COLOMBIA — María Alejandra, a Venezuelan migrant, praises God for her new community in Colombia and for the physical and spiritual help that the Christian organization Samaritan’s Purse has provided to her family and neighbors.

María Alejandra:

They are my two daughters. They are my reason to live, and because of them, I keep going. My name is Maria Alejandra. I am a Venezuelan immigrant. I arrived here in Colombia, in Cúcuta. I had to bring my family, my daughter who is 13 years old, and my granddaughter who is 9 years old. I love them with all my heart.

My granddaughter is a miracle of God. The doctors in Venezuela diagnosed that she was not going to live. And if she did, she would live a vegetative life. But since God is good and Alejandra trusts so much in the word of God and in his promises, that girl is very rehabilitated today. For her, I get up every day with the same enthusiasm that today we are going to do something better than yesterday.

You know I’ve always been a warrior woman. It gives me strength to fight, because I have nowhere to live. And then the amount of people started to arrive. And I started to see all those pretty faces and those smiles. And I fell in love.

They settled in the place under the tents. And that’s how the community grew. It’s already inhabited with 85 penthouses. It’s a community that wants to move forward and that goes with all of them to achieve all the goals that have been proposed. That’s how the community work started, which was when we met Samaritan’s Purse.

I belong to the Samaritan’s Purse Protection Program. We went to different communities in the city of Cúcuta. We were taking the medical response, in health, in the delivery of medicines, in the project of the mobile medical unit, and the community program where we work with our women every week. It’s an evangelistic program. They are taught the word of God, they are taught to look in the Bible, to read it, how to develop a relationship with God.

The first thing Samaritan’s Purse did was to unite as a community, to teach us that we were not going to do anything alone, and that we had to work together to achieve what we wanted. And many people benefited from that spiritual help.

Samaritan’s Purse has provided social support, psychological support, and has attended families that no one dared to touch. Samaritan’s Purse has taught us to live as a family, as a community. And every day I ask my Lord I hope that all these smiles that I have seen grow here, I will see them go far.

That one day I can say, “That engineer lived in my community or that nurse is from the community.” The Nueva Alianza community is inspired, accompanied by Samaritan’s Purse. It will become an exemplary community. It will move forward.

Samaritan’s Purse is a nondenominational evangelical Christian organization providing spiritual and physical aid to hurting people around the world. Since 1970, Samaritan’s Purse has helped meet the needs of people who are victims of war, poverty, natural disasters, disease, and famine with the purpose of sharing God’s love through His Son, Jesus Christ. The organization serves the Church worldwide to promote the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

CONTACT: Kaitlyn Lahm, news@samaritan.org

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