What if my sponsored children in Tanzania and Uganda Googled me?

My first letter from John arrived two years ago, as a bolt from the blue. ‘I like playing ball,’ he informed me, ‘my favourite food is banana and meat. What is your favourite game?’ It was a reasonable enough question, I suppose, if entirely unsolicited. Also, it’s hard enough to explain hurling to people who’ve actually seen it: based on the postmark on John’s letter and his childish handwriting, explaining a sideline cut to a small boy in Uganda was going to be a bigger ask. And although it now seems a moot point, there was an additional consideration: I had never heard of John.

Two days later, he was back in touch. ‘I can sing and dane,’ he told me in this second missive. ‘I wish you mery Christmass.’ On this letter, he had drawn a picture for me, a stickish girl beside a basin that was almost twice her size. I could tell it’s a basin because he wrote ‘basin’ underneath it.

Because it really would be impolite to ignore two letters — especially one with a picture of an intriguingly large basin — there began, then, a separate correspondence with World Vision, through whom I have sponsored children in Africa for years now. It turned out that the last child I’d sponsored, a girl called Eliabeth in Tanzania, had recently left the programme and was now ‘living with relatives’ — an outcome that didn’t sound nearly as satisfactory as that of my previous charge, whose entire village had graduated from World Vision’s support structures and were going great guns altogether.

Anyway, because Eliabeth was no longer attending school, World Vision had transferred my patronage to John, a little boy in Uganda. And because we were in the darkest depths of Covid at the time and everyone was working remotely, somebody had forgotten to tell me.

Anyway, there were apologies, an option to cancel my sponsorship (in other words, a chance to let a small boy in Africa know that I was the worst person in the world) and then, at my request, a bit more information about John: that he was four years old, has three brothers and four sisters, was attending kindergarten and enjoyed playing with dolls. They would send a photo, they promised, as soon as they got their hands on one.

I’m not going to lie: I didn’t have high hopes for the photo. Years of photos of Eliabeth had documented a growing girl who appeared to be the unhappiest in all of Africa. Every Christmas, she had essentially acknowledged my patronage by giving me the stink eye down the barrel of the camera. If you ever want to capture contempt and hostility in a single face, then I’d suggest you head to Tanzania and hunt down Eliabeth’s relatives.

And to be honest, her predecessor, Maria — she of the shining successful village — wasn’t much better. While she lacked the barely concealed violence of Eliabeth, Maria looked deeply uncomfortable in the unhappy, unsmiling photos that for a time I used to put on the fridge to remind my own children how lucky they were until she just made them feel uneasy and sad.

But John. Oh John! The photo duly arrived and I swear to God, it might just have been the greatest photo ever taken. Beautiful John, in a stripey t-shirt, leaning into a tyre swing on a tatty rope, with a smile that could light up a whole continent. If they put it on front of the Trocaire box, they’d have needed a bigger box. John. Happy, beaming, golden John. A boy so grateful for my patronage that he was borderline radioactive. At last, the sponsored child I deserved.

Two years on, I’ve just received John’s progress report and his latest photo. And there he is, older, taller, staring at me with the same, unsmiling, haunted expression I’ve become all too familiar with.

And that’s when it occurs to me? What if it’s not them? What if it’s me? Have they Googled me, over in Tanzania and Uganda, and seen that weird photo of me taken at the opening night of my play, October, in which I look like a drunk ghost in a bad nightie? Did they find the Irish Times review of my Garth Brooks play that called me ‘witless?’ My God, what have they heard?

The good news on John is that he’s now in primary school and is progressing well. If he still plays with dolls, he’s not letting on (which in Uganda, might be a prudent move.) He’s only six, so we’ve a long way to go yet, John and I.