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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At home, Aleja has five small children waiting for her to bring them something to eat. She is a single parent, mother of two sponsored children from Betel Student Center in the city of Oruro. She was abandoned by her husband and left with her children.

The family lives in a very small and dark room where they have three beds, a small table, some chairs and a small, wrecked shelf. Outside of the room, they use a small space covered with old pieces of calamines as their kitchen.

Aleja works washing clothes. She earns around $21 per week, and that is how she supports her family. She uses the money to pay the rent, the water, the electricity, the gas and buy the food and some things her children need for school.

Bolivia is experiencing a food crisis as a consequence of many things. Besides the inflation, there are other variables that are affecting the country.

When we have the “typical” unrests, immediately some food is “hidden,” so people speculate, and as a consequence the prices rise. This general rise of prices in basic food has affected everybody, especially those who need it the most.

“It affects my family because I can’t feed my children properly, I can’t provide them everything they need,” says Aleja.

Families have had to reduce the number of meals they have every day, because what they earn and what they have is simply not enough.

When people go to buy what they need for the week, they go back home with half, or less, of the things they were supposed to buy. It seems like money doesn’t have the same value anymore. It seems like money flies out of their hands. It seems like money falls out from holes in their pockets.

Sonia, the Betel Student Center director says,

“Many rather not eat bread anymore. They eat quinua (grain) or other things they bring from their crops. They eat chuño (dried potato) soup. They bring food from the country, like potatoes, chuño, grains, and that way they don’t have to buy things here.

For example, they don’t eat oat, lentils or milk. Things that are good for them, they can’t have because they are too expensive.”

The development centers have also been affected by this situation. Suddenly, the budget they had wasn’t enough, so they had to take some measures that also affected the children. They had to reduce the daily provision they gave the children in order to make the money last for the whole month. Sonia explains,

“We were very sad, because we started to give the children only one plate of food. One day they received soup; the other a dry plate. We also suspended special activities for the children, like field trips. Also in the material for the classes, we stopped buying some things.”

However, not everything is discouraging. Thanks to special funding through the Complementary Intervention Program (CIV), many children who have malnutrition will be helped by receiving extra nourishment at the student center.

This intervention will benefit 80 child development centers in Bolivia. They will work with all of the undernourished registered children, up to 18 years old.

Sonia says that parents are very thankful for this extra support they receive. They were already thankful for the meals, but this extra food can be considered an extra blessing for them.

They are very thankful; they come here and say that here they can have meals and a soft drink. Those are the only three days they can eat. At their home they don’t.

Children don’t miss a day at the center, even though many of them live far away and have to walk around one hour or more to get here.”

The children are very thankful, too. They might not express it with words, but their faces of happiness, when they receive their meals, say it all.

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