A quick look at vital statistics shows Anna Altemus and her sponsored child, Wanida, live in different worlds. When it's a balmy 75 degrees in Wanida's small farming village near Phitsanulok, Thailand, a cold wind envelopes Anna's hometown of Newark, Delaware. And while nearly 90 percent of Anna's neighbors have a job, about 70 percent of the people in Wanida's community struggle to find farming jobs, eking out a living on just $51 a month.

Living different lives, on different shores in different styles, ordinarily would be a recipe for division. But when Anna visited Wanida on a recent sponsor tour to Thailand, she found that similar personalities, interests and an unbreakable love of Jesus Christ created a bond with this 11-year-old girl. It's a connection even ethnicity, class and distance could not dissolve, and a realization that many sponsors share when they meet their sponsored child for the first time.

"We both like nature. We like to be outside - just playing, like with water, or climbing trees or whatever," Anna says. "At lunchtime she picked up an inchworm and had it crawling on her hand, and that's what I would do, too. Other girls would all say, 'Yuck, get that away from me!' But we are the same in that way, we like to do things in nature."

Loving nature and drawing are just two of the interests that help the sponsor-and-child bond. But perhaps Anna and Wanida's greatest connection is their shared love for Jesus. When Wanida's father died three years ago, Anna drew and sent Wanida a picture of Jesus holding the little girl as a way of comforting her. Anna also wrote Wanida a song that ended with the words:

"You are the [apple] of your Father's eye,
Run to His arms, crawl up inside,
He wants to hold you when you laugh and when you cry,
Little [Wanida] in Him you can hide."

Wanida took her sponsor's advice - today she is a Christian, a rare status in young girl's heavily Buddhist community. Even the child's family members aren't Christians. This fact helps Anna share an even deeper, more urgent connection with her sponsored child - that of a prayer partner.

"She is a Christian but her family is not, and so knowing how that can be very difficult . I can pray for her better now," says Anna. "Also, it will help me to pray for her because I have seen her culture and the things she might have to deal with living in Thailand."

As their visit went on, both Wanida and Anna began to learn just how similar they were and how connected Compassion's Christian Child Sponsorship program has allowed them to become. While Anna gave Wanida paper and oil paint to encourage the child's love for drawing, Wanida presented her sponsor with a wind chime made out of cans.

"It was very beautiful and hard to make, and she did it herself and I love wind chimes," says Anna. "I don't really think she knew that, but somehow . it just shows me God is so good to put me and her together as sponsor and child because we have so much in common. I don't know, it is just a blessing."

And now when the cool wind blows through Newark, Anna will hear the music of Wanida's chimes and remember the song that God so graciously put into the hearts of two kindred spirits living thousands of miles apart.

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