We never know what we are going to experience on a Blogger Trip ^[3].

Certainly each day is planned out — Child Development Center visits, meeting sponsored children for the first time, home visits — but there is often something special that occurs that touches the heart of a blogger.

Author and blogger, Ann Voskamp had one such experience on the Ecuador Blogger Trip.

You can read her story below. Oh and, you may want to pull out a kleenex or two before you start reading.

The prize for this week’s Blog Month winner just so happens to be a copy of Ann’s book, One Thousand Gifts.

Did we say yet how much we love Ann?

Lastly, this week’s Blog Month assignment ^[4] is posted and ready to go!

Maybe you’ll be the next blogger to go on a Blogger Trip with us and have an experience like Ann.

From Emanuel Student Center (EC-273) in Ecuador.

We find Jonathan in the jungle, off the banks of the Amazon. He’s fifteen.

He is scared. He shakes like a thin leaf in wind.

“My mother, she runs out on us when I was four.” He tells the translator this.

His voice’s a whisper, not even a ripple.

“I do not know where she lives.” I don’t need translation to know his fear, hear how his voice quakes.

“I have seen my mother only once in my life again.”

Jonathan keeps twisting his own hands, a wringing out of pain.

“My father, he leaves the city when my mother runs out. He brings us back to the jungle, so my grandparents can help us live.” A skinny hen clucks behind him.

“But there is no work for him here and he goes up the river to work at a village.” Jonathan glances out towards the Amazon.

“So, his grandparents are still here?” I look towards the translator —

The translator repeats the question in Spanish.

“No.” Jonathan shakes his head. “No grandparents anymore.”

I am trying to understand. Make sense of this.

“So you are here alone?” I glance up at this hut propped into sky. At all this jungle.

“My father, he takes my brother with him when he goes.”

I nod slow.

And why not Jonathan?

“My brother is my Father’s favorite.”

“My father tells me to stay here. My father leaves me alone here.”

Something flashes – and I understand. And I don’t at all.

Someone named him Jonathan — but no one loves Jonathan like a brother.

No one loves him like their own soul.

Jonathan is a boy abandoned in the jungle. And only for a moment —

I am looking into the whites of his eyes.

How do you turn away?

What do you say to a son right between the ages of your two oldest sons, a son with no courage left, both halves of his heart leaving him here at the edge of the Amazon river – the river streaming on without him?

How do you abandon a child to poverty when you’ve looked right into the begging whites of his eyes?

Read the entire post ^[5] by Ann Voskamp.

^[6]