Updates

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Mission Santa Maria is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, all donations are tax deductible. 

Thank you for everyone who has reached out to us with kind messages and wishes these past weeks. We are doing well and spend most of our days inside the Mission Home compound. We are very safe and completely quarantined and having the kids here make the adjustment to the quarantine a little more fun.

As I mentioned briefly in our message last week, we have begun to help families in the surrounding towns where we live. We are entering the fourth week of a strict lock-down here in Ecuador. This means most of the families in our area have been out of work for three weeks and have been running out of food for their families. Even in good times we here of some of our families at the school who can’t afford to buy enough food. One of our fathers told me he was giving his children limes to eat…

We made the decision just over a week ago to help over 100 families that needed food. We drove to the nearest city an hour away and bought food from distributor. To do this we needed a special government permission to be able to drive (cars are only allowed on the roads two days a week) and we needed to show this document at a checkpoint before we arrived to the city. We delivered a majority of the food to one town and enlisted the community to help us divide the food into bags for each family. The rest of the food was divided by boys from our program who delivered them to another town (the poorest in our area).

Yesterday we made another trip, with two pickup trucks and are now helping 130 families. The people are extremely grateful and so I pass on their gratitude to you all. Without you and without your generosity we would not have been able deliver this food.

Some of our donors have been sending us funds specifically for this project. This was not a planned project since we don’t typically help families with food. Therefore we have not budgeted for these food purchases and in order to continue, we need additional help. If you have already donated, perhaps you can help us by helping us tell others of our need. You can do this by sending our website, or forwarding this email, or sharing our posts on Facebook or Instagram.

Lastly, I want to share some thoughts on why we are doing this special project. Two things have been coming to my mind over and over again the past two weeks as we started to help these families. The first is that food is such a basic need that we really can’t accomplish our mission (or much of anything) if people don’t have food. Secondly, the sisters here who care for the children often say a blessing before meals and almost always ask God to bless those who do not have food. These past weeks that has become very real for us. How can we ask God to help people that don’t have enough to eat, if we do not help them when it is in our power to do so?

I believe we are doing our part and God is answering the sisters’ prayers these days.

Jim