The Children Couldn’t Believe They’d Been Invited
“Warned to stay out, Pastor Abraham and his wife Karol walked in to invite a hundred children to Christmas — and kept coming back.”
About 550 children were expected at the Christmas gathering, and about 650 came. Some came from a place no one had expected to see at a church event.
Near the foot of Cotopaxi Volcano there is a community that local people had told a pastor and his wife to leave alone. Around thirty women work there, and about a hundred of their children live there too, at home, because the brothel where the mothers work is also where the families live.
Prostitution is legal in Ecuador. That does not make it safe for those children, and it does not make the place any less of a neighborhood. What the pastor and his wife walked into was not a raid. It was a community of a hundred children who had never once been invited to a Christmas event.
They were told not to go
People warned them off. The community was controlled by dangerous men, they said, and there was no getting in, let alone getting the children out for a Sunday afternoon at church. They went anyway, together, on a November day in 2023, and walked in to invite the children.
The children couldn't believe it
The children asked again, to be sure. They could not believe a church wanted them at anything, or that there would be something for them at Christmas, and the invitation itself was the part that did not seem real.
What she saw
When the report reached the rest of us, one line stayed with everyone:
"Quedó impresionada de todo lo que vió." She was deeply shaken by everything she saw.
That was the line that mattered. It was not triumph and it was not victory; a pastor's wife had walked into a place she had been warned about, looked at a hundred children, and gone home shaken by what she saw.
That night I wrote to them both:
"Yo sé muy bien el dolor personal y emocional que cae en un ministro en situaciones tan delicadas. Gracias por ser siervos del Señor con corazones juntos con los más vulnerables."
(I know the personal and emotional weight this kind of situation puts on a minister. Thank you for serving with hearts turned toward the most vulnerable.)
Her reply was simple: Gracias amigos por su apoyo. Creemos que Dios hará su obra perfecta. (Thank you, friends, for your support. We believe God will do His perfect work.) His was shorter still: Bendiciones desde Ecuador.
What Thrive Community Care is for
This is the place to say plainly what Project M:25 is for. We are not a rescue organization. We do not raid, and we do not show up in places we have not been invited. We care for children every day on our own campus outside Quito, and we walk alongside pastors like these two, who have built relationships in communities like this one.
Thrive Community Care exists because pastors need more than encouragement. They need training, trauma-informed tools, and a way to keep walking into communities like this one without losing themselves to what they see, and they need to know they are not doing it alone. We walk beside them, behind them and around them, so that when they go where no one else will, the training stays current, the prayers stay steady, and the support is real.
The story didn't end that night
At the Christmas gathering, the children from that community received their gifts and felt special that day. In the months since:
A community well was dedicated nearby, opening clean water to families in the area.
141 leaders have been certified through Thrive Community Care.
The pastor and his wife keep going back, to that community and others like it.
The work is slow and faithful, and it is not finished. The children could not believe they had been invited. In communities like this one, the invitation is the ministry: someone showed up to ask, and came back.
