While our focus at Cadaniño is serving vulnerable children and families, it is incredible to see how our ministry has been a blessing to the staff we have hired.
A core focus has always been the teaching, training, and development of the teachers who have come to work with us, working to help them, like our teachers, grow in their relationship with God.
Here is the story of how working at Cadaniño impacted one of our teachers.
In 2019 when we were looking to build out our after-school programs for vulnerable children at one of the Cadaniño Community Impact Centers, God led us to hire a teacher as a part of our team.
Though she was a believer and had some knowledge of God, the Bible, and an interest in learning more, she was not attending a church and didn’t seem to have a solid personal relationship with God.
Since the role we were hiring her for was for tutoring and computer classes, and she had skills in those areas, we felt let to hire her anyway.
We have always believed that ministry to our teachers, training them, and helping them develop a personal relationship with God, is key to the work they do serving children from difficult places.
Every day at our centers, the staff meet for devotions and prayer. We do read books on faith and had Bible studies, and she began to participate in these.
Little by little, her faith began to grow. She began attending church at the invitation of another staff member. With time, she started getting involved in ministering to the parents of our students, praying for the families during our home visits, and sharing messages of eternal hope and encouragement during outreaches.
Soon after, she went through some personal crises that were very difficult for her, and when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, she suffered significant personal loss.
n one short week, both her parents and her brother passed away from it, and she found herself in isolation with a severe case of Covid.
This was a challenging time for her, there was little she could do for herself, yet she felt God’s presence during that time. He comforted her, encouraged her, and revealed Himself to her making her feel that He was right by her side during this difficult time. The God that she had heard, read, and studied about, became real to her.
After she recovered, she stepped up and became more involved in serving the parents of our students. The struggles she had faced empowered her to serve others. As the country went into lockdown for six months, there was no transportation, people could not work, and the families we worked with faced incredible hardship. She could draw from her personal situation to comfort, encourage and speak words of hope, life, and truth to those who most needed it.
She went from someone who hadn’t had a relationship with God to someone who personally knew God and felt Him in her life. The year she has spent us learning what it means to be a child of God, and a follower of Christ had given her a faith that would sustain her when it seemed like her whole world was falling apart.
She became a pillar in our ministry who was able to pray for, comfort, and encourage the parents of our students in their times of desperation.
Her work became so much more than just a job. She took a personal interest in our student’s lives and invited them over to her home to tutor them and minister to them.
She has expressed how the love she gets from the kids. That it fills a hole in her heart and she gets as much from them as they get from her.
She has shared time and time again how grateful she is to have joined our team. Through it, she was able to develop a personal relationship with her savior, and without that, she would not have had the strength to get through the overwhelming challenges she had to face. Here is a letter she gave us recently.
"For me, being at Cadaniño had been a great privilege and a great honor, and it became a family that God gave me with which to share marvelous and unforgettable moments. I was given the teaching and training to know my Heavenly Father better so I could trust in Him, and it placed in me the love I needed to unconditionally serve each of the children, young people, and families we work with.
What is Cadaniño to me? It is a place where I can help teach and train students in practical skills that are a blessing to their future and encourage them to take what they learn and use it to be a blessing to themselves and their families.
Cadaniño allowed me to share the Word of God with the families of the students, helping them learn how God is in control of each of our lives and supplies our needs. I loved visiting the homes of our students, and we shared moments of joy and celebration over the years.
I feel so happy that I have seen how the children and teenagers I taught have advanced in learning to use computers and gotten better grades in school. I know that they will continue to grow until they have even more knowledge and become great systems engineers.
I can see that my purpose is to help the children and youth of today become the great people needed for Guatemala’s future.
I pray blessings into the lives of those who started this ministry and each of the people who contribute financially to make it possible.
I want to give a profound thank you to the Martiny family and the team at Cadaniño for having trusted and allowed me to be part of the team. They have all meant so much to me; I greatly bless their lives. I have deep thanks, appreciation, and affection for everyone here. I know that Cadaniño will go further than we can imagine because God is the one who is guiding it."
Though this dear teacher is moving on from our team to a new opportunity, and we will miss her, we can clearly see the blessing she has been to our students and how God has used the ministry to impact her life.
Though she won’t be working for us as a teacher, she will still be involved in ministry to the families we serve and will always be a part of the Cadaniño family.
If you would like to help us continue to have an impact in the lives of this teacher, and the hundreds of children, parents and families we work with, please consider making a donation to our ministry
