A Skill Saves a Family from Starving

Loyda has been a single mom for the past 5 years. She’d been providing for her three children by selling fish and fruit in the marketplace. But over the past year, multiple lockdowns due to COVID 19 in PERU have made life extra hard for this hard working single parent.  
 
“We only ate one time a day,” Loyda told The 700 Club. “Usually at noon. We didn’t have breakfast, at night we didn’t eat either. We were desperate. We would go to sleep having only eaten once a day.” One day, they got down to their last meal. "I always felt discouraged when my children said, ‘Mommy, I'm hungry.’” 

Loyda said she grew so desperate that she considered the unthinkable. “This is the way we lived. One day I wanted to kill myself out of despair. No one know's how hard it has been,” said the brave woman with tears falling from her eyes.   
 
When Operation Blessing learned about Loyda and others in the community we brought emergency food for 70 families on two separate occasions. Then to help Loyda and others to generate income, we provided a sewing class and all the cloth and supplies needed to make and sell masks using sewing machines already available at her church. When the program was done, Loyda had earned $275 in profits.     

“With that money from selling masks I made enough to restart a grocery business and provide for my family!” she declared. “Everything you see here is because of the masks,” she added pointing to shelves filled with packaged foods to sell.  
 
Since then, Loyda has continued to use her training to make more masks and do other sewing jobs in the community.  “Now I can put food on the table and we eat three times a day,” she said. “I thank God for this blessing that we have received through Operation Blessing!”