Hello, brothers and sisters of Monat and Connect Church! We are excited to share with you an update on the ministries and construction of La Atravesada. 

As you know, we have had a construction delay. The cause was due to political problems that the local authorities of Sucre Canton had. They didn’t agree with the councilmen to receive us in a session with them. The other reason was that the land really had no deed or owner and belonged to the municipality. For this reason, the municipality couldn’t sell it to us because we are a religious institution, however, we found a solution by “leasing” the land for 50 years. These issues delayed the construction but were finally resolved in October, thanks to God we have started. 

Challenges: 

• The pandemic was a challenge for the team 
• Another challenge was learning how to work as a team which we weren’t used to, but because of the pandemic we supported to each other. 

• Another challenge was that the help from the mayoress never arrived with the machines and dump trucks she promised. However, with the brothers and the church, we were able to raise money to hire private machinery. 
• Another challenge was finding skilled labor, but thanks to God we were able to enlist the help of an engineer who has worked on Catholic church projects in rural areas. 

Learnings: 

• We have learned to work as a team together with the local church. 

• We have learned to trust God more because of all the obstacles that have been encountered so far.  
• We have learned to study the Bible as a team, training ourselves for the challenges we were going to encounter. We studied Nehemiah. 
• We have learned to know the people at the Km 20 (the name of the community) site better. They know us now too.   

We haven’t been able to achieve a considerable advance in the objectives of the intervention because of the many delays that we had, however, we are starting to do our best to recover the time that we lost. We are starting the construction with excitement and faith in God.  

We have been teaching the word of God with the tutors. We have been able to influence 8% of the beneficiaries and the parents so far (12 beneficiaries and 24 parents). 2 families of the community (5 adults) have been reached with the gospel.

According to the comments of some parents, they are happy because their children are receiving this help from the church and Compassion Foundation. At first, they thought we were deceivers, but after the work in the middle of the pandemic, they learned to trust us.