In twenty days Christy, Edie, Traci and Kelly will write their first words from Nicaragua.

We’re counting down the days to those first words one smiling face at a time…

You can help if you want. Download all 20 countdown images here and post them on your blog, Instagram, Facebook, wherever – one each day starting today. (If you tweet them, please use hashtag #compassionbloggers.)

The trip to Nicaragua will be different from any Compassion Bloggers have taken before. The hope we’ll see is familiar – moms learning to sew and parent, children eating at tables in rows, kids in desks hunched over open books, teachers explaining scripture, little ones measured and weighed and healed.

The backdrop of this familiar hope is different in Nicaragua though. Children forced to work. Some in fields. Others in brothels.

Child labor and human trafficking is a problem in Nicaragua so Compassion works to prevent it.

There are things we could show you on our trip to Nicaragua that would move you to sponsor a child (or ten!). There are people we could introduce you to, things we could say that would move people to give in record numbers. But Compassion won’t let us. No, compassion won’t let us.

We won’t interview little girls who live in brothels. We won’t even go to one. We won’t talk to mothers whose children are forced to harvest our produce. Compassion and compassion forbid us from doing anything that even might come across as exploiting those who are already being exploited.

But we will travel through the neighborhoods and past the fields where children serve as slaves. On the way to hope.

Hope is the central character in the story we have to tell. Starting June 18th. I hope you’ll read along at compassionbloggers.com/nicaragua, and pray us to Nicaragua and back, and help us spread the word online.

Thanks in advance.