This photo was taken in Burkina Faso by scfish7 at one of our child development centers. He uploaded it to our Flickr group a while back.

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“Along the wall outside the Compassion project, many children watched and waited while the other children played and sang. With hundreds and thousands of children needing the hope that Compassion brings, our hearts broke to see the ones that could not be helped. Hundreds more are waiting for their chance to be sponsored, to be given hope, to be shown the love of Christ.” – scfish7

Upload your photos of children in poverty to our Flickr group.

A new day begins in the city of Siguatepeque, Honduras, and with it a routine process caarried out by two girls at a child development center egg farm. They change the chickens’ water and pick up the eggs.

“Hey, here is another one,” says Keila with enthusiasm while they search for more eggs and the chickens walk between their legs.

The center is in a fresh environment with lots of pine trees. The 140 chickens lay eggs to feed the 257 children at the Pentecostal Student Center.

One of the desired outcomes of our programs is the physical development of children, but the rise in food prices has worsened our church partners’ ability to help the children grow healthy.

In Honduras, 70 percent of families in the rural areas live in extreme poverty, and in the past year, the cost of basic grains has doubled. The price of fertilizer has gone up 71 percent.

This egg farm is one of the ways Compassion Honduras is responding to the global food crisis, which has created great difficulty in the holistic development of the children.

The chicken project started as a dream of this student center in November 2008, and the dream came true through our Complementary Interventions program (CIV). (more…)

After a two-hour bus trip through chaotic traffic, I arrive at a child development center located in the northwestern part of Lima City.

The center is in a quiet place far from the noisy avenues, although the homes of squatters surround the church mission. The houses are built with precarious materials that show the poverty this community has to face. The mission is on a large property with buildings built long ago.

As I walk through the church’s wide, dusty dirt-floor patio, the center director greets me. With a wide smile and wearing blue jeans and a black hat, she looks ready to film the perfect Western TV series. Her name is Miss Pino and she is a graduate psychologist who has also studied at a Bible institute and has specialized in child advocacy and child evangelism. She has been appointed by her mission authorities as center director for Semillero de Campeones Student Center, which started in June 2008.

In this position, Miss Pino has to deal with many things she never thought she would, such as trying to keep the center open. The rising costs of household items – cooking oil, chicken, milk, etc. – has led to a 20 percent increase in food costs for all student centers in Peru.

For Semillero de Campeones, this has made it difficult to manage a program with 166 young children to feed, from which 40 percent do not have a sponsor yet.

Because of the rise in prices, many student centers have had to stop some activities such as camps, retreats and extracurricular activities. The budgets for each center are simply not enough.

Development centers with less than 160 registered children, such as Semillero de Campeones, have been more affected as they have fewer resources to face the crisis. Therefore, in order to continue serving the vital meals to the children, Semillero de Campeones received a special assistance through our Complementary Interventions Program (CIV). (more…)

I am missing out on so much.

Every day, I am bombarded with thousands of images of what I don’t have. If only I looked like this famous person or wore those shoes or had that latest tech gizmo, I would be worthwhile. In our culture of consumerism, I am what I own.

I would love to say that I rise above this mindset, but a recent trip to a large suburban mall reminded me that too often, I buy in to it.

My best friend and I perused store after store and watched other shoppers pick up items without even a glance at the price tag. We left the mall frustrated. Angry, even. I was infuriated … not because people were spending hundreds of dollars on shoes and clothes they’d forget about after summer’s end, but because I couldn’t afford those things.

This mindset is not only hitting our wallets, but taking us away from the heart of Jesus himself. (more…)

Our ministry takes place in some of the toughest, grittiest places on the planet, but we face these hard realities with an adventuresome spirit.

In the midst of this chaotic world, we do not waiver and we do not blink, as we pursue our single-minded strategy of “Christian holistic development of children in poverty through sponsorship.” We will never raise a white flag in surrender to the evil raging against us.

In the face of extreme poverty, courageous leadership requires determination and faith. Courage isn’t the absence of fear, it’s moving forward despite the fear.

“Courage is fear that has said it’s prayers.” – Karl Barth

Listen to a member of our leadership team talk about the importance of courageous leadership.

Remember Jordan? 17-years old. Raised $500,000 for the Bite Back campaign.

Well, she’s going to be interviewed on CNN.com Live today at 3:30 p.m. EDT. And if you miss the interview, it’ll be archived on CNN’s blog: Young People Who Rock.