Updates

As we near the end of 2025, we are deeply grateful for your steadfast partnership. This year brought some challenges, but your generosity provides a source of stability among so much uncertainty. But it is more than just stability, you provide hope.

For many of our families this has been a difficult year. Unfortunately, gang-related violence has become a daily reality, even in our small towns along the coast. So many have lost their incomes due to the collapse of tourism as people stay away due to the surge of violence. In response to so many families’ needs, with your help, we have increased our scholarships to 270 children, the most ever! Additionally, our Scholarship Plus program has helped more children than ever so that children are able to attend our school. Julio is one of these children.

Julio is a part of our Scholarship Plus program. In addition to tuition, he receives bus fare, school supplies, his uniform, and monthly food supplies for his family.

Julio is the youngest of ten children and has been raised by his mother after his father left when he was a baby. We recently made a visit to his family and words cannot convey the reality of their poverty. They share a “mixed home”—part bamboo, part cement—with two of Julio’s older sisters, their husbands, and five nieces and nephews living with them. No one in his family has attended college, and most stopped school after eighth grade.

Julio and his mother stand in their kitchen.

Julio and some of his family stand outside of their ‘mixed’ home.

Julio dreams of becoming a teacher, and his mother dreams of a brighter future for him. She believes that attending the Mission School is the best way to make that possible. Thanks to our Scholarship Plus program, in addition to tuition, Julio qualifies for monthly bus fare, his uniform and school supplies, and our monthly food program that helps sustain his family. For Julio, and so many like him, your support keeps alive the hope that education can open doors to a future filled with dignity and purpose.

Amid the instability of the past two years, the Mission Home has remained a beacon of hope for the most vulnerable children. Every child arrives having survived abuse or neglect, but at the Mission Home they are welcomed into a loving, safe environment. They receive nourishing food, clean clothes, and their own bed. The Missionary Sisters provide the maternal love these children have not experienced yet is so desperately needed. Mission Santa Maria has been able to fund the Mission homeschooling program, where children who have missed years of school receive an education tailored to their needs until they are ready to join the Mission School. We also fund the children’s after-school soccer and ballet programs—simple joys that help restore the hope of childhood.

The children living at the Mission Home love participating in after school soccer several times a week!

A bright sign of hope this year came from watching our first cohort of work-study participants graduate and begin professional careers. Students from our programs spent two years earning an engineering degree at the top university in Ecuador while interning at shipping companies. This past February, our first class of five young adults graduated and found jobs, two of whom were hired in Peru. We are thrilled that another six students—including four young women—have now entered the program and will graduate in 2027.

For us, this is a key part of our mission, that our programs will provide an opportunity of dignified, sustainable incomes. We believe these young adults are a living testament to the future your generosity makes possible.

For children who have endured trauma or poverty, hope can sometimes feel like a fragile or distant concept—especially when their neighborhoods are unsafe, their parents cannot find work, and their futures seem uncertain. Yet your generosity keeps that hope alive: hope in a safe place to sleep, eat, and play; hope in an education that teaches both skills and compassion; hope in the opportunity to work with dignity and build a better life.

Thank you for standing beside us, and beside them, in hope.