ROCHESTER, N.Y. — COVID-19 is certainly making it difficult to plan long-term travel plans overseas, but for nonprofits like the Irish Children’s Program of Rochester, volunteers continue to recruit host families for children from Belfast, Northern Ireland next summer.
The Irish Children’s Program of Rochester celebrates 40 years of connecting children from Belfast with families in the greater Rochester area. The trip has been on pause for two summers now because of COVID, but there is hope kids will be able to travel here next July.
Bob Tucker is the volunteer president of the Irish Children’s Program of Rochester. He’s been a host family too. He knows the positive impact that four weeks in America means to children from Belfast where religious tensions and segregation between Catholics and Protestants still exists.
“They don’t know what their lives would be like or how they would feel about the situation over there if it weren’t for the experience of coming over here as a child,” Tucker said. “Back in the '80s and '90s we were bringing over close to 30 kids. We’d like to climb back to the teens at least.”
ICP of Rochester says it fosters peace through understanding. Children from different religious backgrounds get a chance to interact and build friendships.
A new film, Belfast, is in theaters now. The film shows the unrest in Belfast in the late '60s. Some 50 years later, tensions are still high. Many neighborhoods around Belfast are still dominated by one religious group or another. Children who live just streets away from each other never get a chance to meet.
Clare Mercer lives in Belfast. She’s on the ICP volunteer board there. When she was 14 she traveled to Rochester through the ICP program.
“It is lovely for them to meet someone who they would never have met before and realize they’re not so different," Mercer said. "I do think they think they're slightly different, but are both just 12, 13 and 14-year-old boys and girls with the same interests. To watch those relationships forge and those changes develop and then they go home to say to their parents and tell them that they met someone from a different community and they are not the way they thought they were going to be and that they are just like me. They are the future and that is where we’re going to make the changes and this program is the absolute king pen in making that happen.”
ICP Rochester needs about a dozen host families. They are holding onto hope that COVID will not cancel travel plans in July.
“Travel is going to be something limited for a bit," Mercer said. "COVID is going to be our biggest issue. I would love nothing more than to be choosing children to get them ready to go. Hopefully we can manage it but it’s a difficult time for everyone.”
Aside from host families, ICP of Rochester needs more volunteer board members to continue the mission to stay connected with children from Belfast.
ICP looks for host families with children ages 9 to 15 years old. Families without children are asked to host two children so each child has companionship. ICP will host informational meetings to prepare each host family for the July visit.