In the slum community of Makerere Kivulu that lies in the shadow of this prominent institute, the storm drains overflow with filth and stinking water between rows of shacks made of planks and rusty iron sheets. The dilapidation of these structures is set off by the stable buildings surrounded by high stone walls that dot the area.

Many of the people in the community are unemployed, and even those who are employed are underemployed, dealing in small businesses like hawking goods, frying and roasting food like cassava, and selling vegetables like tomatoes and eggplants.

Most of them earn a maximum of about a dollar a day. In despair, many of the women look to prostitution to earn a living, and the men resort to alcohol and spend their days drunk. The youth form gangs and go about stealing and indulging in drugs.

It is this community that 13-year-old Brenda wakes up to every morning at 6 a.m. Brenda lives with her 70-year-old grandfather, Juliano, her 65-year-old grandmother, Violet, her uncle who is mentally ill, and three cousins.

Brenda’s grandmother sells roasted maize, potatoes, grasshoppers and cassava in the market while her grandfather earns money as a shopkeeper. These sources of income sustain the family, pay the monthly rent for one room in a five-room house, feed and clothe the family, as well as pay school fees for the other children not registered with Compassion.

Brenda begins her day with prayer and then brushes her teeth. She dresses in her uniform bought by her grandmother, and heads off to school. She has to be at school before 7 a.m.

School is a 20-minute walk from home, so on school days she never has time to have breakfast. When she gets to school, she goes straight into class for the first lesson of the day.

Her first meal of the day is at 10:30 a.m. when class breaks for 30 minutes. Brenda’s grandmother, Violet, gives her money for food at school every day.

Brenda often buys passion fruit juice and a doughnut. She eats these quickly so she can have 15 minutes to play with her friends before heading back into class.

Class breaks for lunch at 1 p.m., and if her grandmother has paid the fee required of each student to eat lunch at school, then Brenda goes to the school kitchen for lunch.

Lunch at school is usually posho (a kind of bread made out of maize flour and water) and beans. However, so far this term her grandmother has not been able to pay the lunch fee and so Brenda spends the remaining money her grandmother gave her for the day to buy a samosa (a small palm-size triangular snack made of a vegetable or rice or meat wrapped in dough), and this is her lunch.

She then uses the rest of her lunch period to play with her friends. She resumes her afternoon classes at 2 p.m. for two hours until 4 p.m. when she heads back home.

At home, the first thing Brenda does is to take off her uniform and fold it neatly so it will be ready for school tomorrow. She then changes into her stay-at-home clothes and goes to fetch water from the community tap nearby.

Brenda’s home does not have clean running water, so the family has to buy water from the community tap. Brenda usually makes two trips for four 5-kilogram cans every day so the family has enough water for their needs.

After making sure there is enough water to last the family until she comes back from school the next day, Brenda helps her grandmother with chores in the house like cleaning the floor or washing the utensils.

She then takes a bath in the communal bathroom used by all the tenants of the building. The bathroom is made of old iron sheets and sackcloth to give the families some semblance of privacy.

As the sun begins to set at 6 p.m., it is time for one of Brenda’s favorite activities: teaching her friends at home the Word of God that she has learned. They sit together outside the house in the company of the yard animals.

After this she heads off to watch television at a neighbor’s home. Her favorite program is “Second Chance,” a Spanish soap television series currently popular in Uganda. It’s the story of a man given a second chance to change his life.

One hour later Brenda is back home, ready to settle down for the night.

She has her supper, which is usually whatever meal was left over from lunch. Brenda’s grandmother cannot afford to cook twice a day because she spends most of her day at the market. So she cooks enough food for lunch and supper at once, and then divides the food into two for both the meals.

As soon as Brenda has had supper, she says her prayers and goes to bed to rest, ready to begin again the next day.

Brenda misses going to the Compassion-assisted child development center on Saturdays. Now that she is in secondary school, she studies at school on weekends.

However, she is comforted and looks forward to spending two days at the center each week during her holidays. During these holidays Brenda also has more time to help her grandmother at home with chores as well as spend more time with her friends.

Brenda wants to be a lawyer when she grows up so that she will be able to solve conflicts in her community.

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Just as any other Sunday, there are people in the streets coming and going. Housewives with shopping bags going to the local outdoor market to buy the ingredients for lunch, families with their best garments coming from church, and kids going with balls to the park.

The air is filled with freshness and calm, and somehow the future seems brighter for many people going to the local church in the Majucla community.

In a neighborhood named Cuscatancingo, in a poor area of San Salvador, walls full of graffiti, stray dogs, and police and military forces are part of the normal landscape. There are also groups of teenagers with baggy pants and big shirts, some of them with tattoos. They are gang members just ‘chilling.’

In this neighborhood, there is a church named “Tabernaculo Biblico Bautista Majucla” or Baptist Biblical Tabernacle of Majucla. And on this day, at a little bit past 10 in the morning, there are over 100 people in the church.

There is a line outside of the church, and it is growing. The church is almost full. For anybody just passing by, this seems like the second service at the church, but it’s not. The message is a bit different because it is a monthly meeting that the center has with the parents of the children enrolled.

Brother Rodolfo, the pastor, isn’t sharing the message, but his wife Wendy, a respected woman in the community with vast experience in pedagogy, is.

The people attending these monthly meetings come from low-income families. Most of them do not have formal jobs. They survive making tortillas or selling vegetables at the local street market.

These meetings are an initiative in El Salvador called “school for parents,” and the initiative is being financed through a Complementary Interventions Fund (CIV).

CIV is a tool used to provide additional assistance to the families of the children registered in the Compassion programs.

“We come here to learn,” says Ana Luz, mother of Rosibel. “It is a blessing too, because my husband is not Christian, but he likes to come to the meeting.”

The purpose of a school for parents is to inform the parents what their children are learning, but also to have an opportunity to provide parents knowledge and tools that will help them in their role.

The Compassion centers have adopted this model and meet with the parents at least once every two months. In the case of Tabernaculo Biblico Bautista Majucla, they meet once a month.

The school for parents has been active since the beginning of the center, a little more than three years ago.

Just as in a school meeting, the parents get acquainted with the upcoming events at the center, they know when the next sponsor letter is due, and which children have received letters from their sponsors. There is also participation by either the pastor or a special guest, such as a medical doctor, a police officer, a firefighter, or a psychologist, who talks about a subject of interest for the parents.

The talks at the meetings touch issues from marital problems to good health practices for the family.

“We do not take our children with us for these meetings because they are a distraction, and some of the subjects are not appropriate for them,” says Ana Luz.

In fact, some of the subjects studied at these meetings teach the parents about the well-being, the trust, and the intimacy of couples.

“I believe that if the couple is ok, the children will also be ok,” says Sister Wendy, explaining that if the couple lives in an atmosphere of love and understanding, the children will also receive love.

There is also the spiritual component. The parents read the Bible, pray and sing hymns, and those seeds are starting to bear fruit.

“I was not Christian, and I did not want to know anything about church, but I liked to come to these meetings” says Dinora, mother of Laura.

Finally, the Bible studies given by the pastor at the school for parents penetrated Dinora’s heart, and she became a Christian.

“Since last December, I started attending church,” she adds.

The success of this program does not happen just because of the training and knowledge of the staff, but because of their love for the children and their families, and the commitment of the pastors and the church.

“We have spiritual help and material help,” says Sonia, mother of Edwin. “My children are learning about computers … [But also] I know that if one of them gets sick, I can come looking for the pastor and he will help me.”

This morning, Sister Wendy is talking about the psychological implications of a divorce in the lives of the children. After about 20 minutes she ends her talk with the words: “The best solution to face a divorce: to hold hard in the hands of the Lord.”

The staff plan the school for parents with love and enthusiasm, knowing that this will impact the lives of the children at a deep level.

Brother Nicolas, grandfather and caregiver of Brenda and Tatiana, shows his excitement for what he learned at the school for parents and for the efforts of the church to provide a good service, with integrity. “Whoever is not grateful with God for this blessing, and with the staff, is not being fair,” he says.

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