WEST ORANGE, NJ — Compassion International, a leading authority on child sponsorship that releases children from poverty globally, will be bringing its tour, “The Compassion Experience,” to the West Orange area June 24 through 27. The event will educate visitors about the realities of life in poverty as well as provide an international experience to visitors who may not ever have the opportunity to travel abroad to a developing country.
The four-day event will be set up in the parking lot of The Life Christian Church at 747 Northfield Ave. in West Orange and there visitors will be invited on a self-guided journey where they will be immersed in the lives and stories of two children living in Uganda or Bolivia. Each child’s story starts in hardship but ends in hope.
The experience includes more than 2,000 square feet of exhibit space, featuring replicas of the homes and environments of these two Compassion beneficiaries. The event is free and family-friendly.
“We built ‘The Compassion Experience’ in order to really bring the developing world to America,” Mark Hanlon, Compassion International’s senior vice president of global marketing and engagement, said in a press release. “When people think of poverty, they often think of the lack of things, the lack of stuff, the lack of money. Those are all symptoms of poverty. The real issue of poverty is the lack of hope. Through our holistic child development program, Compassion stirs hope in children. And you’ll see that hope come to life at this event.”
The tour is highly interactive, using individual iPods and headsets to offer visitors a sense of what life is like in extremely poverty-stricken areas around the world where the World Bank estimates that 700 million live on less than $1.90 a day. In the areas Compassion serves, nearly one in five children die before the age of 5, mostly from preventable causes, and 124 million children worldwide do not attend school, according to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics. Tour-goers will have the opportunity to “change the story” of children living in poverty by learning more about the issue, as well as Compassion’s child sponsorship program, which tackles global poverty one child at a time. Compassion currently serves more than 1.8 million children in 26 of the world’s most impoverished countries.
For more information about “The Compassion Experience,” visit www.CompassionExperience.com.
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