
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