You're listening to Catholic Sprouse, the daily podcast for Catholic kids that strives to plant seeds of faith.

Hey there, Sprouse. Today is Wednesday, April 21st, 2021. All week long, we have been talking about Great Latino Saints. All of these saints are pictured in our new book, Great Latino Catholics. Here are a longer version of their stories.

But if you want to check out their incredible portraits, head to our shop.

So we have already talked about St. Rose of Lima from Peru.

We've talked about St. Oscar Romero from El Salvador.

And today, we are going to talk about St. Laura Montoya, who comes from Columbia, which is a country right at the top of the continent of South America. So, St. Laura

Montoya was born during a civil war that was happening in Colombia. And in fact, her father died

in that civil war when she was just two years

old. When he died, the family lost everything, everything, and they were left completely destitute.

After this, Laura went to live with various family members, but in it all, she felt pretty abandoned.

She wasn't given a lot of loving care and attention, and she never received any sort of an education.

However, when she was a little bit older in her teens, it was decided by her family members that she needed to get some sort of training so that she could then

contribute financially to the family. So they decided to train her as a teacher, which is incredible

because she never went to school as a student. But praise me to God, she was naturally very smart.

She went to teacher's school and she excelled, and soon

she was teaching. Now, through this experience, she decided on two things. Number one, she decided

that God was calling her to be a nun, not to marry, but instead to give her whole life in service

of the church and to be a spouse of Jesus Christ.

She also discovered a deep calling to minister to a specific group of people.

Now, just like in the United States, in Colombia, there are indigenous people.

This means non-European people that had lived in the area on that land before explorers and colonists arrived.

Native Americans, we might call them.

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