The walk through the haphazardly planned township of Fadama is not a smooth one. You have to stop from time to time to scan the road to avoid stepping into wastewater on the ground due to lack of a proper drainage system.

Several child development center workers from the Church of Pentecost Fadama went into Fadama to identify impoverished children in the community to be registered into their new center.

As the four team members turned a corner, they collided with a little boy who had been angrily shoved out of a wooden structure that serves as a place where people go to buy food and eat. Such spots in Ghana are popularly called “chop bars.”

The boy was thin, in worn-out clothes and with no sandals to protect his feet from the filth on the ground. His name was Fred. (more…)

They are the most heartbreaking reports I’ve seen during my 12 months in this job. (Not that you can really quantify or categorize something like this, but last week was the first time I cried reading a crisis report.)

Cyclone Aila. If you haven’t heard about it, don’t feel bad. It really hasn’t been in the news much at all.

None of the major world news sites say anything about it. When I checked yesterday, they all had headlines about singing sensation Susan Boyle, but nothing about Cyclone Aila. However, just because there are no headlines doesn’t mean there is no news.

Over the past week, David Adhikary, our communications specialist in Bangladesh, has been sending photos and reports from the midst of the cyclone’s aftermath. They are devastating. Here are a few excerpts from his reports …

“During the disaster night, the children and their families suffered a lot. The cyclone took down their houses, and after that the dams were destroyed. Some of children had to stand in water for the whole night. The center staff found many of the children in a wet condition.”

“The Compassion center staff and the parents of the children are very anxious about the aftereffects of the flood. The dead animals could cause dangerous diseases, and the probability of malaria is very high.”

“There is not a single house in the village that hasn’t been affected by floodwater. The village is near the sea and the river water is very salty. The floodwater mixed with their water sources and made it impossible to drink.

“The water crisis is the major problem for the people. People were seen drinking the polluted floodwater to put off their thirst. The floodwater is very dirty and stinky. The dead animals and fish are floating all over the water. Children of that area are also drinking the same water.”

Worse …

“The affected families have taken shelter at the nearest market. The families are staying with the animals in the market. The marketplace is badly polluted as the people are using the place for all kinds of uses.

“There is no toilet and the people are using free spaces for a toilet.

“The adult girls are staying with their families in the marketplace. Their parents are very anxious about their daughters because at nighttime they have to stay with lots of unknown people together in the marketplace.”

And perhaps saddest of all …

“This morning we received very sad news about one of the children we assist. Her mother committed suicide just after the cyclone disaster. Their house was broken down and she committed suicide out of her frustrations. She lost her husband last year during Cyclone Sidr. She faced many challenges last year and finally gave up. [The children] are now orphans and vulnerable. They lost their father and mother in two consecutive cyclones. Please join us in pray for these children.”

Oh, God.

It feels like it’s too much, doesn’t it? When I read stuff like this, I find myself begging Jesus to hurry up and return and make all things right. It’s difficult not to get overwhelmed with despair.

The crazy thing is, though, God has placed Compassion right in the midst of this mess. Because of our unique church-based structure, our child development centers are distributing food and water where even relief agencies haven’t been able to access!

Families who lost their homes and have nowhere to cook are receiving hot meals at the child development centers. During the next few weeks, the centers will provide them with dry food, oral rehydration therapy and water purification tablets.

Here are a few of David’s photos. As you look at them, pray for the people in the photos and the thousands more you don’t see who are in similar desperate situations.

We have set up a fund if you would like to make a donation to help the victims of Cyclone Aila.

If you sponsor a child in Bangladesh and your child has been affected by Cyclone Aila, we will contact you as soon as we receive information about your child.

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…)

Have you ever heard of Atrial Septal Defect (ASD)? Apparently, it’s a congenital heart defect.

If you have a defect in your interatrial septum, the tissue that divides the right side of your heart from the left side, your blood can get confused. And if that happens, you end up with blood that goes where it shouldn’t. That’s bad.

In a normal heart, the left ventricle has to produce enough pressure to pump blood throughout the entire body, but the right ventricle has to produce only enough pressure to pump blood to the lungs.

In the case of a large defect, this pressure difference means that blood from the left atrium can flood and enlarge the right side of the heart and, if left untreated, can result in heart failure.

That’s ASD in a nutshell. And this is why I tell you.

Alexander is an 8-year-old Kenyan boy who has ASD. He is in the third grade and is the youngest child in a family of five. Because his heart has been pumping deoxygenated blood to his growing body for his entire life, Alexander is smaller than most children his age.

In August 2008, during an evaluation at the child development center, a pediatrician noticed that Alexander has a heart murmur. Follow-up tests in Nairobi identified the birth defect and recommended a cardiac catheterization procedure and open heart surgery.

But Alexander’s parents are peasant farmers, and his mother sells fruit at the market to earn extra income. They survive on $13.70 per month.

$13.70 a month is barely adequate to meet the family’s basic needs, let alone pay for open heart surgery.

At this point, heart failure is a real possibility for Alexander. However, studies have shown that patients with a surgically repaired ASD have an excellent prognosis, particularly when the operation is done before the age of 25.

But Alexander’s family can’t afford the operation. It costs $8,303.

Alexander has been waiting to receive the surgery for several months now, since early December, but he can’t wait any longer. His condition has recently worsened – which made me think of something Amanda suggested back in February.

“I am just kicking around a few ideas here. What if Compassion had a “Spotlight of the Week” – or “Spotlight of the Month?” It could be either a child (medical need?), family, or small community need. It could even be in the area of the global financial crisis, disaster relief, Child Survival Program, or some other facet of Compassion. For example, one week you could highlight the (global food crisis) need of a community in Uganda to have goats or seeds for crops (or both). After the donations have been given, you could easily follow up with a story in the blog to share the results of the giving.”

So, Alexander has a need. And our objective is to give him a normal heart. Can we do this for him?

Make a donation to help pay for Alexander’s surgery. (Update: May 21, 2009 – You did it! And more. You contributed around $10,000. I expect to have the exact amount tomorrow.)

Thank you for loving this child.

As I receive updates on how Alexander is doing, I will share them with you. I can’t promise you updates with any degree of regularity though. I can just promise that there will be a follow-up.

It is a sunny Sunday morning in San Salvador. It is dry season.

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. (more…)

The green leaves start to receive the first rays of the sun, leaving the darkness and cold of the night behind. It is 6 in the morning and the harvest looks ready – ready to be separated from the corn bush, ready to become part of a meal, and ready to be part of a change in the lives of an entire community.

This is the fruit of seeds planted with hope, watered with hard work and dreams, and, at last, harvested with joy.

Pastor Damian checks two sacks full of beans. It is just the beginning of the harvest and the fruits already look promising.

Another man, Brother Juan, a seasoned farmer with dark skin and gray hair, is a perfect example of a Salvadoran farmer – thin but somehow robust, quiet and wise. Juan has served as an adviser to Pastor Damian since they decided to implement program “Double Seed.”

Juan talks about the beans and how they should keep some leaves and dirt in the sack so the beans will not lose the humidity they need.

“This way, they can last for about a year,” he adds, and smiles, knowing that the efforts made these past three months have given results – promising results that translate into hope.

It has been three months since Double Seed started in the community of Corinto, in Zaragoza, a city located eight miles south of the capital city, San Salvador, in El Salvador.

These past months meant sweat and great efforts for the people, but it also meant hope for a future that did not seem so clear a few months before. (more…)