In the summer of 2016, Holt sponsor and then Holt employee Billie Loewen met a very sad, hungry girl in a remote village in Cambodia. She immediately signed up to sponsor her. Four years later, she receives an update that makes her heart soar.

In the first week of every month, I pull open the Excel spreadsheet with four years of monthly budgets. I open the Chase app and Wells Fargo and drift quickly over the charges, looking for anything amiss. The single line with a shortened title, “HOLT INTL CHILD,” and associated charge — $38 — always catches my eye.

Most months, paying bills is the only time I think about what it costs to sponsor the beautiful, shy, heartbreakingly sad little girl I met in a village in Cambodia on a scorching hot, dusty day in 2016.

Tiny, impossibly thin with straggly hair turning yellow from lack of nutrition, and a broad face with deep, serious eyes, 10-year-old Phal captured my entire heart the moment I saw her.

It’s been four years since I met her, and I think about her a lot.

Her picture is on my fridge, clipped with a heavy magnet and stacked in chronological order with all the other pictures of her that I’ve cut from sponsored child reports over nearly four years. When I stand at the fridge, peering over the shelves mindlessly over the smattering of deli meat and single-serve puddings, her picture often catches my eye and I wonder if she has enough to eat, if she’s doing better in school, if kids are being nice to her, if her siblings (her legal guardians) are okay, and what they do for work.