Flashback to my early days!

This video titled “Sing it to the Mountains” was made during where 32 CI youth from around the world gathered in Kansas City for the 3rd International Youth Conference (IYC) – that was 14yrs ago but will stay long in my memory, going back to the time when I became a sponsor. For a week, the delegates studied leadership, worked on team building and completed exercises to boost their confidence. I believe that was the last time we've seen biennial IYC in action, but the surrounding beautiful park where CI headquarters located was an idyllic place to meet as it's today.

IYC would be a great way for us to connect to the organization as a whole rather than through our individual sponsorship. However, I believe nowadays roadshows like this can be done online with sponsor interaction virtually as it happens to be the case in the corporate world during current Covid lockdown.

Another flashback memory was that of reading a story in Journeys (unfortunately no longer in publication) so vividly and was just searching for the magazine in my archives, but could not find anywhere. It was about an extraordinary sponsor who made an organ donation to save her sponsored child’s life and her trip (to Honduras?) to see where the child is as she had left the program without her knowing. I believe this remarkable story was featured in Spring or Winter edition of 2006. I searched online, but was able to find only a handful of the recent editions but not this one. I'd appreciate if anyone can help locate a copy for me.

Also, while doing my research, I saw this cover page of Summer 2010 edition, which is not the version I received in print. It talks about Uganda, but as far as I know CI never operated there, even though was then exploring prospects of expanding operations to Kenya in Africa. Have you heard of CI Uganda?

Finally, a quiz for anyone interested:

When did CI officially become known as Children International? (hint: When the child sponsorship program started exactly four decades ago in 1980, it was still called the Holy Land Christian Mission)
Who was the very first sponsored child and from where? (hint: Featured in Journeys, Winter 2008)

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Children.org Sponsorship

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