How to impact future generations

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Above: Campers cheer in the Monte Blanco chapel.

Reaching the teachers

Another way LATCOM is helping the church transform communities is through training school teachers and principals in character-based education.

A few years ago we had a ministry called VEA that showed videos in the public schools. While the program resulted in significant numbers of high school students viewing videos on the negative results of alcohol and drug consumption, gang warfare, and the social disasters of premarital sex and abortion; we felt it wasn’t enough. We discovered that by the time these youth were viewing the videos, it was already too late for many of them. Showing the results of poor choices was simply placing an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff of life rather than a fence at the top. We came to the conclusion that the only way we could effectively impact the Bolivian society with Biblically-based, life-changing principles and values was to introduce these values to elementary students while they were still in their formative years.

In January 2007 I heard the following statistic from the president of Compassion International: “A child learns 45% of his worldview by the time he is five years old; and 85% is formed by the time he is twelve years old.” In other words if you want to change a community or a nation you must reach the children with transcendent and absolute truth while they are still in their formative years.
Knowing that LATCOM does not have the resources to reach all the children in the classrooms, we opted to focus our efforts on the teachers and principals. Working with Character Solutions International, we began to instruct these Bolivian public school leaders to use CSI’s character curriculum. The few places we have been able to carry this out have shown tremendous success. However, we have now gone as far as our financial resources will allow us. If this program were substantially funded, I have no doubt that this program would play a significant part in transforming Latin America and opening the flood gates for the presentation of the Gospel.• by Tim Ramsey

The only way we could effectively impact
the Bolivian society with Biblically-based, life-changing principles and values was
to introduce these values to elementary students while they were still in their formative years.