Planning

Planning for the trip is hard work! Fortunately, Children International makes it a little easier by providing sponsors with suggestions, information, and frequent contact. Sponsors are encouraged to visit their children and every effort is made to accommodate sponsor requests and to make the experience an enjoyable and memorable one for both the sponsor and the child. This contact has been very important to me as one who does not travel often and as one who dislikes airplanes!! But with the support of friends and Children International, I see that what was once a dream can become a reality.

So many sponsors wonder whether or not they could ever take the plunge to visit their sponsored children. I believe that if the seed has been planted in your heart, it can happen. Initially, I checked cruises to avoid traveling by plane, but soon discoverd that cruises do not happen during the time of the year that I want to visit due to the extreme heat. So, this idea was taken off the burner and I explored the shortest plane routes available. After researching the web and speaking with a travel agent, I found an hour and a half flight to Cartagena with a 3 1/2 hour return flight. I think I can handle that!

After doing all of this research, I contacted Lori Kays who is charge of sponsor visits and she contacted the field offices at Cartagena and Barranquilla to see if the second week in July would work and it did! An itinerary was set up so that I could see visit all of the children's homes as well as take them to the arcades for fun. My plan was to do a two day visit, visiting Sonia and Yiseth on day one and visiting Pancho and Bleidis on day two. I would only have a short time to meet with Pancho at the community center with his mom and sister Evelyn because I would need to travel by van to see Bleidis who lives in Barranquilla which is about an hour away. That would work since I had already seen Pancho's home on the videos that Steve had taken on his visit.

Well after about 2 weeks, the airline contacted me to say that the flight schedule had been changed and the return flight was now going to be two days later! So this meant that I would need to stay for a longer time in Cartagena. It was okay, just a little more expensive and meant that I could possibly have more time with the children as well as do some visiting in the old historic city of Cartagena. Barbara, another sponsor who has done much traveling, had encouraged me to spend a little more time with the children and in the walled city anyway. I also wanted to up the dates of the trip and so wanted to see if the last week in June would work.
Fortunately, Lori has informed me that this is doable and now I am waiting for the new updated schedule. She says that I will be able to spend a day each with Bleidis and Pancho and still see Sonia and Yiseth on one day. This will be good because it will be fun for them to have each other to spend time with at the arcades as I do not plan to play games or do any rides there!!

I received much support in figuring out which hotel to stay in and after much research and discussion, I decided to go with the Hotel don Pedro de Herida. A little more on this hotel in a later post!