Cindy is a little bit shy but always smiling. Her mother, Ana, is a fervent Christian who wants the best for Cindy and Antonio, her two children.

Ana enrolled Cindy at the Generación para Cristo (Generation for Christ) Student Center, knowing her daughter’s life would be blessed, but she never imagined the reach that blessing would have.

The Majucla community, where this story takes place, is a poor urban community on the outskirts of San Salvador city, El Salvador. In the words of Pastor Rodolfo whose church runs this center,

“This community is a place where people live either because they are poor and cannot afford to live some other place in the city, or live in rural areas and decide to move to the city to look for job opportunities.”

Though most of the area is urban with paved roads, street lights, and houses built with bricks, many homes lack other basic services such as water and electricity, because they cannot afford them. Most of the residents do not own the houses either, but they work hard to pay the $40 or $50 in rent every month.

Most of the people living in Majucla are hardworking people, from women selling tortillas in the streets or vegetables in the local street market to hardworking men working in construction or as bus or taxi drivers.

But Majucla has a stigma.

Its walls tell a story, with graffiti that claims a territory. To think of the name of the community is to think about gangs. To grow up in a place like this is to carry the stigma that most likely a boy will become part of the gang and the girl will become the wife of a gang member.

That means most teens in this community have one of three futures: the jail, the hospital, or the cemetery. The root of this shadowy environment lies in one key element: broken families. This was true for Cindy, but not anymore.

When Cindy is asked about the best thing she has received from sponsorship, it takes her a while to answer. After a few seconds in silence, her eyes become watery and a knot in her throat makes it difficult for her to speak.

She sobs for a few seconds and says,

“I prayed a lot that my dad would stop drinking and would become a Christian. I never gave up.”

The beauty of Cindy’s relationship with her sponsors was the support of their prayers. Cindy had the confidence to ask her sponsors to pray for her family which was on the edge of disintegration. The support they gave to Cindy showed up through the letters they sent.

While other young teenagers in the community were joining gangs (where they could find a “family” for protection, a “family” to give them nice clothes, a roof and food in exchange for lifelong loyalty), Cindy was at church, praying for her father. One day Cindy wrote to her sponsors,

“I want to thank you for your prayers, because now my dad does not drink anymore. Now he leads a small praying group, and he is a servant at church.”

Through the years, Cindy has received special opportunities, including math workshops, computer courses and learning to work in a bakery. Because she could make bread at a young age, Cindy could provide some income for her family.

Cindy and some of her classmates receive a percentage of the bakery’s sales. Other teenagers and mothers in the Child Survival Program help sell the bread in the community, so the workshop is self-sustaining and a source of jobs for the people in the community.

All this has contributed to Cindy’s development and to her family’s wellbeing, but it was in the hardest hours that Cindy’s sponsorship was a blessing for her and her family. Soon after her father became a Christian, the family struggled again.

Wendy, Cindy’s tutor tells us,

“It was hard, because you might think that since the father just became a Christian, things would go well, but it was not the case.”

Ana shares,

“The church has been of great support. Not just materially, they have been of great support emotionally.”

Since Cindy’s father did not have a steady job, it was the the Child Sponsorship Program that supported Cindy with basic things such as school uniforms and shoes, and also the family with staples during those times.

Cindy’s father spent almost two years without a steady job. Part of those scarce times he spent in bed, ill. The money from the bakery workshop and the aid from Cindy’s sponsor and the church helped the family stay afloat.

Things finally got better for the family. Antonio got a job, and now the family can cover their basic needs.

It is Sunday afternoon, and the whole family is dressed up and ready to go to church. Cindy’s father is one of the volunteers at church. They now look like the family God planned them to be.

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 Compassion began to minister in the Dominican Republic around the year 1970. At present, we are working with a total of 168 implementing church partners and an equal number of child development centers.

Out of these development centers, Betel Student Center in the municipality of Consuelo in the eastern province of San Pedro de Macoris is one of the most recently opened centers with 69 sponsored children.

Recently, only 25 children at this center were sponsored. But the staff were amazed to see God’s provision of new sponsors for their children who live in the community of Barrio George.

Barrio George took its name from from Hurricane Georges, which hit the Island of Hispaniola in 1998 and left many dead and thousands of people homeless.

Many of the development center children and their families were among the homeless after this hurricane. A number of unfinished apartments, which were midway through construction, were provided to temporarily shelter these families. 

Poverty still affects the families, especially the children. This is why the Biblical Christian Church in Consuelo asked us to partner with them to start a child development center in this locality.

Now, whenever the people in Barrio George see the development center secretary, Raida, or the director, Patricia, in the streets they ask if their children have been sponsored yet.

At church, people ask for prayer that their children will be sponsored. Whenever a child receives a sponsor, they give thanks to the Lord for His provision.

Consuelo’s economy used to be based on the cultivation of sugar cane, but the industry deteriorated and closed in the 1990s, leaving many people unemployed. The community in which Raida and Patricia live has very few work sources; most men working locally are motorcycle-taxi drivers or vegetable-market vendors, while women wash and iron other people’s clothes for pay.

Other people work at the free-zone industries in San Pedro or move to the tourist city of Bavaro for jobs. These people must leave their children with a grandmother or an aunt. Formal jobs are rare for school teachers, city hall workers or government ministry workers.

In the community of Barrio George, children learn to read and write around the age of 8, which is why many sponsored children don’t normally write introductory letters themselves.

The Letter-writing Process

The letter-writing process starts in the country office, where a Sponsor and Donor Service associate receives the request for new-assignment letters through the Correspondence Tracking Application computer system. Through this system the field office learns that a new sponsor has been found for a child in the Dominican Republic.

Each Sponsor and Donor Service associate works with an average of 43 child development centers. The associate prints a list of requests for new-assignment letters for each child development center. Every Thursday, these and other documents are sent by courier to the centers. In the capital city, centers usually send a staff member to pick up their documents personally.

At the child development center, the secretary opens the documents and sorts the content. The request for new-assignment letters lets the secretary know which children have been newly sponsored. These children are called from their classrooms and given the good news – and encouraged to write an introductory letter to their new sponsor.

Typically, the secretary interviews the child to begin the letter-writing process. Some of the secretary’s common interview questions are about facts she already knows, such as the child’s family, with whom they live, if they are enjoying good health, their school grade, what they like to do, what they like to play, if they pray, if they want to ask a question of their sponsors, if they want their sponsors to pray for something specific, and so on.

From the child’s answers, the secretary drafts a letter in a notebook that is saved in the child’s office file.

When a child doesn’t yet know how to write, the secretary copies the letter from the child’s notebook onto the letter stationery, which is ultimately sent to the sponsor. Usually, the child signs the letter either with his or her name or a written mark, or by marking the letter with a fingerprint.

Often, the child will include a drawing, which is attached to the introductory letter.

If the child is able to write, he or she transcribes the letter content from the notebook onto the letter stationery.

In the case of an older child with more writing experience (usually about the age of 12), the child writes the original letter in his or her notebook and the secretary checks for corrections. Then the child writes the actual letter on the stationery that is to be sent to the sponsor.

After children have written to their sponsors, the letters are sent to the country office and received at the Documentation Reception and Distribution Center, where each piece of information is verified and registered. Then the children’s letters are forwarded to the corresponding Sponsor and Donor Service associates, who scan the bar code on each letter to verify that they have been received from the field.

The next step is translation. Sponsor and Donor Services pass the letter to the Translation associate, who calls the translators so they can pick up letters for translation.

Every translator is given seven days to complete a package of letters. Usually translators receive a new package of letters as they return the one they’ve just translated.

Letters then go back to their corresponding Sponsor and Donor Service associates, who prepare the letters for mailing to their destination countries. From the beginning to the end, the time needed to have child introductory letters written and shipped averages 15 days.

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And this is why Edouard says we should care about what is happening in Honduras:

Poverty in Central American countries is the foundation for all other social justice issues. Honduras maintains an unemployment rate of 28 percent, and two-thirds of its citizens live below the poverty line. The instability the country is currently experiencing is not rooted in politics — it is social. It is hopelessness and destitution.

When Central American economies fail to produce opportunities and jobs — and if governments cannot protect citizens — populist demagogues promising reform but continuing the status quo are elected.

Where poverty flourishes, crime and corruption flourish. This is what we are currently witnessing in Honduras.

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