I headed to ActionAid's head office near Archway today for my meeting about my sponsor child Delifa's deteriorating performance and poor attendance at her school in Malawi.

It turned out that Delifa and her family were not going to be able to participate remotely in the meeting via the Red Cross-provided webcam, which was somewhat of a relief. Apparently usage of the village's broadband modem was on a strict rotation and another family was using it to upload a video diary for a BBC3 documentary.

Jeremy the case officer pulled out a large file and filled me in with some of the background details. Apparently Delifa had been an exemplary student since the start of my sponsorship in 2002, but had recently been falling behind in her studies and very recently she had been skipping lessons altogether. He said, rather accusingly I thought, that sponsored students needed encouragement not only from their parents and teachers, but also their sponsors and it was his understanding that I had not once written to Delifa or made any enquiries as to her progress since the start of my sponsorship.

I immediately said that I thought 15 quid a month should be encouragement enough, which wasn't met with a tremendously positive response. I immediately back-pedalled and said I hadn't been aware that direct contact with the child was encouraged or even possible due to language barriers.

Apparently, Delifa had sent me a letter and card and had become increasingly despondent on receiving no reply from me.

I said I remembered receiving the letter but had thought that the enclosed card was a mass-produced mailing rather than personal communication because it had clearly been professionally printed rather than hand-drawn.

Jeremy said it was a little patronising of me to assume that just because Malawi was a Third World country that there weren't basic desktop publishing facilities. In fact Delifa had produced the card for me using Microsoft Paint and a second-hand inkjet printer.

Feeling suitably humbled I left after promising I would immediately write to Delifa and encourage her to throw herself fully into her studies.