If there’s a take-away message to be found in the award-winning French documentary BABIES, it’s that all human beings are basically the same, regardless of where we’re born or the conditions in which we’re raised.

Watching a year in the life of four adorable babies living in four very different environments — the hustle and bustle of Toyko, the remote Mongolian countryside, neo-hippy urban San Francisco and a small tribal community in the Namibian desert — this couldn’t be more obvious.

Yet sometimes I think we forget this. Just as a baby is a baby is a baby, all of us are the same, in that we all deserve love, dignity and the opportunity to grow into our potential.

I watched BABIES last week at Empire Grant Park at a free screening, held as part of a six-city, cross-Canada tour organized by Christian development organization World Vision.

BABIES was the hook to get people into the theatre. The real point of the evening was to encourage those in attendance to sponsor a child.

The event’s theme was education and the difference it can make in a child’s life. One of the guest speakers was Teriano Lasancha, a young woman who grew up in a traditional Masai village in Kenya. Lasancha was sponsored through World Vision by an Australian couple when she was about four, and was one of the first kids in her village to attend school.

The experience profoundly changed the trajectory of her life. Traditionally, girls were valued less than boys in her culture, she explained, leading struggling families to marry off their daughters as young teens for the dowry payments they’d receive in return. This was supposed to have been Lasancha’s fate. Instead, she went on to become the first girl in her community to go to college.

Now in her 20s, Lasancha has been living in Toronto for the past three years, where she’s studying social work at Ryerson. On a recent trip home, she was able to build her family a house and buy her father some livestock.

She spoke about what she called "the power of one."

"If you can touch one life, that one life can touch others," she said.

"I was the one sponsored, but that impacted my brothers and my community. My family changed. The perception of women in my community changed.

"Don’t say ‘I’m only one person, what can I do?’ You can do something — and that something you can do? Do it."

More than 500,000 children in 48 countries are currently being sponsored by 465,000 Canadians, a number that includes 17,874 Manitobans and 9,971 Winnipeggers.

World Vision organizers were unable to tell me late last week if anyone who attended last week’s event decided to sign up as a sponsor, although more than half of the 180 or so people there raised their hands when asked if they were already doing so.

If you’re curious, it costs $35 a month and you can learn more at worldvision.ca, where you can also see pictures of some of the thousands of kids still waiting for sponsorship.

Born into circumstances beyond their control, they’re living in very different conditions than we are here in Canada. They’re also just like us.

Marlo Campbell’s favourite baby was Bayar from Mongolia.