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…)

Martha sits on the chair facing the window, arms crossed, and gives a great sigh of relief.  She looks at her big tummy and realizes that the days have advanced very quickly. Not many days are left before she visits the clinic.

Martha is six months pregnant. She is expecting that perhaps this time she will hold a baby in her hands, and be able to breast-feed it until weaning age. If this happens, the baby will be her first surviving child. Martha has had two pregnancies at an interval of three years, but neither of the children were delivered safely.

She lost her first child through labor complications because she could not reach the maternal clinic early enough to get medical attention. Her second child died a few days after birth because of lack of proper care and medical treatment.

Martha is so alert and aware at this time to do all she can to have her child survive. She cannot withstand the horrible idea of losing her third child after nine months of painful pregnancy. And she wants to be respected and not mocked in the village and in the family of her husband. She hopes the child inside her will reverse this. (more…)

Growing up in Haiti, Milord was no stranger to need. In his rural home of Petit-Goave, where the average income is barely more than $1 a day, he experienced poverty personally and saw how it affected those most vulnerable, women and children. It became his personal dream to impact his community for good.

When he moved to the city and became part of the Capitol Development Center, he became the leader of the youth club … and decided he wanted to become the leader of the entire child development center so he could help make an impact on his community.

Milord was so committed that he, once a Compassion-sponsored child himself, achieved this mission when he became the director of the Capitol Development Center. He is honored to minister to 450 children through the child sponsorship program and 90 children and caregivers through the Child Survival Program (CSP). His mission is to bring them spiritual, socio-emotional and economic change.

Milord has now been successfully working as the center director for eight years. He became director just several years after graduating from the program himself, having studied social work and theology at the university. (more…)

Today’s blog post is actually a double – two stories written by Leura Jones, a contributing writer for Compassion who describes herself as “a 30-something mom of four kids who suddenly finds herself unemployed and wondering what’s next.”

I Have Hope Now

Erina, a 32-year-old mother of five, used to ask God to kill her family all at once so that she would not die and leave her children to suffer alone. Three months after her youngest child, Ibrahim, was born, her husband left, taking two of their older children and most everything they owned.

“I would wash other people’s clothes or dig for food,” says the young Ugandan woman. “Sometimes our own clothes were not washed for a week because we had no soap. I couldn’t afford to buy firewood to cook our food. I had to walk 25 kilometers to look for firewood in the forest.”

But Erina has an aunt who encouraged her that God is good and will provide. When Erina looks at her baby boy, born healthy and with rarely even a cold, she believes this is true.

She had even more reason to believe when Ibrahim was chosen to be part of our Child Survival Program (CSP).

Through the program, Erina and her children received food, bedding, toys, and Christmas presents. Erina learned how to keep her home clean and healthy, feed her children nutritious meals, and to read and write. She is also able to earn reliable income by cooking for the church. And in April 2007, Erina gave her life to Christ.

“I have hope now. I am happy. I am alive and healthy. CSP has helped me with education, living with people peacefully, and starting up my own business so I am no longer helpless.”

She has also learned compassion for the suffering people around her.

“CSP fights for us. They check on us even though we are not home—they come back again. They don’t give up on us. This has helped me because now whatever I get, even though it is little, I can be compassionate to [others] who have nothing. I can help others as I have been helped.”

Ibrahim, now three, is thriving as well. Erina describes him as more intelligent and receptive than her other children because of the attention and help he has received.

When asked what he wants to do someday, the boy says he wants to be a doctor. His mother has confidence that because of his involvement with CSP, he will be able to attend school and achieve his goals.

(more…)

Below is an excerpt from an e-mail that Paul Moede, the leadership development marketing director for Compassion U.S., sent to his family last week and also shared with his co-worker, Gayle White.

Paul is currently traveling in Uganda.

Today we visited a child survival program deep in a rural area. Sometimes it boggles my mind to see the joy of little kids who see a bus. They run alongside the road waving and laughing. Closest I’ll ever be to a rock star. Unbelievably chaotic roads, traffic that is harrowing and market stalls that defy description. Sides of meat hanging in the sun. . . . fresh fruits and vegetables . . . and people thronging everywhere.

Thought I would tell you about a home visit today with a single mom and three children — and infant and two toddlers. The mom, Sauda, has recently been abandoned by her husband, and has no source of income at all — just a plot of garden from which to feed her family. I could tell you more, such as the day her mud and thatch hut caved in on her from the rain and she had to build a new hut by herself. About 7′ by 12′ for four people.

After we spent time with her, we left gifts for her children as well as a tub and bag of staples. Never in my life have I seen such a response to a gift — joy that she could not contain. She covered her face as she knelt before the food and started to sway back and forth. And then she erupted from the ground, raised her hands and started dancing. Now I’m not talking about subtle. I mean clap your hands, shake your booty, turn and sing at the top of your lungs dancing. And she went on for two minutes. The joy was so contagious all we could do was clap along with her and choke back the tears.

Unbelievable.

Anyway, all is well. The poverty and chaos is bleak. The infrastructure is rotting away, but the church gets things done.

Paul

The first thing Heidi Partlow does each morning is check her e-mail. It’s always packed. As Compassion’s complementary interventions manager, she gets all kinds of e-mails each day.

E-mails about how to submit a proposal for a complementary interventions (CIV), e-mails from marketing departments about the particulars of a CIV, e-mails about a disaster that has just occurred.

So her e-mail inbox pretty much dictates her day. After attacking the onslaught of messages each morning, she has a cup of tea at 10 o’clock. 

Then she spends a lot of time running around, especially during a week where there has been a crisis, like with the recent hurricanes, getting approvals for funds to be distributed.

But she slowed down enough to give us a peek into CIV and her world. (more…)

I was driving to work the other day and was blessed to hear one of my favorite songs, “He Reigns” sung by the Newsboys. I’m not sure how old the song is but every time I hear it I actually see in my mind the African plains.

For some reason the song just reaches all the sensory parts of my brain. I can smell the Amazon rain and hear the song rising over the noise. It makes me want to sing louder and love deeper in a way that I don’t always connect with on a daily basis.

Why? I don’t exactly know, but there is something extremely powerful to me in this song and the thought of coming together with other believers around the world in a grateful choir singing “Glory, Glory, Halleluiah, He reigns, He reigns.” It gives me chills.

It’s the song of the redeemed rising from the African plain.
It’s the song of the forgiven drowning out the Amazon rain.
The song of Asian believers filled with Gods holy fire.
It’s every tribe, every tongue, every nation, the love song born of a grateful choir.

(chorus)
And all Gods children singing glory, glory, halleluiah, He reigns He reigns. (2x)

Let it rise above the four winds, caught up in the heavenly sounds.
Let praises echo from the towers of cathedrals to the faithful gathered underground.
With all the bells rung from the dawn of creation some were meant to persist.
With all the bells rung from a thousand steeples, none rings truer then this.

And this is my favorite part.

and all the powers of darkness tremble at what they’ve just heard, cause all the powers of darkness can’t drown out a single word.

On that particular morning, the lyrics choked me. I kept picturing myself singing “glory, glory, halleluiah, He Reigns . . .” as a part of the grateful choir around the world like I normally do. Only this time I was holding my 16-pound little boy, Edison who is four and a half months old and standing next to a woman from West Timor holding her 15-month-old little girl, Maria, who weighs 10 pounds and hardly has the strength to eat. I couldn’t even sing with this thought in my mind.

I probably should have pulled over and parked so I had the time to sob before Jesus about this powerful picture and ask what He would have me do about it today, in this moment. Sadly, I didn’t take the time to do that as I was in a hurry, of course . . . but I suspect it won’t be long that I can outrun that time with Jesus. I know it’s coming.

For now I’m ever more grateful that Compassion allows me to do something for the women standing beside me (figuratively speaking) around the world with their babies . . . other women who don’t even know Jesus yet, women who can’t write their name and have to beg for food to feed their babies or worse than that have to watch their babies die from starvation, malnutrition, diarrhea, or whatever other illness claims their lives.

I know that I can love these women in a tangible way through Compassion’s Child Survival Program. I know that I can help churches in their area reach out to them and offer not only needed health resources and nutrition but a different life, an opportunity — and not just one but multiple opportunities. Opportunity and success helps women become more confident and confident women can raise more confident children.

Thank you Newsboys, and whoever wrote that song, for staying open to the Spirit of Jesus. I think somehow it is a picture of heaven to me. I know that I want more people in the grateful choir with me holding cute babies.