Living Libraries Impact: When Teachers Catch the Vision

Living Libraries Impact: When Teachers Catch the Vision

2025 was our biggest year ever—just barely edging out the massive year we had in 2024: since March we’ve been working with 55 teachers and principals weekly, as well as the 1,530 kids in their classrooms spread out over five schools. We do what we do because we believe it’s a seed of the reign of God Jesus announced 2,000 years ago was breaking in. We believe children in Arequipa should be able to grow up learning to understand what they read. And to make that work long-term we need teacher transformation. So it’s a joy to share about three teachers this year who have caught the vision and where an impact is so readily seen.

Holding a Book for the First Time

Holding a Book for the First Time

Often I use this space to share big numbers about how many schools, teachers, and students we’re sharing the gift of reading with. I’m proud of the program and how big an impact our team is making in real lives of real teachers that plays out in the lives and futures of so many kids. The school year started in March, so we’re 9-weeks into a new school year and the team is hard at work with 52 teachers, in 6 schools, working with 1500 students. We set up 38 mini-libraries this year—many thanks to many of you!

Justice, Wellbeing, and Joy in the City - Looking Ahead

Justice, Wellbeing, and Joy in the City - Looking Ahead

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.

“Development Philosophy and Policies” as a Chance to Share Faith

“Development Philosophy and Policies” as a Chance to Share Faith

Over the last few months I’ve used our fortnightly CUDA team meetings to discuss our way through one of CUDA's founding documents, about what we believe about the kingdom of God, development and wellbeing, and how to be active agents of change who reflect the ways of Jesus.

Reading: Opening hearts and healing wounds

Reading: Opening hearts and healing wounds

Although our main mission is to train our teachers, through modeling, in metacognitive reading strategies, reaching the classrooms and feeling the affection of our students, children between the ages of seven and eleven, expressed in hugs, smiles is an ineffable sensation. Reading not only opens doors, it opens hearts and heals wounds. Our noble activity is like the stem of a rose that is not only addressed to our teachers but also to our students, who day by day we see in them a greater attachment to reading. For this, not only motivation has been enough, but also a set of significant strategies that allowed reading to be efficient and meaningful.

Evolving Libraries

Evolving Libraries

One piece of the Living Libraries puzzle that we’ve been thinking deeply about is what happens when we leave. We’ve done our best to structure Living Libraries so that we’re giving teachers and schools a process: comprehension strategies, skills that are put in place that will change reading education but also math, science, history. It’s our aim at sustainability. We want to move on to more schools and teachers and kids, but it’s essential that what we have taught continues to teach and a be a part of a child’s education.

Toward Shalom - CUDA Microfinance

Toward Shalom - CUDA Microfinance

Paty is a servant leader in our small house church network. She hosts one of the churches, leads our church in the service of loving our neighbor, and has worked full-time with CUDA for the last ten years. Six years after sunsetting our microlending program, the pandemic gave us an opportunity to resurrect it, paying special attention to Arequipa’s marginalized populations—including current and former sex workers and an abused minority community.

Paty and CUDA’s Microfinance Program

Paty and CUDA’s Microfinance Program

Getting to be in relationship with Paty as a Christian follower, leader, and servant has been one of the great joys of our 7 years in Arequipa. The last year and a half, in particular, has been a formative time of shared faith, discipleship, and formation for Jesus’s mission and partnership in the gospel. It’s as if God’s work in Paty’s life—which has included so many spiritual mentors, and in which Katie and I personally got to share for years of reading the Bible and breaking bread with Paty and Lola in their home—had all been leading up to the moment where God would call Paty to minister to a very marginalized part of Peru’s population, a group beautifully made in the image of God yet abused by society, including women involved in sex work, and men and women abandoned by their families early in life either because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

Living Libraries - October 2021

Living Libraries - October 2021

As a reminder, we are Living Libraries, a branch of the Christian Urban Development Association’s work in Arequipa, Peru aiming to break cycles of urban poverty and make way for justice, wellbeing, and joy because of Jesus. We put a library in a public school where there were previously no children’s books, and train the teachers with reading comprehension strategies over the course of two years to get that school ready to function on its own with a reading program. We do this because we believe that when the kingdom of Jesus comes into a community, things get better.