My team has been placed in Jaco, Costa Rica for this month. Jaco is a touristy beach town filled with American Surfer Bro’s and local Costa Rican’s who are living out the Costa Rican motto, Pura Vida meaning “Pure Life.”
Our job this month is to support our contact Hannah in every way possible. We have been improving the ministry property that we are living on by digging up plants and shoveling mounds of dirt into wheel-barrows to improve the ground structure so that rain water will drain out of the property rather than back into it.
On Wednesday nights Luke and I go downtown to help George, a former drug dealer, who has turned his life around and ministers to the homeless at the town square. I saw Claudia there this week, she’s a women that I had met on my run beneath the mountains the opposite direction from the beach. I talked to Claudia and she was happy that we’re going to her home country (Nicaragua) next month. She explained how her people were in much need. She also introduced me to Mario, who the next day as he was walking by La Ola (“The Wave”, the property we are living in) stopped to help us shovel dirt for about an hour.
These are just a few examples of how important healthy relationships are to the locals. Also on Wednesday nights, the girls go downtown to pray over the prostitutes, you can read more about this from Victoria’s blog:http://victoriabaxter.theworldrace.org/?filename=being-light-in-the-darkest-place-ive-ever-been
I have taken every opportunity to get out and play soccer with the locals. I played once in San Jose with two boys that lived nearby and we did our best to keep the ball away from each other and outside of the drainage ditch on the other side of the road. I joined in on a game one night at an outside mini turf field a couple of streets down from where we were staying. It was boys vs girls and the girls ended up winning by a goal, and it wasn’t because we let them win. I also played against three ninyo’s on a basketball court with Stephanie and she got hit in the face with the ball. And just yesterday I played with some older guys at Kids Club on a classic Central American Park Field.
Kids Club is where our team put on a skit of The Prodigal Son in a local park where about 80 kids come to every Saturday to participate in some singing and bible stories put on by Iglesia De Radical. Then we sent each kid home with a bag of rice and beans that we bagged together on our property the day before.
Some other things I’ve done so far in Costa Rica:
Surfed
Fed monkey’s banana’s from a tennis court fence
Spotted an iguana on a golf course
Celebrated Costa Rica’s independence day downtown on the 15th
Charged to the bathroom 7 times one more before anyone else woke up
Christian Surfer’s ministry on Thursday Nights
Thanks for reading and supporting!
