The Condor Vision Trust (CVT) is a christian charity established in 2010 to support a number of activities in Peru. The CVT supports and channels funding to ministries already active in Peru. The main areas of activity that we support are prison ministry, education, and counselling/healing.
We work to enhance the educational opportunities for Peruvian children and to provide training for Peruvians engaged in ministry work.
Training and development of local people in both general education and specific disciplines such as training for healing victims of the civil war and other trauma.
We are also involved in reconciliation issues within Peru.
Our motto is:
“Changing the World one person at a time”,
“Changing nations one city at a time”
Condor Vision Trust is an English charity based in Sheffield which started by supporting ministries on the ground in Peru and now works also in other parts of the world.
Michael and Mercedes Bell first became involved in Peru in 2006 through Christian Solidarity Worldwide who were taking a group of supporters out to Peru where they had been working as ever with the persecuted church and specifically with the large number of innocent people who had been imprisoned on terrorist charges during the civil war in Peru in the 1980s -1990s that started with the rising of the Shining Path.
Many of these people were Christian. Some of them were still in prison at the time, but most of them had been released at the time we first visited.
Among these men we met two lovely young men with young families. Daniel and Julio. Daniel spent 8 years in prison on false charges where he was tortured and Julio spent 2.5 years as well falsely accused and tortured as well. Julio went back into prison a few days after his release to share the good news of Jesus Christ with the other men inside. This was the call on his life.
We immediately struck a deep friendship with these two men and their families.
When we arrived back in England after this first trip to Peru we felt we could not live our lives as if we had not seen the poverty and injustice that we saw and we decided to help Daniel and Julio rebuild their lives.
With the passing of time our remit has been expanding to help others in Peru as well in other countries as well.
During the 1980s and 1990’s armed conflict leading to the civil war Christians were often targeted by both sides; some were forcibly disappeared or put in prison on trumped up charges. Today, many still seek justice or simply to know the fate of their disappeared loved ones.
The compensation for being wrongly convicted and spending several years in prison was a little plot of infested land with no services and it took the Government years till 2009 to tell the innocents which plot was whose so they couldn’t build anything. In the interim various Christians (including the Condor Vision Trust) paid for the better looking shacks.
Cajamarquilla 2005. We were appalled by a lot of things on our first visit, and in particular by the conditions that Daniel (and other innocent ex prisoners) Maria & baby Gabriela were living in. Daniel was helped back on his feet.
The Condor Vision Trust remains committed to standing with those who suffer, throughout the entire duration of their pain. By supporting the Trust we earnestly hope you too will do the same.
During our visit in Lima and the surrounding areas with Christian Solidarity Worldwide we saw so much need and poverty and injustice that it was hard to process. After our visit we (Michael and Mercedes) flew to Cuzco for a site visit, Cuzco is more than twice the height of Ben Nevis and higher than any one of us had been before and Mercedes came down with altitude sickness. When Mercedes started to recover, and was in floods of tears, she said Lord what can we do?, we had seen so much over the previous week and a half, we felt impotent, and Mercedes prayed this prayer, Lord what can I do. I believe the Condor Vision Trust charity that we formed to help people in Peru was born that night . One thing that I have noticed is that if God really touches your heart on something and you really intercede, He will give you the answer and you are invariably part of that answer.
