In the days, weeks, and months leading up to landing in Costa Rica, I have been imagining and wondering what it would be like. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I knew that there was a “base” that we would be staying at that was owned by the world race, and I knew that Monday through Friday, I would be doing ministry work. What I didn’t realize was that we would be staying in a beautiful Costa Rican home owned by Adventures in Mission in the city of San Jose and get the entire house to ourselves. Our home for the next three months has an open living and dining area, a large backyard, enough bedrooms for each team, and a chef that makes the best dinners ever!! I definitely didn’t expect to share a dorm-sized room with eight other girls… that will definitely make for a lot of stories in month two or three. Overall when it came to the living situation, it was hard to wrap my head around the fact that we are a walk away from Walmart, McDonald’s, and Starbucks.
When it comes to ministry, I honestly did not know what to expect. Two things that never crossed my mind was that we (seven 18 to 20-year-old girls from the United States) would be hanging out at a men’s prison playing soccer or packing and cleaning an entire missionary’s house to move her 20 minutes down the road. It was baffling playing soccer with so many nice young men and watching them have such a healthy community together and then finding out the reasons they were put in prison. One of the young men that I had a conversation with was 21 years old and so sweet. It turns out that he was sentenced to 5 years in juvenile prison because, in his small village in the middle of the rain forest, he killed a man. The reason he decided as a 16-year-old boy to do such a terrible thing is that that man was sexually and physically abusing his sister. In Costa Rica, women are much less respected, and if they had taken that issue to court, there would most likely not have been justice. Even though murdering someone is a terrible thing to do, it was very eye-opening finding out the situations and circumstances people were in when they decided to commit these life-changing acts.
When I thought about ministry on the field, I never pictured myself packing a house and climbing on the roof to untapped the cable chord. At the end of the day, God puts you where you are needed, no matter how odd you think it is. When I imagined living on the field, I didn’t know if that would mean living in tents and washing ourselves and our clothes with buckets or living in a house. Luckily, there are six showers in this house. The entire squad decided to wash their clothes in the sink tubs downstairs because we aren’t allowed to use the washing machine. The issue with that is when they hang them up to dry, they get rained on. My friend Angela and I decided that we weren’t going to deal with that. So with no phone or map and without knowing the base address, we hopped into a taxi that took us 20 minutes across the city to a laundry mat. So picture this, two young white girls walking down the side of the road in the middle of San Jose, Costa Rica carrying their laundry. Angela lived in Panama for 12 years so she can speak Spanish very well and I can understand a lot of it, so we were able to manage. Honestly doing our laundry there and being able to talk to the two ladies that work there was one of the best experiences I’ve had so far. Angela and I were out on our own with no phone and no idea where we were so it was amusing having to figure out how we would get back home and how we would break the $100 bill we had… long story short, a Korean bank made an exception and converted our American money to colones (Costa Rican money).
