Young Women to Watch: Rosa

Rosa is a seventeen-year-old Honduran girl who is part of Compassion International’s Leadership Development Program. This program “works with high achieving and high potential students from Compassion child development centers.” I read about Rosa in a Compassion blog entry, and I found myself moved by her hard work, her hope, and her potential. She is someone who does small hard things faithfully, as evidenced by the daily schedule she provided Compassion. Read and be inspired.

6 a.m. – Wakes up each morning to clean the house and make sure all laundry is done for her mother and brother. Rosa’s mother raised all five of her children alone and works at a local restaurant cooking chicken.

8 a.m. – Prepares breakfast for her family.

9:30 a.m. – Begins baking tortillas to sell for the business she operates out of her home. Each day Rosa makes tortillas and people come from around the neighborhood to purchase them to eat for lunch. The money she earns from her business is used to help buy food for her family, and it also pays for her bus fare to and from the university.

12 p.m. – Finishes selling the tortillas and starts lunch for her 14-year-old brother. After he has eaten, she makes sure he gets off to school.

12:30 p.m. – Cleans up, eats her own lunch, and studies for her afternoon classes.

1:30 p.m. – Takes the city bus to the University of Tegulcigalpa, where she is a first-year student studying Business Administration.

7:30 p.m. – Returns to her home and spends the rest of the evening studying and spending time with her mother.

Rosa is living a life of courage and dedication in the midst of poverty. Compassion asked her what she wants to do when she graduates, and she responded, “I eventually want to own and operate a business in my community but first I think I want to get my master’s degree.”

Let Rosa be an inspiration for you to give another young person the tools to succeed. Visit Compassion’s website and sign up to sponsor a child today. You can be a part of stories like this one.

And let Rosa inspire you to be faithful in the small things and the hard things, to make sacrifices for others, and to live a life of persistence and discipline. I want to be more like her.