Dear friends,
São Paulo is one of the largest cities in the world — more than 22 million people. Over 500,000 children live on its streets. Thousands more, likely millions, live in the favelas, where the boys are pulled into drug trafficking and the girls into sex trafficking, often before they reach their teens. The majority are destined to die before the age of thirty.
Those are the numbers. Here is what we do about them.
Twelve feeding centers operate near the slums of Diadema and São Bernardo in the southern region of the city. Each one serves two groups of children a day, timed around the school schedule — the children who study in the afternoon come in the morning, and the children who study in the morning come in the afternoon. Nobody is turned away because of when they go to class.
A day at a feeding center includes a healthy meal, games, teaching, a biblical devotional, and for the older kids, computer or trade training toward future employment. For many of these children, that meal is the best food they will eat all day. For some, it is the only food they will eat all day.
These centers are supported by Jim’s Kids, named for Jim and Carol Daniels of Dayton, Tennessee, whose vision started it all.
Alongside them stands the City of Refuge, founded in 1999 to receive children who have been abandoned, neglected, or abused. Every child comes to us through the proper governmental agencies. We now have five homes in Mauá caring for 50 children. We are asked to take in more children every single week, and every week we are limited by homes and by finances rather than by willingness.
Across the whole ministry to children in São Paulo, more than 5,400 meals are served every week.
Pastor Veranilda Guimarães leads this work as National Benevolence Director for the Church of God in Brazil — the largest social ministry the Church of God has in South America.
Here is the part that still moves us most. The children who came through this ministry starting in 1999 are now adults. Many watched friends die in the trafficking and know it was God who spared them. And many have come back — as teachers, as volunteers, as social workers, as coaches in the sports programs — so that another child can get out.
Gifts marked for “Jim’s Kids – Brazil,” Project #062-0002-034 can be sent to Church of God World Missions, PO Box 8016, Cleveland, TN 37320-8016.
For the children,
John and Kathy Hayes