By Paul Pearce, director of global strategy for Unbound
Visiting sponsored members’ homes is one of the highlights of an Unbound Awareness Trip. On a recent trip to Nicaragua, sponsors were treated to a special musical performance at one home.
Photo credits for this report go to Ricardo Ajpuac and Gerver Churunel, CFCA-Guatemala staffers, the CFCA staff in Managua and Bob Hentzen.
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“Bob’s notes” are reports from CFCA President Bob Hentzen, who regularly accompanies mission awareness trip participants. You can see Bob’s full update on his Facebook page.
It’s a joy to share with you the beautiful people of Nicaragua.
With a population of more than 5 million, statisticians rate Nicaragua as the largest in geographical size and economically poorest of Central America.
It is popularly known as the land of volcanoes, poets, artists and good baseball, but let’s add beautiful harmonies and colorful dances to that list.
CFCA serves 9,626 children and their families in Nicaragua, along with 856 aging friends. Currently, 1,280 families are on our waiting list for sponsorship. Read more
Try this indio viejo recipe from Nicaragua … mmm!
Unbound serves more than 10,000 sponsored children and elderly in Nicaragua. Our staff members there sent us this tasty recipe for “indio viejo,” or a corn-based, slow-cooked stew!
The Nicaraguan people are experts at making a variety of food dishes based on corn. This is a culture inherited from their ancestors.
In rural communities, corn-based meals are consumed daily. One of them is indio viejo, which is usually served as the main dish with rice, fried plantain and coleslaw salad. Sometimes, however, it is served as a secondary dish.
This recipe is for five people. See the full recipe
From left are Harvey Correia; his son, Michael; Claudia, the Correias' sponsored child; Linda, Harvey's wife; and Timoteo, Claudia's father. This picture was taken at Claudia's quinceañera.
Last week Harvey Correia wrote a beautiful blog post about his family’s first mission awareness trip to Nicaragua, where they met their sponsored child, Claudia, and also sponsored two more children: Juan Francisco and Neyling. Here he recounts the story of how Claudia and her “family” from the U.S. got to celebrate her quinceaÒera,the celebration of a girl’s 15th birthday and transition into adulthood.
We enjoyed visiting Claudia so much in 2009 that we returned on a mission awareness trip the following August so we could visit all three of our sponsored children.
We visited Claudiaís home on this trip and met her mother, a sister and a brother. Unfortunately, we learned that her father was quite ill and had been unable to work for nearly a year because of his ailments.
This obviously brought sad feelings, but we also had some new joys by seeing our children bond together while we traveled with CFCA for the next few days.
We treasure a photo of Claudia walking with her arm around Neylingís mother.
During this trip we met a fellow sponsor, and through him we met more sponsors through Facebook contacts.
One of these contacts had photos of a quinceaÒera celebration for their sponsored girl from Nicaragua, and we decided to pursue helping our girl Claudia celebrate her quinceaÒera.
We just returned from our most recent visit to Nicaragua and had a wonderful time. We visited all of our children and had a wonderful time at the quinceaÒera Mass. Read more
By Harvey Correia, CFCA sponsor
Claudia, second from right, is sponsored by Harvey and Linda Correia, also pictured. This picture was taken in 2009 when the Correias and their son, Michael, left, visited Claudia in Nicaragua on a CFCA mission awareness trip.
My wife, Linda, and I began our family relatively late so when there was a CFCA presentation in our parish while Linda was pregnant with our only child, Michael, we liked the idea of expanding our family through sponsoring a young child.
We sponsored Claudia, a 17-month-old from Nicaragua, in August 1998 when our son was 6 months old.
Although we were not especially active sponsors in writing to our sponsored friend, we treasured the letters received, first written by an older sister and, as Claudia grew older, from Claudia.
We did pray for Claudia and her family in our daily prayers, and this helped strengthen our bond with Claudia as well as help teach Michael our beliefs in social justice.
The annual photos have been a great treasure and formed a great album showing Claudia’s progress.
We read CFCA articles about mission awareness trips and thought one day it would be nice to meet Claudia. Read more