This week is the week. Our Compassion bloggers are traveling to Nicaragua. Beginning tomorrow you will be able to experience what poverty is like for a child in Nicaragua through their eyes.

Their pictures. Their blog posts. Their tweets.

We also have a little contest. It is an incredibly simple way for you to take part in this trip and potentially be one of three winners of a prize package.

This prize package includes nine, yes nine, books. Each of them written by a blogger who has been on a trip with us! Hello summer reading list!

Beginning right now through this Thursday at 4:00 p.m. MT, complete any of the following and you will be entered into the contest, numerous times.

Here’s how to participate:

1. Write a blog post about the Compassion Bloggers trip to Nicaragua.
   
   In your post you must link to a post written by one of the bloggers on the trip. Once you publish it, paste the link of your post in the widget below. This is worth 10 contest entries. You can do this once a day.
2. Leave a comment on a Nicaragua trip blog post from any of the bloggers on the trip.
   
   Who doesn’t love some comment love? Let the bloggers know what you think about their posts, that you’re praying for them, or that you’re just thankful for their perspective.

   Paste the link to the post you commented on in the widget below. This is worth 5 contest entries. You can do this once a day.

3. Share a blog post from one of the trip bloggers on your Facebook profile.
   
   Paste the link of your status update in the widget below. How do find the specific URL to use?

   Once you update your Facebook account, go to your profile and scroll to the update you just published. Under your name you will see a time stamp:

   

   Click on the time stamp, copy the URL that appears in your browser and then paste it into the widget below. This is worth three contest entries and you can do it once each day.

4. Pin or repin blog trip content.
   
   Repin any of the Nicaragua blog trip content that is on our blog trip Pinterest board OR pin Nicaragua trip content directly from one of the bloggers’ blogs.

   Of course, you will need to have a Pinterest account to do this. Here is an explanation about how to pin.

   Once you’ve published the pin, copy the URL for the pin, which you can get by clicking on the pin once it’s live, and paste it into the widget below. This is worth three contest entries and you can do this once each day.

5. Retweet any of the tweets from the bloggers on the trip.
   
   Paste the link to your tweet in the widget below. To get the link, go to your Twitter profile, click on the date in the upper right hand corner of your tweet and copy the link in the URL. This is worth one contest entry and you can do this once each day.

And there you have it! A variety of ways for you to participate in the trip, to increase your chances of winning a fabulous prize package, and to spread the news of the Nicaragua trip to your friends, family and followers.

What’s the prize package? Oh yes! It’s a good one!

Many of the bloggers we’ve taken on trips have written some truly wonderful books. We’re putting nine of their books into three separate prize packages:

1. Southern Plate: Classic Comfort Food That Makes Everyone Feel Like Family by Christy Jordan
2. The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Food from My Frontier by Ree Drummond
3. Saving Savvy: Smart and Easy Ways to Cut Your Spending in Half and Raise Your Standard of Living…and Giving by Kelly Hancock
4. A Little Salty to Cut the Sweet: Southern Stories of Faith, Family, and Fifteen Pounds of Bacon by Sophie Hudson
5. Mended by Angie Smith
6. One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are by Ann Voskamp
7. Plan B: What Do You Do When God Doesn’t Show Up the Way You Thought He Would? by Pete Wilson
8. Organized Simplicity: The Clutter-Free Approach to Intentional Living by Tsh Oxenreider
9. Sparkly Green Earrings: Catching the Light at Every Turn by Melanie Shankle

So you see? We’ve got your summer reading right here.

The contest closes this Thursday, June 20 at 4:00 p.m. MT, and the winners will be randomly selected and announced during a Twitter chat the same night.

At 7 p.m. ET we will host a Twitter chat with Resourceful Mommy. All of the Nicaragua trip bloggers will take part. Don’t miss it!

Be sure to follow #CompassionBloggers to join the conversation.

Lastly, an added bonus – a link-up! If you do write a blog post related to the trip, add it to our link-up.

We are excited to have you come alongside us. Let’s do this!

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My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

Do you have one of “those” stacks in the corner of your living room? YOU know the one we’re talking about. It’s on the coffee table or next to your favorite chair — it’s the pile of magazines you love but are not sure what to do with!

Magazines are fantastic. But, living in this digital age, more and more of us are decluttering our homes by opting for electronic versions of our favorite reads.

And because we want to meet you where you live, we created something special — Compassion Magazine on iPad.

Now, rest assured non-iPad users, we still offer the print and online versions of our magazine. For those who do use the iPad, this new version allows you to experience great interactive content that the print and online versions cannot. Take a look…

Compassion Magazine for iPad is free and currently available three times per year in winter (February), summer (June) and fall (October) and the latest edition is now available. To receive the iPad version of Compassion Magazine, go to:

MyAccount –> Magazine Preferences –> Check the box that says “Compassion Magazine iPad Version.”

You shouldn’t have any problems signing up for this resource, but if you do, please call us at (800) 336-7676 or send us an email at compassionmagazine@us.ci.org.

Expand your world with Compassion International’s free iPad magazine! [Tweet this]

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

In a fast changing Kenya, the Maasai are learning the importance education plays in the evolution of their tribe into modern society. Because of this, elders in the community make sure that boys like Odupoi spend their days bridging the gap between the modern world and keeping their cultural roots in tact.

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

Traits that we greatly value and strive to consistently demonstrate are integrity, excellence, stewardship and dignity. If you were to add a fifth trait to this list, what would it be?

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

In Claire’s neighborhood, many children grow up to become prostitutes and thieves. But Claire’s story is different.

At age 16 she was given the gift of music when she received a guitar. On that day she didn’t just received the gift of a guitar, but she was given the gift to dream about who she could become.

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

What do we do? Well, that’s a great question!

The short answer is,

“Releasing children from poverty in Jesus’ name.”

But if someone were to ask you what we did, what would you say?

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

I recently became a mom. It’s been the greatest thing ever…and the hardest thing ever. My daughter has just started copying what I do — it’s the most precious thing in the world!

I’ll blow air out of my mouth and she will try to do the same. It makes me proud to see my daughter growing and learning and to watch her little personality blossom.

It’s no different with our sponsored children. It’s awesome to watch them grow and get to know them.

Just recently, I received a letter from our little boy in Tanzania. He wrote,

“I loved the picture of your daughter, but she looks funny.”

I’m guessing he meant that she looks different from other babies he has seen, but my husband and I got the biggest laugh out of it.

Recently, some of our sponsors shared some funny things that their children had written in letters:

“I sent some pictures of camels and got asked how our camel was and if it lived inside or outside our house.”

“The child wanted to know how flush toilets worked, if we had one, and did we like to play with it. This same child somehow managed to decapitate a statue of Mary and was worried about killing God’s mother.”

“The answer to the question, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ was ‘I want to be a fish, but I’ve never seen one.’ The same child advised not to eat udon because it looked like tapeworms and these are really bad for you.”

“A child in Indonesia wanted to know if people in Canada had hair on their feet to protect them from the cold.”

Another child asked,

“Is math the same in every country?”

“When you come to visit me, I am having chocolate ice cream and you are having strawberry and banana because strawberry and banana is my second favorite and you can share yours with me.”

“What language do your dogs speak? Ours speak Spanish.”

“Is Japanese English with strange writing?”

A child in Kenya wrote a sponsor in Japan,

“I think you should come visit me. It would only take 10 minutes or maybe an hour and that is not very far.”

Sponsored child laughing

Children say the darndest things don’t they? Share your funny quotes in comments below.

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Our ministry is Christ-centered, child-focused and church-based. But what does this really mean and how are we set apart, or different, from other child development organizations?

We use the “three C’s” to answer this question, but what one word do you think best describes us?

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

Happy Mother’s Day to all of the beautiful moms around the world!

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

The tears rolled from my cheeks. Heavy, thick sobs that could no longer be hidden as my body shook with each contraction. There wasn’t much space to breathe, nowhere to escape, and the emotion of the moment caught up with me.

My midwife, whom I’ve trusted so many times, came over and whispered if it was the pain and asked if she could help me, the soon-to-be mother again sobbing in the hospital as I sat on a mint-green birthing ball while the mid-afternoon sun danced through the blinds.

I’m just overwhelmed with emotion.

That was my hushed, in-between-contraction reply. It wasn’t the pain in that moment, though it really could have been, but it was this deep core of emotion of becoming a mother again.

With each contraction rise, as my belly became taut, the tears continued to pour and with them the words, a simple song over and over again, “Thank you for Samuel.”

He was my son. And I was waiting for him to arrive.

Sometimes I wonder.

I wonder about those mothers I see on the Compassion site. I wonder about them and their journeys to motherhood.

I wonder about them laboring and if the tears fell just like mine, rolling down their faces and forming puddles on their shirts.

I wonder about the times when they open their doors and welcome children in and become mom and don’t worry about the food to provide but rather open their hearts and homes. I wonder about the mother of the little one at the top of the Compassion Blog, drinking water – safe water – from the faucet.

I don’t wonder what I can teach her. Instead, I wonder what she can teach me.

What can I learn if I were to sit in her room, with my hands in her hands and the unbreakable bond of motherhood shared?

What can she teach me about joy?

About life? About tenacity? About motherhood? About what it is to live in poverty?

What can she tell me that I can then share with you about her?

I can’t imagine her world, but I want to learn, to understand, and to simply be with her, sharing that bond between women of loving a child who calls us mom.

What can she teach me?

My world is so mixed with lattes and soccer and worrying about the rips on my couch downstairs or what color of pansies to buy in the spring that sometimes I miss out on seeing and remembering those moments when the contractions ripped through my body and the rawness of motherhood was in front of me.

I become so busy and worried about picking up Gatorade at the store or flavor enhancers for water that I forget about mothers all over the world who just want, and just need, clean water for their children.

I forget.

But I want to remember. I want to learn about life, joy, and what it really means in her world to be a mother. I want to learn about the bonds we share — be it beaming with pride when they take their first steps, or dealing with a sick child and feeling your heart ache but still fighting. I don’t want it to be about me in those moments — I want it to be about us — mothers separated by miles and miles and vast swatches of ocean but sharing that deep bond of loving a child.

Sometimes on Mother’s Day I get caught up in the race of my world. Not wanting to go out to eat because I don’t want to worry about what to wear. Wanting to go get flowers and to spend money on things that are just decorations.

What can I learn?

What can I do to be a voice for the mother of the child who is sold into slavery at age 8? Here I worry about whether soccer cleats will last another year, and she worries about the day when a man walks through her door and takes her daughter from her arms. What can I do to help?

How can I live life remembering?

We share this bond, this motherhood bond. We share the moments of struggling with defiant 2-year-olds and we share the agony of labor as it rips through our bodies.  But I am spoiled. I forget it, really.

Until moments like this January, when my son Samuel sat in the hospital for six days as influenza ravaged his body and the doctor looked up at me and said,

“… he would have died if he had lived in a third-world country. Children just like him die from this every single day.”

I looked at my son — his little body burning with fever, an IV pushed into his hand, the monitors hooked up to show the constant blip of his heart that was finally not racing — and again, tears filled my eyes.

Humbled tears.

And tears for the mothers in the world whose children didn’t have access to care like this. Tears for those mothers who held their babies close to their chests and pleaded for their heart to slow, for the fever to leave, for the infection to be gone.

Those mothers. Those are the mothers who, on this Mother’s Day in America, I want to remember and honor and write about. I want to remember those mothers who labor from dusk to dawn and work to put food on their table and pray that their children are safe.

I don’t want to be too comfortable. Those pansies and geraniums and impatiens could mean the difference between my front yard looking like it’s keeping up with the hypothetical Jones family and another child being clothed. Safe from slavery. Getting an education. Drinking safe water.

So on Mother’s Day I want to be a voice. I write about mothers and celebrating motherhood and pulling up your bootstraps in motherhood. That’s my heart. And part of that heart means not being silent and remembering those mothers who are, right now, raising their children in poverty that I cannot imagine.

We don’t talk much about it, it’s not that comfortable, and it makes us question the latte in our hands. Don’t not get the latte. But don’t forget about those mothers.

Let’s talk about it. Let’s be a voice that makes a difference. Let’s support those mothers. Let’s remember their children.

Today I stand in support of the mothers of this world. To the mothers who give and try and go without and bend on their knees in prayer. To the mothers who love their children and dream of the best for them. To mothers.

Please. Please join me. Be a voice of Compassion.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Rachel Martin is passionate about motherhood, intentional living, and living an authentic joy-filled life. You can find her writing on her blog, Finding Joy or connect with her on Twitter.

This is post is connected to an official assignment for the Compassion Bloggers Network. Interested in joining the team? Learn more about how you can use your blogging influence to speak-up on behalf of children in poverty.

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates