Growing up in the village of Bartolo means growing up with little knowledge of the outside world. Ariel has never seen an elevator, a traffic light or a shopping center. What he has seen is poverty, a one room school house and a wonderful church. His father is a farmer and earns about $30 a week and his mother is a housewife. In his village there are no outside jobs for women. He lives in a house made of sun dried mud bricks called adobe. The roof of the house is made of tin and the floor is just packed dirt. Like his school, it has only one room where the family lives, eats and sleeps. They have no water, no electricity, no bathroom and no kitchen. They have an outhouse they use and the kitchen is also made of adobe bricks. In fact, it is an adobe stove that sits outside the house. When it rains, they cannot cook. In the house they have one wooden bench and a wooden slab table in the kitchen. He shares a wood frame bed that has rope crossed around the ends on which a straw mattress is place with his mother. They sleep on the hard dirt floor and try to avoid the running puddles of water when it rains, that accumlate through the cracks in the tin roof.
Ariel is not yet old enough to go to school but cannot wait to start in Kindergarten. He has no toys to play with but with his young imagination he dreams of having a ball, soccer ball and toy cars. He's a typical boy. He is the youngest of his 5 sibblings and enjoys playing with them.
Ariel has not accepted Christ yet. When he is sponsored he will be attending church every Sunday and in the feeding center he will get Bible lessons every day. His health is pretty good although he does have some eye problems. There is no doctor in his village and the nearest clinic is a two hour walk from his house.
