At only 5 years of age, Michelle had to say goodbye to one of the places she loves the most: her child development center.

Michelle has been sponsored since she was 3. She was raised by her grandmother, who registered her at the center. But when Michelle’s stepfather found a job in another city, they decided to move there.

Often, children and families don’t tell church staff they are moving. The children suddenly disappear, so the tutors have to go look for them.

Whenever a child stops coming to a development center, the tutor or social worker will visit the child’s home to find out what is happening. The tutors even go to the schools, and usually that’s where they find out the child has moved to another place.

When Michelle stopped attending the center for a couple of weeks, her tutor went to visit Michelle’s home. The tutor was told Michelle wasn’t coming back.

“Sometimes the mother or the father travel to work to Argentina, Brazil or Spain, and they are left with an aunt, so they have to move to another house. Sometimes the parents take the children with them, so we have to remove them from the program because there is no place to transfer them. Others have to move away because the house is not their own, they are either in a rented house or temporarily taking care of a house.

“Other reasons a child stops attending the center activities are because sometimes the child or youth starts working, and either they lose interest or don’t have time or because the parents don’t want their children to become Christian,” says Elda, the Director of Michelle’s center.

Our church partners do what they can to keep the children at the centers. At Michelle’s center, staff members have brought back many children by speaking with the child’s guardians (e.g., aunts and uncles) letting them know the benefits the child will receive.

When a child moves to a new area that has a child development center in the community, the child can be transferred to that center. The staff works hard to make this happen.

Rather than moving, there are cases where the parents just don’t let the children continue attending the center.

“We recently had a case where the mom is a Jehovah’s Witness. When we visited and called her so the child could come, the mother got mad. The tutor said that the child is desperate to come but the mom won’t let her.”

At times, the youth or children themselves decide to leave the center for various reasons. Sometimes it’s because of pressure from parents to work or because they lose interest as teenagers.

“There are also cases where some children or teenagers tell us that they don’t want to come anymore, but later on we find out the real reasons. Sometimes, it’s that the parents don’t let them go or that the child is working during the day and studying at night.”

After a child leaves Compassion, the staff do the follow-up work of handling gifts and departure letters.

“When a child receives a gift and is no longer at our center, we try to find the child. When we can’t find the child we have to return the money to the country office. If we find the child, the child comes to the center to receive the gift and then returns to where he or she is living. We can wait for a child to appear for up to two months.”

When a child isn’t available to write a goodbye or thank-you letter to the sponsor, it is often written by the tutor, because the tutor is the one who knows the child best and can explain the reason the child left.

If the child isn’t located and the sponsor has sent a gift, the gift is returned to the Global Ministry Center in Colorado Springs. This money is then added to the Christmas Gift Program to be shared among the children at Christmastime.

In Michelle’s case, the staff at her development center were preparing her departure forms to send to our country office, but Michelle appeared back just in time. Her family had decided to come back, and she was able to continue in the program.

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“He just went home one day afraid of dying,” says Emma, Angelica’s mother. “After that, he kept on saying ‘they are going to kill me’ over and over until he lost all sense of reality.”

Since then, Emma took on the responsibility of raising their four children. Angelica, 6, is the youngest. Emma worked hard day and night as a house-help, earning only $25 a month, until she developed a heart ailment.

In October 2008, the Word of Life Foursquare Church began its partnership with Compassion as it opened the Living Word Child Development Center in the Philippines.

The church surveyed the neediest communities to find children for registration. They went to a community of wooden-stilt houses over a flooded swamp and visited Emma’s home. But no one was there.

The child development worker heard of Emma’s situation and attempted to see her a few more times, but was unsuccessful.

After a month, the child center was ready to register almost 100 children, but Emma still hadn’t been spoken to.

To make sure that the family was at home, the child worker, Michelle, decided to visit the family late in the evening during a storm. It was raining hard and pitch black as Michelle carefully crossed one bamboo bridge after another.

“For the first time in my life, I was thankful for lightning because it was my only source of light.”

Recalling that stormy night when Michelle visited their house, Emma says,

“(Michelle) came several times before, but I was always out. Then she came in the evening during a storm. That really meant a lot to me. She bothered to come, and her coming proved that she really cared. The church really wanted to help.”

The Living Word Child Development Center opened after it registered its first 100 children, including Emma’s daughter, Angelica.

The center gathers the registered children every Saturday for their learning activities, school tutorials, Bible stories, fun, play and food. The center conducts regular medical and dental checkups for the children, and through Complementary Interventions, the center is also implementing a “Crush Tuberculosis” program.

Angelica looks forward every Saturday to her time at the center. She loves to study and draw, and she can now read and write on her own.

“(The center) is my second home. I enjoy playing there and listening to stories.”

Michelle says Angelica is one of their jolliest and most active children.

“She is a joy to have around. One day, she refused to eat her snacks and fruits. She is never out-of-mood and so I approached to ask her what’s wrong. I thought she might be sick. Angelica answered, ‘I will take my food home to give to my sister, Hazel. It’s her birthday today.’ ”

Michelle later found out that Angelica even gave some of the food to her cousin, who lived nearby. She has never regretted braving the storm that night to meet Emma.

A few months after the center opened, Emma decided to give her testimony at one of the Bible study classes for the parents.

“I thought God had forgotten us. This is why I love coming to our Bible studies because I feel that God had not forsaken us.”

Today, Emma and all her children regularly attend church. Emma has stopped working completely due to her heart condition, and now her two children, Alfie, 14, and Hazel, 12, work at nights to earn money for the family. They sell balut eggs (steamed duck eggs, a popular evening delicacy) to motorcycle-taxi drivers.

After school, they walk a kilometer to a gasoline station and sell the eggs from 5 to 8 p.m. They earn around $3 a night.

The other daughter, Alma, 13, stopped going to school to assist her mother at home.

Angelica’s father is still missing.

Emma says Angelica repeatedly prays, “Lord, please make my mother healthy, and help my father find his way back home.”

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

This video is about a year old, and if you haven’t seen it, it’s definitely worth your time.

The video is a little less than eight minutes long, and in it Michelle talks about the value and meaning of Compassion’s programs in her life.

We don’t have a video about Tony Beltran Morales, scholarship recipient number three, but we did profile him back in November 2008 – Leadership Development in the Dominican Republic.

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

My project was the first-ever Wess Stafford Moody Bible Institute scholarship that was awarded to three of our Leadership Development Program (LDP) graduates.

Oh yeah, my name is Celina, and I work in marketing on the events team. Working with LDP graduates was a little out of my realm of expertise, but I was up for the challenge!

As I was being told about my role, three LDP grads –- Michelle Sheba Tolentino (Philippines), Richmond Wandera (Uganda) and Tony Beltran Morales (Dominican Republic) were headed to the United States, and nobody could really tell me what my role was actually going to be.

Everything with the Moody scholarship program is brand new territory for us. In the beginning, my job was to ask a whole lot of questions. And now, I realize that my job has been to break ground.

I don’t consider myself good at ground breaking, but every job I have had for the past 10 years has involved some sort of ground breaking. I don’t really like it. But I must be good at it because God keeps assigning me to it.

Anyway, the Moody scholars are here and have been for four months now, and I have to say that I think they are the most amazing people in the world!

They are smart; way smarter than me. They are kind. They are funny. And they know an aspect of God’s character that I will never know in all my days on this earth.

Why?

Because little children see His face, and although Michelle, Richmond and Tony have overcome poverty, they have seen His face in their darkest moments and lived to share it.

I have never met an LDP grad that hasn’t remained childlike in the best way.

I’ve met a student whose father was murdered. I’ve met students called ugly and useless by their families — rejected and scorned — and have all seen His face. And overcome.

The Bible says that we overcome by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony.

Now, these three LDP graduates are earning masters degrees while sharing their testimonies all over the United States and Canada. They are overcoming, and we are blessed to be a part of it!

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