Sara Ambio lives with her parents in a village in a rainforest in Bolivia, which is the poorest country in South America.

Sara starts her day with a breakfast of bread and a hot drink.

She heads off early for school so that she can get a seat, because there aren’t enough chairs to go round!

School finishes at lunchtime, and after a game of football Sara starts her chores cleaning the house, then washing clothes, pots and pans in the river. Then she waters her family’s crops, hunts for eggs and checks their woolless sheep and hens. Some days she rows down the river to work on the family chaco (plot of land).

She says, ‘My chaco is beautiful with cocoa, banana, papaya, mandarin and mango trees. There are birds that copy what you say and monkeys play in the trees’.

But things haven’t always been so good. Life became difficult when cattle ranchers tried to take their land and clear the forest to make room for their animals.

The Centre for Research and Training of Peasant Farmers (CIPCA), an organisation that Christian Aid supports in Bolivia, has helped Sara and her family. CIPCA has provided training and education to help rainforest communities. It also trains them how to produce different crops and meat so they have a better diet and a source of income. CIPCA also provides seeds and animals, basic tools and equipment.

Sara is only eight years old, but she understands what a difference CIPCA has made to her community.

She says, ‘We have lots of different things to eat. Before I only ate rice, now I eat all the things that we grow’.

Because of the money her family makes from their crops, Sara knows that her father will be able to pay for her and her older brother to go away to secondary school.

Sara wants to be a teacher when she grows up and knows that she and her community will have mejores dias – ‘better days’ – with the help of CIPCA and Christian Aid.