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After graduating from the LDP, Daniel’s former student center was closed due to a crisis in church leadership. Ending the partnership was a painful process because all the registered children had to be departed from the program. But Daniel refused to give them up.

“I didn’t want the children to feel they were abandoned so I started my own student center,” he explains. He fed, clothed and taught the children with whatever little resources he had. His family supported him.

Many of those children are teenagers now and remain serving the Lord faithfully. Through the LDP, Daniel earned a bachelor’s degree in Education and was later invited by Compassion to take a Master’s degree in Holistic Child Development at the Baptist Theological Seminary in Penang, Malaysia, where he was among the first graduates of the course. With these scholastic achievements, his mother thought, he is definitely qualified for decent-paying jobs. “But he chose to go full time in the ministry,” his mother says. Seventy-two-year-old Felicia, for some time, hoped that her youngest son could be a well-earning teacher, the provider in the family.

“I questioned why he did not teach in a regular school to earn an income,” Felicia confesses. “My other children worried how their baby brother could support himself.” But now Felicia says she understands that “doing the Lord’s work is more important than anything in the world,” and the entire family supports Daniel’s ministries.

Most of their church members are farmers and fishermen, and yet Daniel’s church has already bought and distributed supplies to the children up the mountains. One notebook and one pen for each child. The church also feeds these children every Sunday afternoon. They call it their “Faith Feeding Program.”
Daniel’s mother, Felicia, laughing and crying at the same time, recalls, “This little boy,” referring to Daniel, “used to wait for me by the window and ask, ‘Nanay, did you bring home food today? I’m very hungry.’ “Now (he) has traveled to many countries, even to Europe. Who would have thought? And now he is my pastor,” she chuckles as she wipes the tears from her eyes.

Accomplishments:

In 2006, Daniel served in an orphanage in Cambodia
He was a Child Development Worker for the Solid Rock Baptist Church’s orphanage where he cared for 42 orphans.
In 2009, Daniel came back home to Ilocos and became the senior pastor of his life-long church. The church gathers at the Obrero household and has grown to 150 in membership