Peru

Letter from Compassion Peru Director, Cristina Zavala

Dear Sponsor,

Receive our warm greetings from the Inka’s land culture, the Amazon River and the beautiful coast of the Pacific Ocean.

My name is Cristina Zavala and I have been the Country Director of Compassion Peru since 2005. I live close to the beach and I love the sunset, with those beautiful colours in the sky, and the sun hiding in the sea like a little child hiding to play. I thank God for His wonderful creation and His call to serve many children in poverty that also play “hide and seek” and have an opportunity to get hope in life.

Compassion began ministering in Peru in 1984. My country has a very rich history, beautiful places, and warm people, but also extreme poverty, broken families, and vulnerable children. Together we can offer the most valuable gift of hope to change the lives of the voiceless and suffering ones. This hope illuminates the lives of around 80,000 children thanks to 242 church partners working in the north coast, highlands and north/central jungle.

The difference between a child who enjoys sponsorship in our program and one who is not registered is mainly the impact of being loved and cared for by people who value and provide them with dignity in a safe environment. Due to their living conditions and lack of economic resources, children face hard situations of mistreatment and negligence that erode their self-esteem and sense of belonging. With the tools provided by the sponsorship program, the church builds up their self-esteem and high sense of value as a unique person. The care provided by the church makes the difference in the child’s being who he is and how he sees himself.

The economic situation works against families and parents, pulling them away from their children when the situation is pressing. They leave their children alone, with little protection and supervision. Access to education, medicines, and potable water is still limited in the poorest regions of Peru. Youths don’t have any opportunity to get skills to be inserted in the labour market. Some villages don’t have medical centres or they close early because of the lack of staff. Other areas get water directly from the river or contaminated water channels, and young people don’t have dreams of progress and developing.

For this reason, this year’s vision for my country is to change the situation. We are working in four strategic lines: cognitive, physical, socio-emotional, and spiritual development. We help children improve their reading, writing, and math level learning, to learn and develop healthy habits; we keep on being successful with little ones who just arrive at the program suffering malnourishment. We are working with complementary funds to offer filtered and safety water. Together with the church partners, we talk to government institutions to improve the medical care centres and to keep on teaching Christian values and principles. We are also coordinating scholarships with private technical schools and using complementary funds to help them to study a technical career such as computing, accounting, etc., or be able to study a major in college. We also teach leadership courses to outstanding students. We want to open a window of opportunities to more children this year, and we will keep on reaching out to poverty areas, growing to serve more than 80,000 children. The desire of my heart is to make our children and young people smile, to be developed and transformed, to be agents to impact their own communities.

Such is the case of a young man who is about to complete the program this year. During his time in the sponsorship program, he faced several troubles: his father is an alcoholic and his mother did not want to hear a word about God. But this young man found a place of affection, care, and shelter at the church. He had the chance to learn work skills; now he is going to a college to study bakery and pastry and is also a leader of his church. He has become an agent of change for his family; from being immersed in poverty he has discovered his great potential and now has big dreams, like working with the best chef of Peru that is well-known globally, as well as to be an entrepreneur and travel abroad to improve his skills in high cuisine. Or like other sponsored young children that also lived in a poverty environment and thanks to Compassion studied in colleges and got prizes. One of them received a “Social Volunteer Entrepreneur” given by the United Nations, as he organised teachers to give school lessons reinforcement in poor locations of Lima.

Not only our church partners are main actors in children’s life, but also you sponsors, always being a wonderful support that helps us to accomplish the goal to help our children. Children who enjoy a relationship with their sponsors are able to feel the love and care of people who value them and give them the dignity of a safe environment, and to desire a different future.

Having a sponsor makes the children very happy. They think sponsors are like relatives who live very far away but send letters that bring them closer. Sponsors’ letters have a high emotional value for children; when they get a letter, they feel they have some physical token from their sponsors. A correspondence relationship between child and sponsor also provides a sense of dignity.

We are thankful to our God because we can witness how church partners are also ministering to their own communities by implementing work opportunities for families, with contextualised programs for education and development that radically change inappropriate ways of living. Join us in prayer for every church partner in my country which is exceeding expectations, working hard and doing such an amazing job.

I would like to express my gratitude to sponsors, donors and support churches that make it possible to release our children from poverty in Jesus’ name.

In Jesus Christ,

Cristina Zavala

Country Director Compassion Peru