Centro Integral Materno Infantil Vida inc “CIMIV” – As told by Enerio Mercedes
This ministry was born as a result of watching the children of this particular community going through very difficult situations like hunger, malnutrition and different sicknesses related to it and young people and adults having trouble to get jobs.
After realizing about this situation, God placed in the hearts of a group of people the responsibility and the desire to do something in order to help the community; and that’s how, on February 14th 1993, and with only 30 kids, this ministry was born. With the goal of getting them nourished back, they would come every day until noontime, and after 3 to 4 months they would leave the program, but their parents would bring them back again 2 or 3 months later showing the same malnutrition problem.
Having this situation, we had the need to reorganize the program, and introduce a formal  education program for both mothers and children, which led us to be able to be recognized by the government’s education ministry.
Nowadays we are working with over 140 kids in our institution, and have other 30 children sponsored in a christian high school, but still in our program.
God has also provided us with a Vocational Technical School that started working  back in 2015; young people that has come out of our program and others from the community have been able to do a technical course and learn something they can work in and provide for  their families.

Since we worked with health, we had Dr. Enerio Mercedes offering services to the community. We stopped doing so, because he needed to go around raising funds for the ministry. We have had dental clinics and right now we have a Lab that offers tests at a low cost.

We saw the need in our center and the community for clean water, and God opened doors through a team that came to establish a water treatment plant. Right now it offers services to the communities nearby and we drive the water to some specific locations.

We have started managing a bakery, and we’ll see how that all goes.

In the plans we have for the future, we need the construction of more classrooms for the Technical school, so we can offer more different classes; also the construction of our medical center in order to be able to offer the primary medical attention to the community, and to improve the services that we are actually  providing.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and for praying for and supporting our ministry!