“My name is Teresa. My dad drinks too much. My mom suffers a lot but she doesn’t want to kick him out of the house. The husband she had before died. And she doesn’t want to be alone again. But my dad hurts us a lot. My mom has to work very hard to provide for us and feed us. My dad is always hitting her. It hurts me to see my mom suffering. Sometimes we don’t have enough money to eat.”

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This was Teresa’s narrative three years ago. Before she joined our sponsorship program at San Marcos Christian School. Now, Teresa has Jesus in her heart. Now, her mother and all three of her siblings have come to know Him as well. And they got passionately saved!

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Her mother now sings on our church worship team. She leads a cell group in her home. And her husband has greatly softened toward the things of the Lord since their hardest times. Teresa and her family are absolutely convinced that he is going to surrender to the Savior very soon!

 

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Teresa’s story is a perfect illustration of what San Marcos Christian School is all about. Through this powerful tool that the Lord has given us, we reach out to hurting families. Children come to our school from broken homes where domestic violence is common. And we have the amazing opportunity of sharing Jesus’ healing love with young, open, hungry hearts.

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You’ll love this. I asked our school principal to give me an exact number of how many of these families have been reached. She smiled widely and replied, “You should ask me instead, how many are left that haven’t gotten saved yet?”

And the answer to that question is, only thirty, out of nearly three hundred! She shared with me that, over the six years since we founded San Marcos, over 1,000 souls have been harvested. As a direct result of being connected to our school.

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We have close to 300 students at San Marcos, in preschool through senior high. Just over seventy of them receive help through our sponsorship program. This program provides top quality education to children from homes that struggle, and feeds them two meals a day.

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Our strategy is to attract unchurched people by charging a very low tuition that is affordable even to poor people. We also have a reputation for a very high quality academic level, which draws new unsaved families in each year. Nearly all of our students were initially unsaved when they came to our school, and nearly all of them have given their hearts to Jesus as a result of hearing Him preached in their classrooms every day. Plus, many of their family members end up getting saved too as a result of seeing dramatic transformation in these children's lives.

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We have opened our doors to students who were kicked out of other local schools for issues with substance abuse, mental illness, rebellion, aggression, and other social disorders. Many of our children come from devastating home environments. Some have parents that are drug addicts or prostitutes. Countless testimonies have come forth from these ashes--stories of how Jesus truly makes all things new in their hearts as they learn to call out to Him.

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We often get asked, "Who is the school psychologist that helped my child so much with his emotional problems?" We reply with a smile on our face that His name is Jesus, and His is the only one who heals broken hearts and saves lost lives.

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San Marcos has grown dramatically since it began. High school here in Peru consists of five years, so we added another high school grade on each year after San Marcos opened. 2010 was the first year that we had a high school graduating class that had come up through all the grades of high school at our school. The student body has grown from just over fifty students on opening day our first year to just under 300, with plans for continuing growth in the future as we continue to add on new classrooms.