Sixty years ago, while covering the Spanish Civil War, the English journalist, John Langdon-Davies saw many parentless children wandering the streets of Spain. Moved to action, he created the Foster Parents Plan to sponsor, financially and personally, orphans of war. The program developed into PLAN International, of which Childreach is it's US member. Childreach's community development program bridges cultures on a very personal scale. In the US, 78,000 people sponsor 100,000 children and the communities in which they live all over the world. And the impact on these 100,000 sponsored children is profound. In the villages where they live, the sponsors donations are now pooled in order to address the overarching needs of the entire community--suddenly these small monthly donations are being used to build schools, to bring potable water to a community, or to improve farming techniques to expand the annual harvest. Over the years, the sponsors and children correspond across vast cultural, economic and geographic distances and, in a very few special cases, sponsors and their children get to meet in person. The Visionaries accompanied Childreach director Sam Worthington and sponsor parents to Ecuador where they were welcomed warmly by their sponsored children. We filmed the deliveries of letters between 12-year-old Yasemin in Massachusetts, and Quiyan, a 9-year-old in Beijing, the first Chinese child sponsored since 1951.
