Upon our arrival to the San Jose airport around 8:00 local time (3 weeks ago… sorry for the delay), we grabbed our bags and waited for our ride to pick us up. After much confusion over where we would stay for the night before we headed to our ministry sites, my team’s ministry host set us up with one of her pastor friends in San Jose, Pastor Pilo. He and 2 friends shuttled us to their church with our bags strapped somehow to the top of the vans that should not have held as many people as it did. (Welcome to The World Race!!) He told us about their ministry sending missionaries from their church to a remote village taking clothes and food to natives who have no good way to support themselves. It takes their team 4 days hiking through the jungle to get to the village and they only are able to go 2 times a year. He told us the money we paid them to use their church as a hotel would not be used to support the church or their families, but to support their mission. We all remarked on how we have never been taken care of so well by complete strangers ever before. They made us feel right at home on our first of many, many nights away from home.
The next morning Pastor Pilo’s friends took us to the bus station in San Jose where my team would leave for Siquierres. We took a beautiful and relaxing ride through the misty mountains. From there our ministry host’s friends took us in a van to our ministry site for the month. It took about 4 hours total to make the trip from Pastor Pilo’s church to Mighty Rivers Eco Farm.
For the first couple of days we spent our time cleaning up our little cabin-esque house. Drusilla, the wonderful woman who runs this ministry is actually in America while we will be here this month, but her good friend/worker/maintenance guy/downstairs neighbor Marlon is here to direct us. He speaks very little English and collectively we speak moderate Spanish. It works out.
A little more about Mighty Rivers
About 2 hours worth of travel from town (walking 2km uphill to the local bus then riding it into Siquierres) is our farm. Run by a few hilarious and amazing American sisters, there are cows, chickens, horses, and sheep. They run their own natural/organic milk store “Lecheria las Lapas” (parrot milk store). They have 2 pet parrots, a wood duck, a turkey, more chickens and dogs than I can count, and a baby calf named Santa Fe. They employ locals and indigenous peoples to work the dairy cows and are building a separate house for expectant mothers, families, and other people that need temporary help or a fresh start. They also do a lot of work with the indigenous people of Talamanca by teaching them sustainable farming, permaculture, baking, English, and general education all while sharing the Gospel.
Just up the street, another sister named Susanna, is starting a permaculture community called Garden Village. Right now she has 3 young men (1 local Costa Rican and 2 from the U.S.) helping her garden, take care of her chickens and dogs, and get the community up and running. She has been so helpful, kind and generous to our team. We love spending evenings up at her beautiful open air house learning about all of the different fruits, vegetables, and wildlife of Costa Rica while getting some much needed community on our secluded farm.
We haven’t had a ton of opportunity to minister to many people directly, but we have done a lot of work on the new house by building a concrete patio, cutting a path with machetes and a weed eater to the river (where there may or may not be an awesome rope swing…) for all the people who live here to enjoy on a lazy afternoon, and we have helped out at local schools (trying) to teach English. Last week we left the farm for 4 days in a remote indigenous village and to take a few days off at the beach in Puerto Viejo, but that journey deserves its own blog post!
I cannot wait to share more about our Costa Rican adventures with you all! We are all safe, happy, healthy, and doing well.
Until next time,
Jeni
