If you grew up anything like me, you know your mom or dad would never let you leave for school without a good breakfast. We were taught back at least as far as the ‘60s that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

Where we live in Mexico, however, there are families that can’t afford to give a good breakfast to their kids every day.

That’s why Lakeside Presbyterian Church provides hot breakfasts for kids all along the north shore of the lake. This ministry started in La Zapotera and has spread due to its success.

At La Zapotera, we give kids breakfast three mornings a week. In September we provided 630 hot meals

At Mezcala and La Cuesta, we provided 920 hot breakfasts in September.

We give breakfast to schoolkids in San Antonio Tlayacapan, too, including 725 meals in September.

We recently started partnering with a new church in Jocotepec. In September, because of your donations, we were able to give them 323 hot breakfasts.

What’s exciting is that, in exchange, the Jocotepec church is sending us youth group leaders to help us with our own youth ministry! Isn’t that the best trade-off ever?

If you added up all the breakfasts delivered in September, you’d come close to 2,600 hot meals in one month.

Because you all are so generous, we’ve been able for the past several years to hire two people to do the cooking—because 2,600 meals is a LOT of cooking. It’s more than 100 meals every single week day. We also hire Ricardo to bring the meals where they’re needed. Of course, he does many other things for the church, too.

100 meals a day = $1,500 pesos.

Then, of course, there’s the cost of the food. That amount last month worked out to about $15 pesos a meal.

That’s a small price to pay to show God’s love and care to our neighbors—AND get youth group leadership for our own kids!

If you can help support this ministry, you’ll be helping kids to not only survive difficult circumstances, but to thrive. After we started the program in La Zapotera, we heard almost immediately from the local school that kids were able to pay more attention in class and learn more. We can’t stop now!

Here’s another opportunity for you, if you’d like to help out by offering some of your time. There’s another hot meal program we’re starting up that’s for families, not just schoolkids. And it will be offered right here at this church! We have the names of families in the area who get help from the DIF government program. After making sure they truly need our help, we’ll be giving them meals to pick up here. If you’re interested in volunteering to help serve those meals, we’ll need help three days a week, on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, beginning in January.

If you’re interested, you can get more details from Martin Thorner. His phone number is +52 1 55 4993 4446 (that works for WhatsApp, too).

And his email address is hans_13_2000@yahoo.com