ABSTRACT
WHILE THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER WAS CONCERNED WITH THE MICROpolitics of Christian theology in the development work of World Vision and Christian Care, this chapter shifts to World Vision and the flow of funds that constituted the NGO transnationally; it deals with one special form of funding in particular: child sponsorship. The child sponsorship program of WV Zimbabwe altered relationships of belonging-both to an international Christian community and to local kin-for sponsors and their sponsored children in Zimbabwe. In this specific process of economic development, which linked donors with recipients of economic assistance, local realities were reconfigured by transnational expectations. Child sponsorship produced unintended disjunctures between hopeful ideas of global humanitarianism and local political economies fraught with inequalities, reinforced by the very humanitarian aid that endeavored to transcend them. This paradox of child sponsorship was unsettling for donors, beneficiaries, and NGO employees alike. As new relationships were built between sponsors and their sponsored children, they disturbed existing relationships between parents and their children, and between youth and elders in local communities. Perhaps most importantly, relationships of child sponsorship entailed differing understandings of what humanitarian assistance meant, to World Vision employees who facilitated and implemented the sponsorship program, to sponsors, and to the communities being sponsored.
