MEETING CARLA!

We meet at last!

our two families unite

Brothers and sisters

Erika, Gloria, Daniel, Carla

The Soccer teams

Carla & Landon

Carla's school mates

both our families

Sisters!!

Feb. 2

A mad rush in the morning to get ourselves ready to travel to Sonsonate in order to meet Carla, our sponsored child.

Got off a bit late due to some miscommunication regarding transportation and then the drive from San Diego to San Salvador took another 1.5 hours.  We finally arrived at the Compassion office and met Ruth who would be our translator for the day.  She was also the founder of Compassion in El Salvador 20 years ago, which began in her house!  Another hour to Sonsonate but it was all well worth the wait since meeting Carla was truly magical.  We strolled through a walk way lined with all her classmates waving flags, then Carla walked towards us with a rose for each of us.  We hugged and then walked together into their outdoor meeting place where they prayed, sang songs and welcomed us as Carla’s sponsor.  Our family was invited to come up and we each introduced ourselves and spoke a little about what being a sponsor meant to us. We met Carla’s mom Erika, her sister Gloria and brother Daniel.  Afterwards, we all took the van to Pizza Hut for lunch and the kids had fun playing on the big jungle gym inside the restaurant.  Then we drove to Carla’s house and met her dad Mario.  Their house had 3 rooms in total but was about the size of our living room, made of cement blocks.  The bedroom slept their whole family of 5.  They had some really nice hand-made gifts for us and a sign that welcomed us to their home.  We gave them our suitcase full of clothes, toys etc. for Carla and her brother Daniel.  Tianna and Landon took their bikes and biked through the little lane in front of their house.

Lastly, we drove back to the school where all the kids were still waiting for us to play soccer.  Two teams were formed and we played for almost an hour.  Both Tianna and I scored, yeah!!

It was really difficult to say good-bye but we felt so incredible afterwards.  It was one of those days when you feel like everything is right, we have blessed her and how blessed are we to have had the opportunity to meet her and her lovely family.