Chico is an adorable 9 -year-old sponsored child. He and eight other family members live in one house with no electricity. His mother, Miriam, does what she can to support her family.

“I work all day, every day to take care of my children. I make tostadas and sell them. Since their father left me, it’s up to me.”

Making and selling tostadas brings in about $10 a day.

While we interviewed the family, Laura, a sponsor from Virginia Beach, Va., asked Chico if he knew Jesus. After our interpreter, Carlota, asked Chico the question for us, she started to cry. I couldn’t figure out why.

Carlota explained that Chico’s answer was no, but that he was ready to invite Jesus into his heart. He had heard about Jesus at his development center, but hadn’t committed his life to Him yet. So, right there in the middle of their kitchen, Laura led Chico in a prayer of salvation.

She explained to Chico that when someone invites Jesus into their heart, angels in heaven rejoice (Luke 15:10). She told him, “The angels are having a big party for you, Chico, right now.”

Chico’s smile at that moment will stay with me the rest of my life.

If you’re part of Compassion’s ministry, you were a part of this moment.

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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.

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

“Lord, if you allowed this to happen, it’s because you will give me something better.” These were the words that Rosalva expressed when she saw her home torn apart by an earthquake that hit the town of San Lorenzo, in the department of Ahuachapan, about 100 km west of the capital city San Salvador, in El Salvador.

Earlier that day, at about 1 in the morning, the town had felt a tremor. Then, at 11 a.m. of the same day, a 4.6 earthquake hit the area; this is like detonating 1,000 tons of TNT.

Rosalva worked as a baby sitter on the other side of the town, and as soon as she could, she ran home, only to see a big hole in the roof, since most of the tiles had fallen off because of the magnitude of the quake. The walls, made of adobe (a mix of clay and straw), had cracks all over, and the danger of them falling apart was evident.

Thanks to God, her family was okay, but the damages to the house were irreversible. “All four corners of my house were completely separated” says Rosalva, trying to describe how her home, a small, one-room house, had cracks so big that the corners were not together anymore.

Civil Protection, the government agency designated to evaluate damages in these situations, reported that 90 percent of the houses in the area suffered damages, and about 70 of the 200 houses of the town were declared uninhabitable.

Rosalva lived with her parents, her husband, her two children and her niece. Suddenly, all her family had to sleep in the street because the earth kept shaking, and being inside the house was too dangerous.

According to the Seismology Investigation Department of El Salvador, what occurred in the town of San Lorenzo was labeled a seismic cluster, which indicates a series of quakes centralized on an area. This particular seismic cluster lasted from December 19, 2006, until the middle of January 2007.

According to El Diario de Hoy, one of the main newspapers in El Salvador, in just three days, there were over 800 earth movements reported, even though the magnitude and frequency of those kept descending.

“I asked my pastor if I could go to the temporary shelter at the local school, and he said it was okay,” says Luz, Rosalva’s mother and caregiver of Yaquelin, Rosalva’s niece.

“So I took my children there [the shelter] and the earth kept moving, and so did they [the church staff]… my brothers and sisters did not stop, the Lord gave them the strength to keep moving” adds Luz, taking pride in being part of such a lovely church, where everybody takes care of each other in troubled times.

“The angel of the Lord stays close around those who fear Him, and He takes them out of trouble” says Luz, convinced that she trusts a powerful God.

In fact, she trusted God, as did her daughter Rosalva and her granddaughters, Yaquelin and Laura. God answered their needs, and the Church and Compassion were the tools to deliver His blessings.

“We contacted the director and told her to raise a census of all the families with children registered at the child development center who needed assistance” says Omar, Partnership Facilitator for Compassion El Salvador.

“Then, we proceeded to make a physical inspection of the damages, so we went to San Lorenzo and made home visits and took pictures to make a Complementary Intervention (CIV) request to help those families” he adds.

Complementary Interventions is a tool used to provide additional assistance to the families of the children registered in the Compassion programs, since the money received from sponsors are strictly designated to provide each child with the four main components of the program: spiritual development, health preventive and corrective measures, school reinforcement, and socio-emotional development.

Through CIV funding, the children and the church partners can receive additional help, such as construction of houses, which is the case for the Shaddai Student Center.

When the staff from Compassion went to San Lorenzo, they took a tour with Brother Omar, the pastor. Brother Omar did not have the usual look of a pastor, with a tie and suit. He had a sweaty T-shirt and a baseball cap, and his black shoes were not black anymore, they were a mix of mud brown and green. And it’s because the pastor along with the rest of the church members were already helping.

A proposal for disaster relief was sent, and two months later, it was approved and the child development center received a total of $27,245, to benefit 29 children and their families affected by the earthquake.

The proposal included a local contribution of $3,100, which was the cost of labor. The families of the children committed to work in the construction of the houses to save the $3,000 needed. Brother Omar kept the muddy shoes on, as well as all the student center staff, and helped the families to reconstruct their homes.

“Some months before we had the blessing from God to get a little piece of land” says Rosalva. But they did not have enough money to build a house and move out of her mother’s house. After the earthquake, Rosalva had the blessing of having her own house built on that land, and her mother Luz Maria also had her house rebuilt.

Since the local government promised to provide the affected families with aluminum sheets and plastic to build provisional shelters, the disaster relief from Compassion was used to build cement walls, and the materials provided by the government were used for roofs. The money was not enough to put in floors, so the houses had dust floors.

Laura and Yaquelin were two of the children who kept receiving blessings from the Lord, through their sponsors. Laura and Yaquelin received family gifts from their sponsors, which was enough to put tile floors to both houses. Laura also got a bed, and Yaquelin got a bike as well.

They are two of the 186 children assisted at the Shaddai Student Center.

Yaquelin and Laura have not forgotten the fear they felt, but now they are two happy cousins with big dreams in their hearts. Most likely, one of them runs to the other’s house and they go to the child development center together.

Laura’s mother, Rosalva, now works at the Compassion child development center, giving school reinforcement to the children, and helping them with their homework. A total a 31 children and their families were assisted. These families trusted God, stayed close to Him, and he took them out of trouble.

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

Read all the posts in the Wess Speaks series.

• What are the first names of the children you sponsor, and what countries? Any special stories you like to tell about them? (Juli Jarvis)

1. Emmanuel (India)
2. Rene (Haiti)
3. Diego (Ecuador)
4. Laura (Bolivia)
5. Alba (Ecuador)
6. Mercedes (Ecuador)
7. Yolanda (Ecuador)
8. Veronica (Bolivia)
9. Sisay (Ethiopia)
10. Fatuma (Uganda)
11. Viola (Uganda)
12. Melecio (Bolivia)
13. Peter (Tanzania)
14. Eliana (Ecuador)
15. azmin (Ecuador)
16. Soinkan (Kenya)
17. Edithe (Burkina Faso)

I know these kids because if you come to our house, you’ll see a big poster next to our breakfast nook with these kids and their progressive pictures over the years. I have visited them all. These kids have been in our lives. About half of them have graduated from the program now, but they are still in my prayers. Some of them I am still in contact with.

Emmanuel now owns his own bicycle business. Rene is a pastor. Mercedes is an architect. Yolanda is the health worker in the Compassion project in Otavalo. Sisay just graduated from the program.

I would love to be a part of the Leadership Development Program. The minute one of our kids qualifies for the program, we’ll do that.

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

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