One of the great honors of my last 9 years in Arequipa (!!) is to be connected with the Christian Urban Development Association. It’s not often that there is such a tangible move from faith to action, executed in a such a thoughtful, impactful way. A theology of the inbreaking kingdom of God is beautiful. It sounds like Jesus in the Nazareth synagogue, talking about good news to the poor, freedom for the incarcerated, healing to the oppressed. Because there is something about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus that means good news for us—right now!—as we wait for the renewal of all things.
The work we do through reading education in public schools with Living Libraries and among vulnerable populations with CUDA Microfinance and Community Development is rooted in a different sort of reality: resurrection seeds now. That is, as followers of Jesus live and move in a place, we ought to be on the lookout for God’s redeeming work and be part of bringing life and healing into dark and hurting places. That’s what I’m trying to communicate: faith and action located in geography. And by God’s grace, new life is possible—justice, wellbeing, and joy in the city.
Living Libraries
Before looking ahead, a quick snapshot of where we’ve been. Lucía and Nancy have dedicated the last 10 years of their lives to methodically teaching teachers to improve reading comprehension with their students. They come to life in the classroom. They thrive on their students’ surprise and delight. They walk alongside teachers and engage the strategies they’re using to join reading and thinking in a way that opens up new worlds. This year, our team was joined by Carlos, a talented and dedicated teacher who has committed to working with us next year as well.
Over the last eleven years, we have worked with 167 teachers and principals in 18 different schools. This means that our efforts, through the teachers’ work that multiplies through the years, have impacted over 10,000 kids. Little by little, in a country that consistently places last or near last in the PISA testing, reading education is improving for the most vulnerable in our city. In 2024, the plan is to work with 55 teachers and principals *weekly,* and the 1,450 kids in their classrooms spread out over five schools. In past years, when we had a large number of teachers in year 2 of our program, we would only visit their school monthly. Because of the changes we made to our program this year, the entire training we offer stretches out over two years. That means that we will still be working with the 28 teachers in the second year for 2024 on a weekly basis, focusing on determining what’s important, prediction and inference, summarizing and synthesis, and an author study to verify comprehension. We are working with 21 new teachers in the first year of our program, where we’ll meet with them and their students weekly, with metacognitive foundations (previous knowledge, vocabulary, predicting, and fluidity) and three strategies: connections, asking questions, and imagining.
Living Libraries is equipping public school teachers to bless their students with a reading education that makes a difference in their learning, a difference that will impact their wellbeing both inside and outside the classroom. If you contributed to our work in 2023, thank you for helping make this possible. We need your help to make this happen next year—our biggest year yet.
Microfinance and Community Development
We often don’t know where our paths of faith will lead us. One thing is clear from the book of Acts, however. The Spirit of God is moving toward joining and healing and reconciliation, and if we’re willing, God’s Spirit may just lead us where we never intended to go, to share life, faith, and a table with the last people we ever imagined sharing life, faith, and a table with. Over the last three years Paty, our Director of Finance and Development, has been working with a marginalized group of people that includes current and former sex workers. She has stepped up in faith to this beautiful opportunity to do one of the hardest things she’s ever done, all because of a years-long process of thinking seriously about what it means to follow Jesus and be Jesus’s love in hard places.
In addition to doing all of CUDA’s accounting, payroll, and office administration (which represents about half of her time), Paty extended small loans to six women who run small businesses, and over the course of 6 months gave them personalized training sessions in business planning, budgeting, basic accounting, as they paid back the loan. She also developed and launched a new personal finance course that she gave to Féminas, a group of ten women, six of which are currently working as prostitutes. Katie was able to be with her for two of the four sessions, and testifies to how Paty is able to engage, teach, speak directly into their lives and situation, affirming that they’re made in the image of God and carry inherent worth and dignity. Katie shares how special it was to see Paty connect, beyond the material of the course, through true relationship.
This course was part of our program’s expansion from Microfinance to holistic community development. The idea is for our work with this and other communities to grow from a holistic finance focus to include emotional, spiritual, and physical dimensions. The idea moving forward (2024 and beyond) is to follow up on the personal finance course with Féminas, including doing a Bible study with them and launching an HIV support group with an overlapping population. We will continue to offer new loan cycles that incorporate this personal finance class, and expand to other vulnerable groups, including the 183 currently in the women’s prison in Arequipa, and adolescents who are at a transitional moment from a children’s home to university and adult lives. Katie is writing elsewhere about her work at the end of this year in the women’s prison, and Paty plans to join in with her and lead CUDA in holistic community development with this group.
We are so excited about this. It is messy, raw, challenging work. And we believe it’s exactly where we need to be serving as an organization trying to follow Jesus. I have challenged the CUDA board to think deeply about the future of CUDA’s connection with marginalized populations, and ask you to pray for the Spirit’s guidance and the faith and wisdom we need to engage this special work.
Grounded in a Vision
Since 2016, our house churches have been working with a severely underfunded children’s home in an outlying part of town named Pachacutec. For multiple years, I went to the coast with them for their week of summer camp to teach the Bible and work with the kids. Paty has been mentoring girls weekly there for the last several years. Because of education development issues they saw in the girls after the pandemic, we banded together as a church to hire a teacher part-time to do specific homework help with girls that were falling way behind. This connected us to the girls’ school in Pachacutec, and through our processes of vetting schools for Living Libraries, I’m thrilled to share that we’re working with the Jose Santos Atahualpa school that the 30 girls from the children’s home attend. It’s this beautiful merging of worlds and work to think that we can do something significant for the teachers of these girls, and that they and all the other girls who will live in this home in the future will benefit from the hard work these teachers put in to grow and develop for the sake of their students’ development. It’s justice, wellbeing, and joy—little by little, child by child, teacher by teacher–that’s our vision.
This work is possible because of our dedicated, talented team at CUDA. Katie and I get to inspire, challenge, and participate in this. And because our financial needs are met and we are taken care of here, the best way to support us is to support our work with CUDA. Living Libraries needs help, as does our expanding Community Development program. We’re hoping to reach $15,000 in year-end donations this month to launch us into 2024. We’re also looking for *ten families who would be willing to partner with us monthly,* giving $50/month in 2024 (or more! We have individuals who give as much as $500/month. Or less! Every little bit contributes to this amazing work).
If you are willing to give, whether by making a one-time donation or by setting up a recurring monthly donation, thank you. It is a straightforward process: cudaperu.org/join (If you prefer to send a check, indications are there. You make the check out to CUDA and send it to the church of Christ at Cedar Lane, 1200 Cedar Lane, Tullahoma TN 37388). We’re a 501c3 registered in TN and all donations are tax deductible.
