When I tell people that I volunteer with an organisation that has sponsored children at the centre of its work, I often get asked whether the faces of the little children that they see on the adverts are really the faces of the children who are being sponsored by that charity. Well I can say that in the case of World Vision, yes it is actually them!

Before I went on my fancy little trip down south for a holiday, I was putting in many of my placement hours under the scorching sun (even though its rainy season, the sun still has no mercy!) out 'in the field' tasked with interviewing some of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged children that World Vision supports. The aim was to gather information and stories in preparation for a visit from World Vision South Korea's Communications Team, who were coming to make a small film for an advertisement on national television that would hopefully increase the number of people willing to sponsor a child via World Vision in Upper East Ghana. We were given a list of children who were in particularly challenging circumstances, for having lost both parents to an accident, to managing with a disability in one of Ghana's most rural communities.

It was a real eye opening experience on a number of levels: seeing how some families in some of the most rural communities live, hearing how they live with the threat of natural disaster day to day, and watching as skinny and malnourished children say that they feel fine and their health is good, when clearly they are really suffering. It was very touching to see how each family welcomed us into their homes, and were really happy to answer questions and tell their stories.

We had to introduce what we were doing very carefully, so as to not give the wrong impression. As soon as we arrived in the big white World Vision pick-up, tens of children would gather and everyone would come around and stare as we sat down on a woven mat with the child and prepared for the interview. Many would possibly assume that because we are visiting the child that we had something to offer them, and we had to do a whole speech about how this was nothing to do with me being a white lady, but that I just happen to be part of the World Vision team! I constantly had to ask politely for the adults to shoo the children away, in order to afford the interviewed child some privacy, but it was clear at this stage that when the film crew landed this child would clearly be seen as a superstar.

I had to learn quickly how to build a relationship in a matter of minutes, in order to begin an interview that asks a number of fairly in-depth and personal questions. I also had to strike a careful balance between getting answers from the child, who was in most cases really shy, and from the parents, in order to get the real picture of the situation. One of the challenges too was the huge amount of room for misinterpretation - I spoke in English, and then my driver, who was kindly supporting me and helping me with all these challenges, had to say the same thing again, in English, in a way that they could understand! Then one of the family members or the Child Welfare Supervisor who was with us would translate this into Kusaal, and the whole family would get involved trying to give us the answers to what we were curious to find out. At times I found myself having to carefully remind people to please translate back to me, as conversations would go on and on in Kusaal, and I had very little idea about what was being said!

Eventually we made progress, and I managed to get most of the stories down. The angle for the advertisement was going to be on the child's dream, showing that by sponsoring a child you can help them to follow their dream and become what they have always wanted and achieve their goals. The problem with that however was that many of these children don't have big dreams or aspirations They live in communities where very few people work, where they have to walk miles to get to school, and where the only people they see in any kind of profession are teachers and perhaps nurses.

Many children here have very little idea of what is possible, and are faced with so many challenges on a daily basis that they are concerned more with day-to-day life than their future. One young man, when I asked him what he would like to be in the future, said a driver, and most of the others said they would like to be teachers or nurses. Very few would know what a bank manager or lawyer or artist or architect might do. It really reminded me of how lucky I was growing up, how lucky so many of us are to have so many opportunities stretching out in front of us, and the ability to imagine a whole range of different futures that we might one day live.

Once we had finished the interviews we were invited to take some photographs of their compound houses, one of which 28 people lived in, which was a real eye opener for community living, and another which had walls that were literally crumbling down around us.

Two week later, the film crew arrived, and were packaged off to the different communities to start making the films. It was a fantastic experience to see how they planned and shot the films, how they attempted to capture the life of the children and the honest situation in which they live. Most of all it was really satisfying to know that the children they were filming were the ones who do and will benefit from those people who decide to donate and become sponsors.

With love from Ghana,

Em

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