The Children Couldn’t Believe They’d Been Invited
“How Karol and Abraham walked into a community no one was supposed to enter — and why we built THRIVE Community Care to walk with pastors like them.”
About 550 children were expected at the Christmas gathering. About 650 came. Some of them came from a place no one had reasonably expected to see them at a church event — ever.
In the parish where Pastor Abraham and his wife Karol serve, near the foot of Cotopaxi, there is a community that local people had told them to leave alone. Roughly thirty women work there. About a hundred of their children live there too — at home, because the brothel where their mothers work is also where their family lives.
Prostitution is legal in Ecuador. That doesn’t make it healthy, and it doesn’t make those children safe. But it does mean that what Karol and Abraham walked into wasn’t a raid scene. It was a neighborhood. A neighborhood with about a hundred children in it.
And no one had ever invited them to a Christmas event.
They were told not to go
Local people had warned Karol and Abraham off. The community, they said, was controlled by dangerous people. There was no hope of getting in. There was certainly no hope of getting the children out for a Sunday afternoon at church.
Karol and Abraham went anyway. Together. On a November day in 2023.
They walked in to invite the children.
The disbelief
And the children couldn’t believe they’d been invited.
They asked again, to make sure. They couldn’t believe they would receive something at Christmas. They couldn’t believe a church was inviting them to anything at all.
The invitation itself was the thing they could not believe was real.
“The invitation itself was the thing they could not believe was real.”
Karol carried something home
When the report came back to the rest of us — through Keren, who was working alongside them, and Sophie Moncayo, Project M:25’s VP of Programs and Partnerships — one detail stayed with everyone who heard it.
“Karol quedó impresionada de todo lo que vió.”
Karol was deeply shaken by everything she saw.
That’s the line that mattered. Not triumph. Not victory. Shaken. A pastor’s wife walked into a place she had been warned about, looked at a hundred children, and carried what she saw home with her.
That night, Tamitha wrote to her and to Abraham:
“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. Estamos orando que Dios les dé las fuerzas y protección para seguir ayudándoles.”
(I know very well the personal and emotional pain that falls on a minister in such delicate situations. Thank you for being servants of the Lord with hearts alongside the most vulnerable. We are praying that God gives you strength and protection to keep helping them.)
Karol’s 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.)
Abraham’s was shorter still: Bendiciones desde Ecuador.
What THRIVE Community Care exists for
This is the moment to say plainly what Project M:25 is for.
We are not a rescue organization. We do not raid. We do not show up in places we haven’t been invited, in front of pastors who weren’t asked. The work we do — the work that has Karol and Abraham at its center, not its edge — is walking with pastors who are already walking in.
THRIVE Community Care Certification exists because pastors like Karol and Abraham need more than encouragement. They need training. They need trauma-informed tools. They need to know how to keep going into communities like this one without losing themselves to what they see.
And they need to know they are not carrying it alone.
That is what we are here for. We do not walk in front of Karol and Abraham. We walk beside them, behind them, around them — making sure that when they go where no one else will, there is someone keeping the lights on, the training current, the prayers steady, the support real.
The story didn’t end that night
At the Christmas gathering, the children from that community received their gifts. They had been invited; they came; they were welcomed.
In the months and years that followed:
A community well was dedicated in the broader parish, opening clean water to families nearby
141 leaders in Abraham’s region have been certified through THRIVE Community Care
Abraham was named MWOA Coordinator for Ecuador in early 2026
Karol and Abraham have kept coming back — to that community and others like it
The work is slow. The work is faithful. The work has not ended.
The children couldn’t believe they’d been invited. But the invitation is the work. In pastoral ministry in communities like this one, the invitation IS the ministry. The fact that anyone showed up to ask. The fact that anyone returned.
That’s what we equip pastors to do. That’s what your monthly partnership makes possible.
