, she has to walk miles to a farm to yield crops under the sun with her uncle. And when the sky turns black, they sleep underneath a Sapele tree to sell their harvest at the morning market.

It was mid-morning when a car drove through her village. “The whole community talked when the car drove in,” Fate, now 25, says. “No one in the village had a car.”

With children jumping around the car as it parked along the dirt road, a group of women and men in cobalt blue shirts let themselves out. They were volunteers from Plan, and they were about to tell Fate something that would alter the rest of her life: Someone had decided to sponsor her.

“After that, everything changed,” she says.

“Access to education is hard for girls in villages in Cameroon,” Fate says. “Parents decide to keep a girl child at home because there’s an idea that the female will get married, but the male child will carry the family’s legacy. I didn’t have to worry about this because of my sponsor.”

The day Fate became a sponsored child wasn’t the last time she saw Plan’s volunteers. The group would return regularly to her school with sponsorship letters and photos. This was something Fate always looked forward to — something she says was the most exciting time of her childhood.

“I kept all the letters,” she says. “Often I’d reread them. My sponsor showed me she cared for me even though we never met. I was the happiest child when I’d get letters.”