One hundred and thirty eight Compassion advocates from the United States and countless other advocates from around the world will be gathering in the Dominican Republic from October 5 to October 11 for the first-ever Global Advocates Tour…And we want to do our best to bring the experience to you!

Beginning slightly before our departure and continuing through the trip itself, we will do our best to bring you updates, tales, and highlights, in picture and in word, of this momentous world-wide Compassion event.

Our intention is to:

• Upload photos to Compassion’s Flickr group, which you can see in the sidebar under Your Flickr Photos (Kees will be doing this.)
• TWEET! – send regular text updates of what’s going on – so follow us on Twitter (That’ll be Kees too.)
• Share stories and commentaries on our blogs – Jesus and Compassion, Sheep Droppings and the “official unofficial” blog of the conference.
• Get YOU close to the action
• Provoke you (in a good way) to jealousy

We will be visiting many child development centers on this trip (too many to list here) and many of us, myself included (Oh! This is Compassion Dave.) will have opportunities to visit with the children we sponsor. It is our hope to transmit as much of the excitement and joy as we are able, so please tag along and be inspired!

Hello friends! Glad you’re here.

I haven’t met all of ya yet, but I do knows a lot of ya. If you’re new to our blog, please leave a comment, I’d consider it a privilege to make your acquaintance.

So that you feel welcome, let me introduce you to a few of the folks who are here regularly.

That character over there. That’s Compassion Dave. The lady cleaning up after the sheep is Compassion Juli. They’re not related…except in their love for Christ.

A couple other cool people here are My Friend Amy, our “blog friend”, and Abbie H.

Abbie writes all in his design, and she makes handcrafted dolls she calls “Compassion Friends.”

The cool thing about what Abbie is doing is that she’s donating all of the money from the sale of each doll (minus materials) to the Global Food Crisis Fund. Each doll costs $36. You should consider buying one.

But if you prefer to win a doll, rather than purchase one, take a look at what My Friend Amy is doing.

Hope you don’t mind the plug for Abbie. It’s just something that friends do for one another. She likes us. We like her. It’s all good.

If you want to buy a doll, send Abbie an email at ahamblin@kc.rr.com.

For the month of July, these non-employee blogs referred the most dance partners our way.

Thanks for your support and for not bruising our toes.

1. Girls Just Want to Have Fun – 70 visits
2. Sheep Droppings – 61 visits
3. Jesus and Compassion – 49 visits