Every Thursday, Madeline Comes Back
A child who once had to grow up early is now the teacher preparing the next generation to thrive.
On Thursday afternoons at Agua Viva, M:25’s campus in Quito, a room full of children watches a giant purple crayon come to life in Madeline’s hands. She’s twenty-one — steady and warm at the front of the room — and the kids lean in like she’s the most trustworthy person they know. Watch her for five minutes, and you’ll see it: this is exactly where she belongs.
It didn’t start out looking that way.
A family with strength of its own
Madeline’s family is Shuar, from the eastern Amazon region of Ecuador. When they first arrived in Quito, her mother spoke only Shuar — not Spanish — and had little formal schooling and few resources. What she had was determination. She worked any job she could find to keep her children moving forward, and she trusted a community she was only beginning to know with the people she loved most.
That trust brought the family to our Agua Viva campus about eleven years ago. One of Madeline’s younger brothers joined our after-school program first. Madeline followed soon after — and became one of the very first young people in Agua Viva’s brand-new teen program.
The year everything got heavier
When Madeline was still a teenager, her father died suddenly.
Grief reshaped the whole household. Her mother wasn’t prepared to cope, and much of the responsibility fell to Madeline. Still a teenager herself, she helped hold her family together and helped care for her younger sister. For a while, she was a child raising children.
She could have disappeared into that role. A lot of kids do.
Seen, safe, loved
What changed her trajectory was people who helped hold the family together.
Through the hardest stretch, Project M25 stayed close — sitting with her in the grief, walking with her spiritually and personally, and telling her something she needed to hear out loud: you can study, you can do this, you have a future.
She was seen in her grief. She was kept safe inside a steady community when home was anything but. And she was loved enough to start believing them.
The return
Her path still wasn’t a straight line. Madeline reached university — then had to step away when the funds weren’t there. It was the same scarcity that had followed her family for years, and it stung.
But this time she didn’t vanish. She came back. She returned to our Bible study in the evenings because, in her own words, she needed God again. And out of that return came something nobody assigned to her: she asked to start volunteering with the children. Every Thursday.
She’s been showing up ever since.
From surviving to thriving
The girl who once had to grow up early has become a leader whom other people follow. Those who’ve known her since she was a teenager say she was always the kind of person who tried to take the load off others.
“She’s the kind of person who quietly takes the load off someone else and carries it herself — a leader since she was a teenager.”
Now she’s pointing that gift at the next generation. She mentors children every week. She’s most of the way through her studies in early-childhood education, with about a year to go. And she’s begun to say a bigger dream out loud: seminary, and a life of ministry — coming back to do for the next child exactly what someone once did for her.
You can already see it multiplying at home. Her younger siblings are thriving in their own faith now; the youngest recently joined the church choir and credits her big sister for what she’s learned. One healed child, it turns out, tends to heal others.
The next chapter — and where you come in
Madeline’s seminary dream has a name and a path: a Thrive Scholars scholarship for when she finishes her current studies. It’s the difference between a calling she carries quietly and a calling she gets to live.
This is what M:25 exists to make possible — not to be anyone’s hero, but to walk alongside young leaders like Madeline as they rise, and to prepare them to prepare others. From surviving to thriving. One Thursday at a time.
